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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - Contemporary and Historical Slavery in West African Digital Literature

  • from Part II - Forms and Figures
  • Edited by Laura Murphy, Sheffield Hallam University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
    Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022, pp 62-77

  • Summary

    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.