Fugitive Slave, Fugitive Novelist: The Narrative of James Williams (1838)

Abstract

AbstractThis essay argues for reading a discredited slave narrative—the Narrative of James Williams (1838)—as an early black novel. Reading this narrative as a founding black novel à la Robinson Crusoe complicates the genealogy and theoretical parameters of literary criticism about early US black fiction. Such a reading revises accounts about the emergence of the third-person fictive voice inaugurated by Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown in the 1850s. It also offers a new understanding of the antislavery movement’s quest for authenticity. More importantly, reading NJW as novelistic fiction illustrates how a fugitive slave might narrativize muddied textual politics and effectively challenge the reparative vision with which we theorize the genres and politics of early African American literary texts.