African American Slave Narrative Research Articles

The Recirculation of an African American Slave Narrative in Canada: Thomas Jones's The Experience of Thomas Jones and Two Religious Newspapers in Nova Scotia, 1851–53

abstract: This article examines how antebellum slave narratives by self-liberated individuals in the United States, which were circulated and read in Canada, are contextualized within a wider body of little-known stories about slavery in Canada. Critics have argued that antebellum slave narratives by self-liberated people are part of the Canadian literary canon, but they have not explored the connection between slave narratives and Canadian newspapers, which recirculated narratives about slavery. This article uses Gérard Genette's concept of the paratext, functioning as the "threshold" to a text, to place a slave narrative back into the threshold of the newspaper that framed it for its religious readers. The self-liberated Wesleyan preacher and abolitionist Thomas H. Jones first arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick in May 1851, and in 1853 his narrative was reprinted in Saint John. The article shares the results of research on two religious newspapers in Nova Scotia and three popular Saint John newspapers, 1851–53, arguing that Thomas H. Jones's The Experience of Thomas Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years was read within a context that gave priority to its evangelical imperatives. Through examining a wider body of newspaper narratives that feature fictional enslaved African American characters and function as moral tales for evangelical readers, this article provides a more contextual reading of Jones's narrative in Nova Scotia. When we place book-length slave narratives back into a wider body of newspaper narratives, it problematizes an oversimplified view of Canadian antislavery divorced from other imperatives and agendas. Book-length narratives, in their US and Canadian circulation context, should be read alongside lesser-known newspaper narratives.

Negociações pós-escravidão ? Da narrativa (de escravo) e das histórias impossíveis em Um Dom de Toni Morrison

The article examines Toni Morrison’s historical novel A Mercy for the ways in which it interrogates the intricate connections between slavery, self-making, private property, and narrative. The rich pool of critical readings of A Mercy often situates itself within an environment of 21st- century ‘post-racial’ discourse, not least since it was published one week after Barack Obama was elected as President of the USA in 2008. The article pushes against such readings by means of an examination of the character of the enslaved mother minha mãe. By showing how this character revisits the African American slave narrative tradition, and by reading the minha mãe in line with the groundbreaking work of Black feminist scholars on the entanglements between slavery, property, and reproduction, my close reading of the minha mãe text establishes Atlantic slavery’s sexual economies as the novel’s explicit frame of reference and signification. My reading of A Mercy is also an attempt at positioning the novel within a broader critical context of recent Black Studies theorizing, in which questions concerning narrative’s ability to account for the social death of the enslaved on a deeper level have taken centre stage. My reading situates itself within African American studies, Black feminist thinking, and Early American studies.First, I situate the minha mãe and her textual fragment in A Mercy against the novel’s critical reception and the prominent tendency to read this character only in tandem with the novel’s other characters—and not as a character that needs to be examined in its own right.Second, I juxtapose the minha mãe fragment with the tradition of the women-authored African American slave narratives. I suggest that the textual fragment of the minha mãe invokes and allegorizes the slave narratives authored by Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs, creating intertextual moments with them. In their respective narratives, Prince and Jacob follow the literary conventions of the slave narrative as a genre in that they more or less implicitly draw attention not only to the sexual subjection by their master but also to how the regimes of property ruptured recognized kinship relations for the enslaved. The character of the minha mãe takes up these concerns raised by Prince’s and Jacobs’ narratives and brings them to the novel’s fictional representation of colonial Virginia.Third, the article expands on this argument by suggesting that the fragment of the minha mãe, while relying on particular features of the slave narrative tradition, in fact also challenges the generic structure of these narratives, which are strongly invested in an ethos of liberation. Unlike the protagonists of the above mentioned women-authored slave narratives, the minha mãe does not gain freedom at the end of her text. Her fragment, as I suggest, therefore needs to be read as a challenge to the slave narrative script and its narrative gestures to liberation.In conclusion, the article enters its close reading of the minha mãe into conversation with recent Black Studies theoretical trajectories stressing the varied ways in which the ‘afterlife’ (Hartman) of New World slavery continues to structure Black existence in the U.S., and their inquiry into whether narrative can account for the enslaved. Finally, I suggest that A Mercy takes up these theoretical concerns with the minha mãe and argue that her textual fragment in the novel amplifies them through its non-resolution.

