Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie
can be adapted to describe the keenest concerns of the present, New Slaveries represents a valuable addition to the drive to rehabilitate the literary element in postcolonial literary studies. This is perhaps most evident in the book's two signal readings: of Nick Broomfield's film Ghosts, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. In the former, which fictionalizes an account of the deaths of the Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay (which Deandrea calls 'an event of key significance for this book' (3) the in built mutability of the gothic is combined with a quotidian realism to highlight the material (and therefore quantifiable) rather than supernatural (and unquantifiable) experiences and origins of the contemporary 'horror' of modern day slavery. It is Deandrea's extended reading of Ishiguro's dystopian novel, however, that most completely realizes the potential of the concentrationary archipelago as a critical framework. As Deandrea observes, dystopian narratives work where their alternative futures converge with the incipient or unacknowledged operations of power in the present. It is perhaps for this reason that Never Let Me Go most effectively demonstrates the coming together of the ghost and the camp. Released from the pressure to trace the imbrication of the textual and the material, Deandrea can respond to Ishiguro's calm, lucid nightmare as an account of how 'the ghostliness and imprisonment characteristic of new slaveries can deviously seep outside its expected boundaries' (157) and how 'the menace of new slaveries extends well beyond new slaves themselves' (171) Although this is a portrait of British new slaveries, a greater focus on other localities in the global machine of new slavery would have been welcome, if only to show what exposes people to new forms of enslavement to begin with. Nonetheless, overall, the central vision of the ghostly concentrationary archipelago in its contemporary form, 'atomized, vaporized into a myriad of ever changing, every shifting places' (16) succeeds. New Slaveries concludes by highlighting the continuities and discontinuities between its approach and those of postcolonial and Black British criticism. Neither, Deandrea rightly points out, is adequate to describe the project here. Indeed,New Slaveries should be prized for the way it draws into focus subjects such as the situation of Chinese undocumented labourers, and trafficked sex workers from Eastern Europe not typically addressed by Anglophone postcolonial writing. Deandrea's cogently argued, humane book is a valuable addition to a growing body of work (including Emma Cox's Performing Noncitizenship and Agnes Woolley's Contemporary Asylum Narratives) which seeks to extend the conventional remit of postcolonial studies.