Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,644
result(s) for
"Laura T. Murphy"
Sort by:
Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature
Metaphor and the Slave Tradeprovides compelling evidence of the hidden but unmistakable traces of the transatlantic slave trade that persist in West African discourse. Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the commerce in human lives, this book shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation.Laura T. Murphy's insightful new readings of canonical West African fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry explore the relationship between memory and metaphor and emphasize how repressed or otherwise marginalized memories can be transmitted through images, tropes, rumors, and fears. By analyzing the unique codes through which West Africans have represented the slave trade, this work foregrounds African literary contributions to Black Atlantic discourse and draws attention to the archive that metaphor unlocks for scholars of all disciplines and fields of study.
eBook
The new slave narrative : the battle over representations of contemporary slavery
\"In The New Slave Narrative, Murphy analyzes a diverse body of book-length, first-person accounts of modern slavery--which cover a wide spectrum of forced labor including chattel slavery, child soldiering, inherited debt bondage, and sexual slavery--to trace the re-emergence of the genre. She analyzes the representation of modern slavery within the contemporary literary, political, religious, and commercial circumstances that have encouraged the genre's renaissance, as well as within the history of slavery and the slave narrative. Murphy argues that the issue of modern slavery has uncomfortably united the international aid community, liberal human rights activists, and anti-oppression activists with an extensive network of Christian evangelicals, a small group of radical Zionists, and freedom-obsessed neoliberals. In tracing the influence of these groups, Murphy makes transparent the way these narratives, even as they critique the systemic injustices the narrators faced, are coopted and are re-exploited by these organizations and the human rights industry. As a scholar-activist, Murphy brings back to the foreground the aspirations and systemic critiques of the authors that are often obscured by the interests of others\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Cambridge companion to global literature and slavery
\"The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery reveals the way recent scholarship in the field of slavery studies has taken a more expansive turn, in terms of both the geographical and the temporal. These new studies perform area studies-driven analyses of the representation of slavery from national or regional literary traditions that are not always considered by scholars of slavery and explore the diverse range of unfreedoms depicted therein. Literary scholars of China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa provide original scholarly arguments about some of the most trenchant themes that arise in the literatures of slavery - authentication and legitimation, ethnic formation and globalization, displacement, exile, and alienation, representation and metaphorization, and resistance and liberation. This Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery is designed to highlight the shifting terrain in literary studies of slavery and collectively challenge the reductive notion of what constitutes slavery and its representation\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Trading in innocence: slave-shaming in Ghanaian children's market fiction
Ghana's market fiction of the early 2000s takes up the issue of modern slavery, particularly in the form of forced child labour. This paper argues, first of all, that market fiction pits innocent children against negligent parents, to insist that parents shoulder the blame for their children's descent into slavery. However, the texts frequently directly associate this notion of contemporary culpability with historical complicity in the Atlantic slave trade in a turn that points to the larger systemic inequalities of modernity that encourage parents to 'sell' their own children. With reference to Perry Nodelman's notion of the 'shadow text' that accompanies all narrative constructions of childhood, we examine how depictions of innocence in these stories of child capture are informed by adult desires and anxieties. Accordingly, the sensational strategy of eliciting culturally painful - and shameful - memories serves as a typically extreme mechanism for delivering cautionary warnings both to adult and young readers not only about the horrific nature of contemporary slavery but also about excessive investment in the structures and ideologies of global capitalism.
Journal Article
The Ethics of African Studies in the Age of Oga Politics: A Response to Tejumola Olaniyan’s “African Literature in the Post-Global Age”
In response to Olaniyan’s article “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” this paper suggests that Olaniyan’s conception of the “planetary” provides a metaphor for imagining a politics of responsibility in the post-global and anti-globalization age. The urgency for planetary thinking is framed within the current ascendancy of big man or “oga” politics represented by the rise of neoliberal populism around the world and in Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” logic espoused by both elite nativists such as Donald Trump and grassroots ethnonationalists such as Boko Haram. The paper suggests that African studies continues to play a crucial and increasingly urgent role in amplifying, translating, and supporting various African ways of being and knowing that have long served as critiques of the disenfranchisement of those in global south.
Journal Article
On freedom and complexity in the (captive) nation
In Biodun Jeyifo's readings of the Chibok girl's captivity in The Nation magazine (Nigeria), he reveals his desperately optimistic insistence on collective substantive freedoms. Jeyifo's response to the situation is one of doubling complexity, pointing to the systemic violence that not only made the girls vulnerable, but also produces the young male perpetrator/victims who hold the girls captive and that holds the nation captive as well. In this paper, Murphy argues that Jeyifo's complex reading of denied substantive freedoms in (what he might now call) a captive era in Nigerian history also provides a lens for removing the \"familiar mask of the righteous judge\" represented by the Western iteration of the #BringBackOurGirls movement. The paper interrogates the way in which Boko Haram tapped into the exaggerated post-9/11 fears that Islamic militants were a threat to Western values and freedom and provided evidence for Christian fundamentalist mythologies of a clash of civilizations. The paper suggests that the fervent discourse regarding the Boko Haram kidnappings point to a contest of fundamentalist ideologies, two opposing but tactically similar movements that ignore the structural lack of substantive freedoms that bring members into their fold.
Journal Article
Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative
Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.
Journal Article