Versklavte Replikanten und die Konstruktion von »Whiteness« in Blade Runner und Blade Runner 2049

The release of the anticipated sequel to Blade Runner and the largely unaltered adoption of the spatial and discursive setting in Blade Runner 2049 gave newfound relevance to the topic of the Whiteness of the enslaved replicants. Because Blade Runner positions the enslaved replicants in a discursive framework that repeatedly references African American history and slave narratives, their hyperbolically white depiction has caused concern and criticism among Anglophone scholars. This essay examines the construction of Whiteness in Blade Runner and discursive differences in the sequel Blade Runner 2049 from the perspective of Critical Race Theory, based mainly on the theoretical groundwork of Richard Dyer and Daniel Bernardi. It will outline the construction of whiteness as a means to critically portray the oppressive discourse in both films, by discussing the detachment of the replicants »invisible privileges« of whiteness. In order to appropriately characterize the, on its face very questionable, positioning of enslaved white replicants within a framework of African American slavery, the analysis will establish how both films utilize whiteness to construct a critical depiction of the historically stereotypical connection between blackness and slavery. The epitome of this criticism is to be found in the hyperbolically white stylization of Roy Batty. The depiction of »White Flight« in Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 will be discussed against the backdrop of racial Othering. The implied migration of white humans to the superior »Off-World« establishes a fear of the Other and its assimilation in the white population. The exclusion of black characters in the original film, and their inclusion in the sequel, affect the way in which the movie portrays replicants within the framework of African American enslavement. Along with the distinct non-hyperbolic depiction of the white replicants in Blade Runner 2049, this necessitates an analysis of the perpetuation of the oppressive discourse. This essay aims to establish the analytical fertility of Critical Whiteness Studies within the Germanophone Blade Runner debate.

Slave Narratives, the Bible and Hymns, Oh My...

Learn how theological librarians can forge collaborative enterprises to help integrate digital humanities into academic research and teaching. Coordinating partnerships among digital humanities specialists, faculty, and other researchers allows theological librarians to provide additional services while also enhancing their standing within the academic community. We will highlight specific examples of text analysis, including identifying and visualizing Deuteronomic phrases with African-American slave narratives, and visualizing similarities between George Whitefield’s sermons and hymns. We will share and demonstrate custom-developed applications and methods to help theological librarians quickly get started in digital humanities. We look forward to sharing with you our successful collaborative endeavors.

The Genres ofGuantánamo Diary: Postcolonial Reading and the War on Terror

AbstractThis essay reads Mohamedou Ould Slahi’sGuantánamo Diary(2015) as an exemplary occasion to stage the dilemmas of postcolonial reading in the present, especially in relation to the global War on Terror declared by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. ReadingGuantánamo Diaryin relation to a genre it clearly seems to echo—the African American slave narrative—the essay argues that the analogy to slavery enables a deeper sense of the multiple and overlapping histories of race and empire but also obscures the transnational geography of detention signaled by Slahi as well as his damning comment on the failed project of postcolonial sovereignty. Showing how attention to questions of genre and their circulation across the globe illuminates the politics of terror and detention, the essay elaborates the possible ethics and aesthetics of postcolonial reading in the present.

SLAVE NARRATIVES WRITTEN BY WOMEN: THE PROBLEM OF SELF-IDENTITY

The article is dedicated to the comparative analysis of African American slave narratives written by women. The objective of the research is the issues of identity formation. To achieve this objective the following methods were used: contrastive-comparative method of stylistic analysis, motive analysis, biographical method. The interpretation of the texts under consideration enables us to come to the conclusion that the identity formation of the female personages of these texts occurs under the influence of their families and the cultural legacy of the whole community, the considered women writers pay special attention to the means of struggle of black women slaves for human dignity.

John Ernest (ed.),The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative.

John Ernest (ed.),<i>The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative</i>.

The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. Edited by JohnErnest. Oxford Handbooks of Literature. Oxford University Press. 2014. xiv + 472pp. £105.00.

The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. Edited by JohnErnest. Oxford Handbooks of Literature. Oxford University Press. 2014. xiv + 472pp. £105.00.

