American Slave Narrative Research Articles

American slave narratives

American slave narratives

Pariahs in the Land of Their Birth

In his book, Native Life in South Africa, Sol Plaatje uses many of the narrative techniques employed by the writers of American slave narratives. This paper compares Plaatje's work with Frederick Douglass' Narrative and explores the similarities and differences in the ways Plaatje and Douglass construct identity.

Audrey Fisch. American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. x, 139. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-66626-2.

Introduction: communicating 'a correct knowledge of American slavery': J. B. Estlin and the 'breeder' in Frederick Douglass's Narrative 1. 'Exhibiting Uncle Tom in some shape or other': the commercialisation and reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England 2. Abolition as a 'step to reform in our kingdom': Chartism, 'white slaves', and a new 'Uncle Tom' in England 3. 'Repetitious accounts so piteous and so harrowing': the ideological work of American slave narratives in England 4. 'Negrophilism' and nationalism: the spectacle of the African-American abolitionist Epilogue: 'How cautious and calculating?': English audiences and the impostor Reuben Nixon.

American slave narratives

American slave narratives

American slave narratives

American slave narratives

"Nothing Was Lost in the Masquerade": The Protean Performance of Genre and Identity in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale

As many times as we reopen slavery's closure, we are hurtled rapidly forward into dizzying motions of symbolic enterprise, and it becomes increasingly clear that cultural synthesis we call slavery was never homogeneous in its practices and conception, nor unitary in faces it has yielded. But to behave as if it were so matches precisely telos of African persons in United States.... The collective and individual reinvention of discourse of slavery is, therefore, nothing other than an attempt to restore to spatio-temporal object its eminent historicity, to evoke person/persona in place of shady ideal. (Spillers, Changing Letter 29) In his novel Oxherding Tale (1982), Charles Johnson reopens slavery's closure through his reclamation of nineteenth-century slave narrative. In so doing, he undermines static formulations of literature, history, and identity: Viewing each account as potentially mutable rendering of and being, he limns their transformative through performative poetics. Just as Spillers posits slavery's closure as point of departure for recovery of that institution's complex historicity, Johnson deploys seemingly fixed categories of identity and genre in order to overturn deterministic models of being. Specifically, his enslaved, biracial protagonist Andrew Hawkins can only achieve emancipation by comprehending his own subjectivity as multiple, as heterogeneously constructed out of interstices between house and field, and white and black. In keeping with this new understanding, Andrew in his role as narrator must also transcend perspective and confines of traditional autobiography in order to enact first-person universal. By extension, Johnson forces his readers to confront limitations of conventional, realist reading method (as he calls it, a heavily conditioned seeing), proposing as an alterna- tive more liberated mode of readership (Being 5). Thus, Johnson seizes discursive aspect of slavery's displaced person(s)/persona(s): Refusing to fix subject, he instead conceives of personhood as effect of reiterative and citational practice, as palimpsest of performances. In both Johnson's philosophical fictions and his philosophy of fiction, he interrogates questions of subjectivity in relation to language and literary form. As he states in his phenomenological treatise on African-American fiction Being and Race (1988), he reserves his greatest respect for the protean writer, performer . . . who slides from genre to genre, style to style, leaving his or her distinctive signature on each form lovingly transfigured and pushed toward new possibilities (53). Here, Johnson challenges orthodoxy that impels black writers to adhere to realism as primary literary mode. Rejecting what he deems calcified vision, Johnson cautions writer against adopting preestablished models . . . for our experience, or for any experience (7). Instead, he calls for African-American writer to grapple with perceptual flux of that characterizes black world - and all worlds - to originate new meaning (15). In Johnson's view, then, good fiction should not only transgress generic boundaries, but it should also strategically stage these traversals in service of liberty for benefit of reader and writer. Using his principles to guide my own critique, I read Oxherding Tale as text which performs myriad versions of genre and identity in order to attain ontological and narrative freedom. As post-modern subversion of classical American slave narrative with resonances of an Eastern parable, novel exemplifies Johnson's own protean dictate[middle dot] By reiterating and mimicking these disparate literary traditions, Johnson invents his characters through complex citational process which allows him to critique notions of authenticity and essentialism and to negotiate new constructions of personhood (Parker and Sedgwick 2). …

Reading through the Veil of Juan Francisco Manzano: From Homoerotic Violence to the Dream of a Homoracial Bond

TheAutobiografíaof the Cuban slave poet Juan Francisco Manzano is the only Spanish American slave narrative written by a person living in slavery. In this text Manzano recounts his corporal punishments in graphic detail but explicitly veils certain key episodes of abuse. I contend that this veil is a marker of sexual assault and that theAutobiografíabears silent testimony to the rape of male slaves. Manzano, however, was not only a victim of homoerotic violence; in one of his poems, “Un sueño” (“A Dream”), he reconfigures homoerotic desire in a way that tentatively reconstitutes his self-integrity and establishes a bond of reciprocity with his enslaved brother. In Manzano's writing, then, homoeroticism is transformed from an instrument of oppression into an act of resistance that challenges the racist and masculinist violence of the colonial slave system.

