Voices from the Coolest Corner of Hell: A Content Analysis of Slave Narratives in the Study of Creolization in the Education of 19th Century African American Slaves

Abstract

The general argument made by Southern historian, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips in 1918, is that the plantation functioned as a type of school for the slave. Similarly, in 1976, Anthony Gerald Albanese examined the plantation system as an institution that conditioned the behaviors of both slaves and slave owners. I maintain that the plantation system was not only an educative agency that conditioned behaviors, but also a conduit for the creolization process. The focus of this study is creolization in the education of African American slaves in the nineteenth century. This is a mixed methods content analysis of African American slave narratives. I use Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s plantation context heuristic to help conceptualize the creolization process that I believe is present within the text. Within the qualitative strand of the sequential mixed method design, I identify thematic codes that signify pedagogy and creolization theory. I classify these codes into three families: slave-making strategies (SMS) codes, creolization theory (CT) codes, and education and literacy (EL) codes. The coding units I collect during the qualitative phase of this study will make up the dataset for the quantitative phase of research in which I explore the relationships among coding families.