The Plagiarist's Craft: Fugitivity and Theatricality inRunning a Thousand Miles for Freedom

After showing that nine percent of William Craft'sRunning a Thousand Miles for Freedomis plagiarized in ways that strongly resemble the ways in which William Wells Brown typically plagiarized, I argue that Brown wrote the narrative in tandem with Craft. Recognizing that possibility encourages us to pay closer attention to the formal aspects ofRunning, whose abrupt tonal shifts and frequent comic digressions make it one of the most peculiar of the major African American slave narratives. Just asRunningprolongs, to an extraordinary degree, the intermediate condition of its fugitive protagonists, so does it hold open, by means of its highly theatrical interludes, the prospect of another future, another stage on which black and white Americans might encounter one another.

Speaking lives, authoring texts: three African American women's oral slave narratives

Speaking lives, authoring texts: three African American women's oral slave narratives

A Student Roundtable on Prison Abolition and Imprisonment Writing

P Lai: In spring 2009, I offered a junior-level English seminar on Literatures of American Imprisonment, a course that surveyed writing that emerges from or reflects on various historical moments and forms of captivity. Rather than considering such imprisonment as anomalous to the United States of America, the course forwarded an argument about the constitutive quality of such captivity for American national character. We read captivity narratives from colonial America in the contact between European and Native Americans; African American slave narratives; Indian boarding school memoirs; Japanese American internment poetry; contemporary prison writing and neo-abolitionist discourse; and poetry from the Guantanamo Bay prison detainees. While the readings covered a span of over three hundred years, we read them out of chronological order to avoid creating a progressive narrative of increasing freedom or decreasing restrictions on the individual body. Instead, we considered how imprisonment has functioned variously to delimit who belongs to the national body and where boundaries can be drawn for the nation-state. The class began with a focused consideration of prison abolition by way of Angela Y. Davis’s succinct, provocative Are Prisons Obsolete? and selections from Joy James’s Brown, Michelle. The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle. New York University Press, 2009.

“Sweet Home”: Audre Lorde's Zami and the legacies of American Writing

Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a “biomythography,” suggesting that the life of an African American lesbian cannot be told in any previously available generic forms of life-writing or self-expression, Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions – the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story – rendering it, after all, not a marginal text, but rather a text that falls obviously and firmly in a tradition of American literature. Both traditions turn siginificantly on the trope of “home,” of finding a home where one belongs. In finding the “home” that she is seeking not, ultimately, geographically, but, rather, generically – in the very text she is writing – Lorde's life story also ends up signifying the similarity of these two ostensibly disparate forms: the slave narrative and the coming out story, suggesting a common narrative trajectory of marginal American identities in the tradition of American life-writing.

The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative

The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative

The Cambridge Companion to the African-American Slave Narrative (review)

The Cambridge Companion to the African-American Slave Narrative (review)

Children in European systems of slavery: Introduction

This special edition on children in western systems of slavery1 follows last year's special edition of Slavery & Abolition on women in western systems of slavery in moving beyond the conventional t...

When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature (review)

