FREEDOMVILLE: Laura T. Murphy at WAC of Greater Houston
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
6:00pm — 7:00pm CT
World Affairs Council of Greater Houston
A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it?
Millions of people around the world today are enslaved. Freedomville is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in India, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. Originally championed as a nonviolent “silent revolution,” this rebellion inspired other villagers to fight for their own freedom. But whispers and deflections suggested that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar’s success.
In Freedomville, Laura T. Murphy, a leading scholar on contemporary global slavery, embarks on a Rashomon-like retelling—a constantly changing narrative of a murder that captures just why it is that slavery continues to exist today.
Laura T. Murphy is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. She is the author of The New Slave Narrative: The Battle Over Representations of Contemporary Slavery, Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives, and Metaphor and the Slave Trade in Western African Literature. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Academy, and the National Humanities Center. @LauraTMurphy
A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it? Millions of people around the world today are enslaved. Freedomville is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in India, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. Originally championed… more
World Affairs Council of Greater Houston