Human Trafficking and the Subversion of the American Dream: A Study of Transnational Victimhood in Kim Purcell’s Trafficked
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Date
2020
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UMT Lahore
Abstract
The aim of this study is to explore the theme of human trafficking in Kim Purcell‟s novel
Trafficked (published in 2012) in relation to the betrayal of hopes of economic prosperity. It will
be seen how the subversion of these hopes in the course of a transnational journey into horrifying
excesses of dehumanization entraps an individual irredeemably in disturbing political, economic
and psychological dilemmas. Trafficked (2012) brings into focus the pervasive international
problem of human slave labour, especially from poverty-stricken countries like Moldova,
Romania and some regions of Russia, lured by dreams of better economic opportunities into a
country like the USA. The research aims at showing the deep-rooted links between
transnationalism and contemporary practices of slavery at the same time that it fixes a
sociological as well as psychoanalytic lens on the plight of the ensuing victims of
dehumanization. Hannah, a seventeen-year-old Moldovan, in being transported to Los Angeles,
the USA, agonizingly discovers the betrayals of the American Dream through firsthand
experience of misery – physical molestation and humiliation, a paranoiac sense of fear and
helplessness, as well as debt bondage – that bars her from the basic human rights of deliberation
and movement. This parallelism of psychological and social displacements highlights how the
protagonist‟s loss of the right to her own name after crossing borders merge together
transnational political, economic and social problems into an overwhelming existential threat.