252Reviews ers return to Toomer's Cane. Like Cane, Wardi's text generates possibilities for further exploration and discovery, more critical analysis. Wardi's study can be read as an elegy that signals a return to origins, to those seminal texts in the African American literary tradition that are invested in the process of remembering. In her poignant conclusion, "Our People's Graves," Wardi reexamines the material markers of death in the novel Mama Dayand in Alice Walker's poem "Burial." Wardi's return to these markers and her treatment of Cane function as a metaphor for what her work offers. Suggesting that the pastoral is a site of ongoing song, of elegy, Wardi provides a means to recover (at least partially) aspects of an African American literary tradition. By reviewing the past and its literature and by "unearthing buried histories" (166), Wardi demonstrates an act of recovery similar to the ones she discovers in these literary texts. Ultimately, the arc ofmourning—ofremembering and finding meaning— comes full circle. Florida Institute of TechnologyLisa K. Perdigao Brennan, Jonathan, ed. When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: AfricanNative American Literature. Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003. xvii + 307 pp. Cloth: $39.95. Jonathan Brennan has done Americanists a great service by putting together this collection of ten essays on African-Native American history and literature. The first striking aspect of the edited volume is its extensive introduction—which comprises one-third of the book and includes 269 endnotes. Brennan's introduction presents a thorough account of the historical, political, cultural, and literary connections between what have been considered separate entities in ethnic studies: Americans of African and those ofindigenous ancestry. The fact that many visibly dark-skinned Americans—individuals classified as African Americans—are actually partAmerican Indian (and likely part white European American) is a salient point in the volume. While miscegenation is widely recognized among scholars today, the existence and specific history ofAfrican-Native Americans has been, according to Brennan and his contributors, a best-kept secret . Thus, as a collection of essays focused on the culture and literature of African-Native Americans, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote identifies a long-neglected area of scholarship in ethnic studies. In discussing African-Native American writers, Brennan cites the hostility that Alice Walker has faced in claiming the Cherokee and white European parts of her racial heritage. As he reminds us, "although the former English colonies have structured racial and cultural categories in such a way as to make it difficult for writers to claim their African-Native Studies in American Fiction253 identity (in contrast to the more permeable policies of former French and Spanish colonies), African-Native Americans are not obligated to choose one community over the other. When they do choose to assume both identities , they sometimes alternate between identities and sometimes assume them simultaneously" (31). Several ofthe essays rightfully assert that, given the unique strain of racial classification in the U. S., identity politics cannot be ignored. The four parts of the book—ranging from discussions of folklore to captivity and slave narratives to treatments of crossblood subjectivities in contemporary ethnic works—address issues of identity from different angles. The cumulative effect is the convincing argument that multiethnic literary scholars should move beyond rigidly construed ethnicities to explore the fertile connection between African and Native American cultures. Part 1 includes two essays that examine "cultural syncretism" between African and Native Americans. Both essays identify historical moments when cultural contact occurred and forged hybrid versions of folktales that already existed in African and Native traditions. While researchers have been busy establishing the African origin of these stories, David Gay points out, they "overlook[ed] the fact that the Native American and African American versions oftrickster stories more closely resemble each other than their supposed African exemplars" (105). In fact, according to Sandra Baringer, the focus on origins "effaces opportunities for the study of cultural exchange, which is more complex than one oppressor versus one oppressed" (118) and, ultimately, "misunderstands the way oral storytelling works" (120). Part 2 includes three essays that examine the parallels and contrasts between Indian captivity narratives and African American slave narratives. According to the authors, because narratives by Indian...

Appropriating a Slur

Appropriating a Slur

Richard Wright's travel writings: new reflections

Attracted to remote lands by his interest in the postcolonial struggle, Richard Wright (1908-1960) became one of the few African Americans of his time to engage in travel writing. He went to emerging nations not as a sightseer but as a student of their cultures, learning the politics and the processes of social transformation. When Wright fled from the United States in 1946 to live as an expatriate in Paris, he was exposed to intellectual thoughts and challenges that transcended his social and political education in America. Three events broadened his world view- his introduction to French existentialism, the rise of the Pan-Africanist movement to decolonize Africa, and Indonesia's declaration of independence from colonial rule in 1945. During the 1950s as he traveled to emerging nations his encounters produced four travel narratives-Black Power (1953), The Color Curtain (1956), Pagan Spain (1956), and White Man, Listen! (1957). Upon his death in 1960, he left behind an unfinished book on French West Africa, which exists only in notes, outlines, and a draft. Written by multinational scholars, this collection of essays exploring Wright's travel writings shows how in his hands the genre of travel writing resisted, adapted, or modified the forms and formats practiced by white authors. Enhanced by nine photographs taken by Wright during his travels, the essays focus on each of Wright's four separate narratives as well as upon his unfinished book and reveal how Wright drew on such non-Western influences as the African American slave narrative and Asian literature of protest and resistance. The essays critique Wright's representation of customs and people and employ a broad range of interpretive modes, including the theories of formalism, feminism, and postmodernism, among others. Wright's travel books are proved here to be innovative narratives that laid down the roots of such later genres as postcolonial literature, contemporary travel writing, and resistance literature. Virginia Whatley Smith is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Her work has appeared in African American Review, Mississippi Quarterly, and MLA Approaches to Teaching Wright's 'Native Son.'

