Chiara is just finishing taking a class about captivity narratives and I’ve been reading a few things at the periphery of that. It’s created this reality tunnel about stories about captivity and stories that expose the basic human dynamics that cause people to value different groups of people differently.
I made this post to aggregate a few things:
- Last week’s This American Life, The Competition, had a story about a Tulsa factory owner who imported workers from India and had them living and working in terrible conditions.
- Yesterday’s NYT had an article on slavery on Long Island and the abuse of foreign domestic workers throughout the US.
- The book Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives has a narrative by Sarah Wakefield entitled Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees that has an uncharacteristically critical perspective (and uncharacteristically outspoken for a woman writer at the time) on white’s perceptions of Native Americans.