The Pedagogies of Sex Trafficking Postcolonial Fiction: Consent, Agency, and Neoliberalism in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street*

Amnesty International’s 2015–16 push for the decriminalization of sex work sparked yet another international debate on sex trafficking, with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), together with a long list of celebrities and iconic feminists such as Gloria Steinem, claiming that such measure will only worsen sex trafficking, among other problems, and myriad pro-sex work feminists vouching exactly the opposite.¹ This dispute is by no means new—as of 2018, it remains at an impasse—but, interestingly, while sociologists and women’s studies scholars have been discussing sex trafficking issues for decades now, and despite its intimate relation to postcolonialism and globalization, the topic has gained prominence in postcolonial studies fairly recently. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts, for example, only in its third edition of 2013 includes for the first time a definition of “trafficking” and provides a few examples of postcolonial fiction dealing with the topic: one of them Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), the novel this article explores in detail.²

By 2013, not much had been written on the subject of sex trafficking from a literary studies perspective.³ Sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and especially legal/law enforcement discourses dominated the conversation, but the challenges of representing sex trafficking aesthetically and the critical responses to such literature—which, arguably, can powerfully shape public perception of the issue—meant that literary treatments of sex trafficking were falling behind in comparison.⁴ Nowadays, some nuanced postcolonial literary analyses have come to light, but, enabled by the ambiguities regarding “consent” in the 2000 UN Trafficking Protocol and its subsequent ratifications, the conflicting feminist debates on sex work—erroneously conflated with sex trafficking or sexual slavery—still dominate the conversation and often establish the parameters of the analysis according to their diametrically opposed views on the subject.⁵ Yet when analyzing sex trafficking narratives through either pro-sex work or anti-prostitution rhetoric, critics may find themselves between Scylla and Charybdis, at times reduced to unresolvable debates on individuals’ consent to be trafficked and their degree of agency.⁶ In this respect, an interesting trend has been observed: where mass media largely relies on victimizing and disempowering tropes echoing abolitionist imagery (see Baker; Barnett; Doezema), postcolonial literary analyses tend to showcase and privilege moments of agency akin to pro-sex work rhetoric (see Bickford; Dawson; McCallum).⁷

This article seeks to intervene precisely here by pointing to the inadequacy of traditionally invoked concepts such as “consent” and, tightly associated to it, “agency” as primary foci of analysis when explaining contexts that can allow for extreme exploitation such as transnational sex trafficking. Despite recent human rights-oriented studies supportive of sex work published by The Lancet and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), the anti-prostitution/abolitionist model has become emblematic of the mainstream fight against sex trafficking in the US and, predictably, is the one receiving most attention and funding.⁸ In response, postcolonial scholars who are apprehensive about abolitionist policies that generally construct trafficked individuals as unable to act or speak in their best interest have tended to embrace the opposing camp’s rhetoric. Prabha Kotiswaran, a sex worker rights advocate herself, duly stresses the need to expand “the narrow focus of current anti-trafficking efforts away from the top of the pyramid of anti-trafficking law, targeting scenarios involving strong coercion and strong exploitation, and instead pushing downwards towards the range of other trafficking scenarios” (405). Kotiswaran further notes that “[m]any postcolonial scholars have powerfully countered this abolitionist discourse by forefronting the agency of third world actors, especially sex workers” (355; emphasis mine). As will be suggested in the body of this work, the latter position is not unproblematic either and needs to be examined, as it maintains the binary by only inverting hierarchies: where one stresses victimhood, the other highlights agency, sometimes at the expense of overlooking appallingly oppressive contexts.⁹

Although many voluntarily trafficked people do enjoy high degrees of independence in...