Arab-American Autobiography and the Reinvention of Identity: Two Egyptian Negotiations

This article examines two Anglophone autobiographies by Egyptian immigrants in the United States, Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1986) and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage: From Cairo to America--A Woman's Journey (1999). The two texts are read as Egyptian negotiations of Arab-American identity in the U.S., in the context of modern Egyptian history and Western perceptions of Arabs, Islam, and Middle Eastern politics. The two texts display radically different strategies of negotiating identity that reflect divergent currents in American cultural politics in the second half of the twentieth century. ********** My story began in Egypt, continues in America. But how tell that story of disjunction, self-exile? In fragments, I think, in slips of memory, scraps of thought. In scenes and arguments of a life time, re-membered like the scattered bones of Osiris. Ihab Hassan And I am now at the end point of the story I set out to tell here. For thereafter my life becomes part of other stories, American stories. It becomes part of the story of feminism in America, the story of women in America, the story of women of color in America, the story of Arabs in America, the story of Muslims in America, and part of the story of America itself and of American lives in a world of dissolving boundaries and vanishing borders. Leila Ahmed The question of autobiography as a genre with an ambivalent relationship to historical fact and narrative convention has preoccupied U.S. and French theorists since the early 1960s, when autobiography began to command the attention of literary scholars as a legitimate genre. (1) There are at least two reasons for the canonization, in postmodern culture, of autobiography, which had previously (especially in the reign of New Criticism) been regarded as inferior to enshrined literary genres (Morgan 3-4). One reason is the generally perceived autobiographical turn in the literature [of the 1970s and 1980s], both in Europe and the United States ... particularly ... among those contemporary novelists who appear to be playful practitioners of fictional games or who--from the perspective of their ethnic or marginal backgrounds seem to be in search of their ethnic identity within a dominant white culture (Hornung and Ruhe 9). Another related reason is the development of feminist and minority criticism, which have questioned the traditional literary canon and brought to the attention of scholars women's and minority writing, especially previously unknown or uncanonical texts, many of which are autobiographical, such as women's letters, fiction, and diaries, and African-American slave narratives. Thus, at a time when postmodern thinkers like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault pronounced the death of the Author--as part of the poststructuralist critique of the transcendental subject of the Enlightenment--not only avant-garde white male novelists, but also those marginalized by gender, race, and/or ethnicity have shown their vital signs through autobiographical writing (Morgan 11-12, Hornung and Ruhe 9). I propose to examine two Angolphone autobiographies by Egyptians who have emigrated to the United States, Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1986) and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage. From Cairo to America--A Woman's Journey (1999). They are narratives of permanent immigration, of transitioning into a U.S. minority. Rather than engaging in debates over the definition, demarcation, and policing of the borders of autobiography as a genre, (2) or even attempting to define a poetics of Arab immigrant autobiography, the more urgent question concerns the kinds of cultural, historical, and discursive intervention that such autobiography makes in the United States. That is, I read these two texts not so much as variations on a literary tradition or canon of autobiography, or as test cases for particular theories and definitions of a genre, but as Egyptian negotiations of Arab-American identity in the U. …

The Multilingual anthology of American literature: a reader of original texts with English translations

An 1830s African-American slave narrative written in Arabic. Dafydd Morgan, the only American immigrant novel published in Welsh. Native American epic, Walum Olum, in the Lenape language. Theodor Adorno's dream transcripts, in German. A short story about the politics of abortion in working-class Chinatown. Lesbian Love, a surprisingly explicit chapter from an 1853 New Orleans novel. A haunting 1904 ballad, The Revenge of the Forests, that is one of the first expressions of radical environmentalism in the United States. Largely ignored in the debates over canon and multiculturalism in America, indigenous American works written in languages other than English have over time disappeared from view. first anthology of its kind, Multilingual Anthology of American Literature brings together American writings in diverse languages from Arabic and Spanish to Swedish and Yiddish, among others. Presenting each work in its original language with facing page translation, the book provides an important complement to all other anthologies of American writing, and will serve to complicate our understanding of what exactly American literature is. American literature appears here as more than an offshoot of a single mother country, or of many mother countries, but rather as the interaction among diverse linguistic and cultural trajectories. Consider that Cotton Mather spoke half a dozen languages and wrote in both Spanish and Latin. Or that the first short story known to have been written by an African American (and reproduced here) was written in French. Not only a literature of immigration and assimilation, American multilingual literature participates in the larger literary tradition which too often marginalizes authors who complicate the fit of authorship, citizenship, and language.