Books by Laura T. Murphy

A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it?Millions of people today are still enslaved; nearly eight million of them live in India, more than anywhere else. This book is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh who founded their own town of Azad NagarFreedomvilleafter staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations championed it as a non-violent silent revolution that inspired other villagers to fight for their own freedom. But Laura T. Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery who spent years researching and teaching about Freedomville, found that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar's success.Murphy embarks on a Rashomon-like retellinga complex, constantly changing narrative of a murder that captures better than any sanitized account just why it is that slavery continues to exist in the twenty-first century. Freedomville's enormous struggle to gain and maintain liberty shows us how realistic it is to expect radical change without violent protestand how a global construction boom is deepening and broadening the alienation of impoverished people around the world.

Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the the transatlantic slave trade, Metaphor and the Slave Trade shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation and persist in West African discourse.