Trading in innocence: slave-shaming in Ghanaian children’s market fiction Esther de Bruijn a and Laura T. Murphy b a Department of English, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada; b Department of English, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA ABSTRACT Ghana’s market fiction of the early 2000s takes up the issue of modern slavery, particularly in the form of forced child labour. This paper argues, first of all, that market fiction pits innocent children against negligent parents, to insist that parents shoulder the blame for their children’s descent into slavery. However, the texts frequently directly associate this notion of contemporary culpability with historical complicity in the Atlantic slave trade in a turn that points to the larger systemic inequalities of modernity that encourage parents to ‘sell’ their own children. With reference to Perry Nodelman’s notion of the ‘shadow text’ that accompanies all narrative constructions of childhood, we examine how depictions of innocence in these stories of child capture are informed by adult desires and anxieties. Accordingly, the sensational strategy of eliciting culturally painful – and shameful – memories serves as a typically extreme mechanism for delivering cautionary warnings both to adult and young readers not only about the horrific nature of contemporary slavery but also about excessive investment in the structures and ideologies of global capitalism. KEYWORDS Ghanaian literature; market fiction; human trafficking; modern slavery; children’s literature; African popular fiction Almost any narrative focused on the abhorrence of slavery, be that story contemporary or historical, is likely to be dependent on the rhetoric of the trade in innocent lives. A conven- tional feature of narratives of slavery, the trope of the innocent victim, reveals the enslaved protagonist to be innocent of any behaviour that could possibly be construed as equal to the criminal abuse they endure. The innocence of the protagonists of non-fictional, auto- biographical transatlantic slave narratives (Equiano’s or Baquaqua’s slave narratives, for instance) is foregrounded in their tales: upstanding members of society or innocent chil- dren are unsuspectingly torn from their communities by avaricious white Europeans dealing in an immoral global trade. This requisite innocence often leads to dubious con- clusions, however. At first blush, the slave-as-noble-savage (Robinson Crusoe’s Friday comes immediately to mind) is conjured up as an innocent, but that positionality provides the rationale Europeans seek for ‘civilizing’ their Others – not simply as a divine duty but as a reproduction of their own cultural redemption from primitive barbarity. During the trans- atlantic trade period, the slave-as-faithful-servant-victim (such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s © 2017 Journal of African Cultural Studies CONTACT Esther de Bruijn esther.debruijn@uleth.ca JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2017.1321982