Rather than regard texts primarily as repositories of ideas or as resources for historical reconstruction, rhetorical interpretation reads them as dynamic interventions in the lives of social groups. This chapter uses the epistle to Philemon as a case study.

This chapter analyses the shape of liberation interpretation, emphasizing an alignment between the factors that constitute a liberationist hermeneutic of contemporary reception and the factors that constitute a liberationist hermeneutic of biblical text production.

Enslavement and punitive deportations from the south to the north of what is today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (in northwest China) have been a feature of this region’s history. This chapter considers various reflections of captivity at the hands of both the Junghar Mongols (ca. 1690–1750) and the Qing Dynasty (from the 1750s onward) in literature produced by the Muslims of the Tarim Basin, that is, today’s Uyghurs. Enslavement by the infidel is a common trope of local hagiographic literature, which taps into Quranic narrative models of exile and deliverance. Alongside these narratives of charismatic male figures, folk songs mourning the experience of captivity also produced a set of popular female heroines in Uyghur literature. The most widely disseminated of these victim narratives, that of Nazugum, circulated in various forms in the late Qing, and after the dynasty’s fall became an important allegory of nationalist resistance among Uyghurs in both China and the Soviet Union.

In his Memoirs, the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni describes the performance of a French opera he attended in Paris at the Académie Royale de Musique in 1763. There is much to admire in this unnamed work, from the technical ability of the dancers to the sumptuous décors, machines, and costumes. But soon, all this spectacle wears him out.

By the end of the sixteenth century, attempts to recover Greek tragedy led to the new genre of the dramma per musica. For the Florentine Camerata de Bardi, it meant the reinstatement of the antique melopoeia of the Greeks, that is, declamation emphasizing the word and its correct prosody. The Camerata promoted the excellence of monody, echoing the antique doctrine of the ethos proposed by the Pythagoricians, according to which modes could elicit different emotional responses in the listener: viewed as natural to man, monody was thus appropriate for the expression of affect. Later, also, Claudio Monteverdi would emphasise monody alongside polyphony, as he would argue in the preface to the Scherzi musicali of 1607. There, Monteverdi would define ‘Seconda prattica’ as a style that asked the music to amplify the affections already expressed by the poem and, in practice, to serve this latter.

Despite its utterly inhumane contours, slavery is a wholly human endeavor, an exploitative relationship between an extractor of labor and a producer of labor. At the same time, as an institution endemic to capitalism’s expansion, it suffuses global systems of exchange, consumption, and desire that are so often and so ironically touted as inherently liberatory. As an expression of power and control, in the sphere of both the market and the intimate, slavery appears to have existed for all of human history and may very well continue to exist as long as humans continue to commodify labor. Indeed, despite it being considered morally reprehensible and legally illegitimate in practically every society today, slavery still infects our global supply chains, our battlefields, and our domestic spaces.

The essay begins by discussing the debatable relationship between narratives of Black Atlantic chattel slavery and discourses of contemporary slavery in a global context. While some scholars are wary about conflating two different historical experiences, others see a useful link between past slavery and current trafficking. Uwem Akpan’s story “Fattening for Gabon” invokes the earlier trajectory of chattel slavery to the Americas but insists on a specific, local history of enslavement within Nigeria that locates it within a growing literature revealing West African internal involvement in past and present slave trade and trafficking. By restricting a global trafficking route to one origin in Nigeria, Akpan emphasizes local conditions of poverty and societal breakdown that lead to child trafficking in Nigeria and other African countries. I argue that even if Akpan ultimately borrows from the conventional slave narratives of the Black Atlantic, his attention is not solely or even primarily on the Middle Passage but on the First Passage when Africans captured other Africans to bring them to the coast for trade. Past and present are brought together in a continuum rather than as the rupture of the Middle Passage.

How might we define English opera in the seventeenth century? Whole books have been written on this topic, and because of the variable terminology with which seventeenth-century writers labelled their works (‘opera’, ‘dramatick opera’, ‘masque’, ‘comedy’, ‘tragedy’), it is unlikely that absolute clarity will ever be had.1 Indeed, the English had a capacious and fluid notion of what constituted opera during the seventeenth century, and we should adjust our overly narrow definitions if we are to understand English opera as people in the seventeenth century did: as a genre that sometimes was fully sung, but, more often than not, included spoken dialogue.2

This chapter introduces key concepts in postcolonial studies and discusses recent developments of postcolonial criticism within biblical studies, such as empire studies, liberation hermeneutics, and cultural studies, including materialist, race/ethnicity, feminist, and queer approaches to empire and colonialism.

Building on the work of Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) scholars, this essay considers the limitations of international law (and the human rights legal framework more specifically) in addressing slavery, and the ways in which contemporary global fiction puts pressure on normative legal and literary conceptions of slavery and freedom. The essay begins with an examination of how slavery and the slave narrative take shape in the context of international law that is rooted in colonial encounters and predicated on the differential recognition of humanity. That analysis leads to investigation of how normative twentieth century human rights law delimits the concepts of slavery and freedom. In its final section, the essay how several contemporary global fictions challenge the familiar, generic logic of the slave narrative and, with it, human rights imaginaries of freedom.

This chapter discusses the different ways textual criticism and reception history are interrelated. Textual criticism is not simply the prerequisite to the task of interpretation but can help to illuminate the compositional growth, transmission, and early interpretation of biblical texts.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which topics and methodological approaches from LGBTI/Queer Studies have influenced LGBTI/Queer biblical interpretation.

Examining two of the most influential novels of late imperial China, Ransmeier’s essay finds enslaved people to be both omnipresent and unremarkable in this period. Both the high Qing era The Dream of the Red Chamber and the Late Ming The Plum and the Golden Vase are set in opulent households doomed to decline, in part by the emotional needs or sexual appetites of their fallible male protagonists. Consuming these narratives, readers become invested in their fate, and accept a world in which human trafficking, slavery, and sexual exploitation played a natural part of domestic life. While unfreely obtained labor was a characteristic feature of the households described in these epic novels and played a central role in attending to the creature comforts of elite masters and mistresses, and while the authors did not necessarily obscure the emotional struggles of individual enslaved people, neither text advocates for social change. The essay also shows how both Dream author Cao Xueqin and the anonymous author of Plum bind their protagonists to karmically determined ends, deploy enslaved people in service of their storytelling, and take advantage of the predominant hierarchical system of their time, creating worlds in which no one was truly free.

Generations after the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST), West African digital creative writers imagine newer iterations of slavery or recreate parodies of the TAST. Whether a story revolves around a street child hawking goods in Accra traffic, or a gifted child who is trafficked from a village in Nigeria to America, these short stories perpetuate fears of—but also resistance to—new forms of trafficking and labor exploitation that are endemic in the West African sub-region. While research has examined the ways in which these tropes appear in cheap popular fiction, not much has been done regarding new media, such as online short fiction, which is avidly consumed by West African youth. This chapter uses two short stories to interrogate different types of slavery in online spaces and to explore literary choices that inform the treatment of this theme in the digital age.