‘Repetitious accounts so piteous and so harrowing’: the ideological work of American slave narratives in England

‘Repetitious accounts so piteous and so harrowing’: the ideological work of American slave narratives in England

The Process of Literacy as Communal Involvement in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass

Harvey Graff has argued convincingly that faith grand promises of literacy has, more often than not, gone unrewarded. The nineteenth century, he contends, provided a fertile climate for educators such as Horace Mann to promulgate belief that literacy inevitably leads to financial and social success. Literacy's failure to satisfy these expectations, Graff points out, is one of social and cultural contradictions present in developing social relationships that make up essence of history and sociology. Stating a central point of his revisionist understanding of history of literacy, Graff observes that the clearest lesson of nineteenth century as 'origins of our own time' constitutes much of what I deem a 'literacy myth.' This myth involves a pattern of contradictions which he points to saying, We may merely reiterate role of post-Enlightenment ideologies and clusters of social thought and theory providing grounding for most of our current notions about literacy, and stress that many, though not all, of facts of development contradict those assumptions and (Legacies 265). Graff also relies on concept of continuity order to interpret history of literacy. To focus on historical continuities, Graff maintains, means eschewing an exaggerated emphasis on change, and rejecting persistent cultural dichotomies. Slave narratives exhibit many of cultural contradictions and continuities present social relationships of nineteenth-century America. When we look closely and examine role literacy played these slaves' lives, patterns of continuity and contradiction serve as analytic and interpretive concepts which help us to reinterpret these roles and better understand slave's relation to ruling culture of nineteenth-century America. Much of what is revealed these narratives is way which literacy enabled and empowered blacks to gain freedom from, and control over, ruling culture that enslaved them. The narratives also, however, reveal ways which literacy, as a tool of white hegemony, sought to exclude and dominate illiterate blacks. This contrast marks one of contradictory ways which literacy developed among slaves. To emphasize continuity, on other hand, we must eschew literacy / orality dichotomy and look at black culture's historical legacy of literacy--conceived as a holistic development--as another way that literacy developed among blacks nineteenth century. Graff's interpretive terminology The Legacies of Literacy suggests a framework for examining role of literacy American slave narratives. Too often, readers conceive literacy these narratives as an emancipating skill which leverages slave out of bondage and into freedom. When critics conceive literacy more complex ways, it is frequently problematized by attendant poststructuralist conundra which pit language, and hence process of acquiring literacy, against narrator's being or authentic self. Or, following lead of Henry Louis Gates, literacy is conceived as mastery of a system of self-referential signs which, as Houston Baker explains, imply an ideal critic whose readings would summon knowledge only from literary system of Afro-America. The semantics endorsed by his ideal critic would not be those of a culture. They would be specially consecrated meanings of an intertextual world of 'written art' (Blues 103). Frederick Douglass's antebellum autobiographies have been focal point of recent debates over significance of acquisition of literacy for slaves. The Narrative of Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) exhibit, an exemplary way, a long tradition of slave autobiography that continually sought new ways to mediate relation between writer and reader. This mediation, however complexly conceived, has elicited from several scholars a discussion that often turns on contemporary theories of language which decenter speaking subject and suspend autonomous discourse alone above nitty-gritty pragmatic social interaction. …

Whose book is this?: Authorial versus editorial control of Harriet Brent Jacobs' Incidents in the life of a slave girl: Written by herself

The recent surge of critical interest in autobiography, leads us to rethink all of our assumptions about this genre. In particular, Jeffery Melhman's and Germaine Bree's ideas on the significance of the act of writing to the autobiographer's gradual self-discovery, help us to understand the peculiar questions of authenticity surrounding the nineteenth century American collaborative slave narrative. Following a brief discussion of American abolitionists' rules governing the format and publication of American slave narratives, this article examines some of Harriet Brent Jacobs' letters to Amy Post in which she explains why and how she wrote her life story. It is then argued that the manner in which the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child edited the manuscript for publication produced a text in which two narrative voices are then discernible.

The American Slave Narrative: The Justification of the Picaro

IF well begun is half-done, a bad start can also mean a bad finish. Beginnings establish a momentum that later stages tend to continue or at least need to confront. Hence the appropriate fascination of scholars with origins-of culture, political movements, personality development. Our sense of beginnings is always colored by our sense of the ending, or of the middle if no end has been reached yet. Neither terminal point exists without the other; if the child is father of the man, our sense of the man shapes our view of his childhood. Nowhere is this reflexive relationship more evident nor more complex than in the study of black American culture. Did that culture begin in slavery's negation of African culture, so that the black American can only be understood by reference to an identity he has lost and knows he no longer has? Or did it begin in some creative interplay between cultures, so that the black American is truly an AfroAmerican, not deprived of culture but endowed through his painful experience with a rich amalgam of his old and new worlds? The relatively negative explanations of these origins, from Ulrich Phillips down through Stanley Elkins and beyond, have grown out of a relatively bleak sense of the black American's current state, just as the more positive interpretations of the I96os and I970S-Genovese's, Gutman's, and Levine's,1 to name just a few-owe a good deal to a different view of black Americans today. Most studies of black American culture have concentrated on its oral aspects-folk tale, music, religion-because they have seemed most distinctive. But the question of the origin of written expression

The American Slave Narrative: Dramatic Resource Material for the Classroom

Slave narratives are biographical and autobiographical tales of bondage and freedom either written or by former slaves. The majority of them were told accounts written with the aid of abolitionist editors between 1830 and 1865. However, a number of narratives (including the work of Frederick Douglass) were written solely by the author and are, therefore, referred to as authentic autobiographies. The first of more than six thousand extant slave narratives were published in 1703, and the autobiographical account of George Washington Carver published in 1944 is considered the last of the genre.1 Primarily written as propaganda, the narratives served as important weapons in the warfare against slavery. Taken as a whole, slave narratives can be considered as a literary genre for a number of reasons. They are united by the common purpose of pointing up the evils of slavery and combatting the antebellum notion of black inferiority. In the narratives, one finds a striking similarity of language, simple and often dramatic accounts of personal experience, strong revelation of the character of both ordinary and extraordinary men and women, and ironic humor and other submerged elements of protest literature. Vernon Loggins has observed that excepting his folk songs, the black man's most valuable contributions to American literature have been in the form of personal memoirs.2 Despite his deeply degrading status, the slave retained the very human desire