Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas

Abstract

With this collection of eight essays (plus an introduction and coda), the editors Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth seek to reconceptualize the slave narrative genre in multiple ways—by extending its periodization back to the early eighteenth century, incorporating transnational and transcultural narratives, and including texts not actually written by enslaved people. Aljoe and Finseth make a compelling case to expand the traditional slave narrative canon to include lesser-known works that do not always adhere strictly to convention. Those narratives reveal meaningful experiences among black actors and authors operating within the Atlantic world during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The essays in this volume demonstrate that in this time period individuals of African descent could assume a host of identities over their lifetimes, often due to voluntary or involuntary transnational geographic movement. The cohort of black men that José Guadalupe Ortega discusses shifted from slaves terrorized by Bahamian masters to critical agents in the transformation of the Cuban sugar economy to litigants who used Spanish law to gain their freedom. As Keith Michael Green highlights, Briton Hammon maintained multiple identities representing various states of unfreedom common in the Americas during the eighteenth century—slavery, naval impressment, captivity by American Indians, incarceration, and indentured servitude. The collection reveals a population of black men who were intensely mobile, shifting from one culture, one form of captivity, or one economic state to another, sometimes multiple times during their lives.