Trading in innocence
Slave-shaming in Ghanaian children's market fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2173147 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Esther De Bruijn (0000-0003-4391-4681, University of Lethbridge), Laura T Murphy (0000-0002-1220-9931, Loyola University New Orleans) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 243-262 |
| Publication date | 2018-09-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of African Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-6815 • E-ISSN: 1469-9346 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13696815.2017.1321982 |
| OpenAlex | W2612094637 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 16 |
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
Aesthetics · Art · Blame · Capitalism · Complicity · Criminology · Culpability · Ideology · Innocence · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Children's Rights and Participation · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare · Psychology · Sex work and related issues · Gender Studies · Law · Social Psychology
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I agreed to go because……..examining the Agency of Children within a phenomenon conceptualised as trafficking in Ghana
Why Was He Videoing Us?’
Nature as a symbiotic edge of humanity
A postcolonial ecocritical reading of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) and Kwakuvi Azasu’s The Slave Raiders (2004)
Aesthetic Formations
Childhood
The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction
The Hidden Adult
Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction
African Child Soldiers and Humanitarian Consumption
Context Matters
Aesthetics of Persuasion
Popular Arts in Africa
Praise the Lord
Occult economies and the violence of abstraction
Millennial Capitalism
Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2023 (3) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |