American Slave Narrative Research Articles

Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative

Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.

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.

A Muslim American slave: the life of Omar Ibn Said

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language, as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that Islam and America are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that Islam and America are not mutually exclusive terms. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

<em>The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel</em>, by Julia Sun-Joo Lee

<em>The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel</em>, by Julia Sun-Joo Lee

Tituba's Fall: Maryse Condé's Counter-narrative of the Female Slave Self

Maryse Conde's I, Tituba … Black Witch of Salem consistently evokes the most recognizable tropes of the American slave narrative as it troubles and outright up-ends them. Engaging provocatively wit...

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

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

The American slave narrative and the Victorian novel

The American slave narrative and the Victorian novel

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.

Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory Eva C. Karpinski (bio) Bella Brodzki. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2007. 250 pp. ISBN 978-0-804-75542-9, $21.95. In this pioneering study, translation is a matter of life and death. Bella Brodzki engages Walter Benjamin’s metaphysical and materialist model of translation, and its elaboration by Jacques Derrida, focusing on the survival of bodies, texts, narratives, images, and memories through cross-cultural and inter generational transmission that is both transcending death and life-giving, linked to an “afterlife” and to “living on.” She offers a compelling examination of the combined genealogical and generative—or commemorative and animating—functions of translation viewed as instrumental to all processes of continuity and change in literature, culture, and history. In Brodzki’s hands, such a broad view of translation proves extremely productive in the service of hermeneutics, applied to a range of American, European, and African texts, fictional and autobiographical, whose historical frames coincide with late modernity and postmodernity. Her selections are marked by or reverberate with echoes of catastrophic events, including slavery, colonialism, war, and the Holocaust, as well as different forms of epistemic violence. Translation appears under many guises as a trope, a theme, a structural device, a metafictional concern, or a textual strategy. It becomes an indispensable concept to explore issues of diasporic literacy, authorship and reading, gender performativity and sexual agency, resistant subjectivities and genres, postcoloniality, trauma, and historical memory. While Brodzki’s theorizing of translation is influenced by deconstruction, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, her approach never fails to recognize that texts operate in the material world shaped by the commercial and political demands of a global literary marketplace. Of particular interest to scholars of auto/biography and life writing are those chapters that deal with contemporary fictional adaptations of the genre of the American slave narrative as well as with Holocaust survivor narratives. Brodzki interprets three novels by Charles Johnson, Buchi Emecheta, and André Schwartz-Bart as translations that extend and rejuvenate generic definitions by shifting from a national to a transnational understanding of the experience of slavery. On the other hand, her analysis of autobiographical texts by Claude Morhange-Begue and Jorge Semprun allows her to articulate [End Page 838] autobiography’s relation to mourning and its “testimonial and testamentary” agenda of memorializing trauma and loss, the two terms that she refuses to conflate. Semprun is an especially important case study highlighting Brodzki’s own position and providing a bridge to the Epilogue, which is more of a climax than a coda to the book. In the Epilogue, she includes her own story: a second-generation Holocaust narrative that stages a “scene of inheritance” of her parents’ survivorship. I would argue that the Epilogue recasts the entire book as a testimonial project, and that her text, like Semprun’s writing, is the result of the recuperative work of mourning and translating the past. Indirectly, via her readings, she testifies to those catastrophic moments in history mediated by literature that continue to haunt us in the present and that cannot be forgotten. Hence, in her praxis, literary criticism is called upon to become an act of bearing witness and memorializing, the functions it shares with autobiography. The centrality of her discussion of Semprun is visible in the reflexive mirroring between the subject and the method of her analysis. She registers the moment when Derrida died while she was writing her chapter—echoing Semprun’s recollection of the radio announcement of Primo Levi’s death. Her text thus evolves into a new hybrid genre: the choice of authors and the framework of trauma and memory bring us closer and closer to the writing subject, the signatory of this book, who translates literary criticism into a form of life writing. Similar to Semprun’s, her own project is informed by a profound relationship with death. However, they both reject redemptive or triumphalist notions of literature as offering mastery through language; rather, the meaning of survival lies in a repeated recurrence of death and loss. Brodzki’s writing is derived from the need to understand history and...

“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

Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century Audrey A. Fisch (bio) Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright, editors. Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century University of Toronto Press. 270. $55.00 Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century is a collection of essays about discourses of 'various forms of captivity' in the nineteenth century. The volume is divided into three sections: 'The Subject of Captivity,' 'Captivating Discourses: Class and Nation,' and 'Captivating Otherness.' Texts under consideration include Russian serf narratives, American slave narratives, Barbary captivity texts, and prison narratives written by prisoners and wardens in the United States, England, and Ireland. Many of the individual essays in the volume are interesting, informative, and represent important works of scholarship. Jason Haslam's examination of the prison narrative of suffragette Lady Constance Lytton, for example, is careful, compelling, and well informed by the existing scholarship; he traces Lytton's complex attempts to 'transmute her privileged individual identity into membership in the suffragette collective [End Page 444] identity.' John MacKay's consideration of the rhetorical strategies employed by writers in the genre of Russian serf narratives to establish a voice and identity is similarly rich. This essay draws explicit contrasts between the serf narrative and the slave narrative, noting in particular the turn for the serf away from religion (in contrast to slave narratives) and towards 'the myth of the Tsar' as father/protector; the essay also explores the rhetorical manipulation of the Other (Jews, Muslims) as alien, non-Russian, in order to solidify for the serf his Russian identity. Also notable is Frank Lauterbach's interesting if less surprising discussion of the prison in late Victorian discourse as 'an emblematic, totemic boundary between respectability and "savage" forms of criminality ... expressed through the notion of class.' For the largely 'gentleman writers' who form the subject of this essay, what is central is not a concern with the reality or abuses of the prison but the need to dissociate from the ethically unacceptable, socially different, and racially disparate populations that form the criminal subculture. The prison can 'emblematically be used both to accept the existence of this subculture and to displace it: criminals were literally and rhetorically contained in prisons in a way that allowed them to serve, to be colonized, and to be repressed as a social and moral Other.' One of the most compelling essays in the volume is Jennifer Costello Brezina's exploration of the narratives of Barbary captives, white Americans captured into slavery in North Africa. Brezina argues that these narratives allow the new United States nation to define itself 'through conflicts with an Orientalized Other' and through narratives of 'captivity and insurrection' which, unlike Indian captivity narratives, 'lay the imaginative groundwork of nation-building.' This essay also persuasively pushes readers to reflect on why these Barbary captivity narratives, unlike the Indian captivity narratives that now form a central place in the classic American historical/literary narrative, 'have been mostly forgotten.' If many of the individual essays are satisfying, the organization and rationale of the volume is somewhat less so. As the editors explain, the 'trajectory from section to section is thus not historical, but telescopes outward, from an emphasis on identifying the writing subject by gender, class, and race, to identifying groups within the nation by class or political affiliation, to classifying nations within an international (and orientalist) framework.' Since many of the writers under consideration engage and blur these identities and classifications, this rationale for the trajectory of the volume feels illusory. At the same time, the editors provide no explanation for why certain texts and authors deserve a place in the volume. Olaudah Equiano's Narrative is the only slave narrative to receive sustained attention, and neither the author of the essay on Equiano nor the volume editors make the case that his eighteenth-century slave narrative should be considered as representative. More broadly, and notwithstanding the accomplishments of some of the individual essays, the volume as [End Page 445] a whole doesn't achieve the major and perhaps overly ambitious claim advanced in the introduction: that it sheds 'new light on...

The Return of the "Unnative": The Transnational Politics of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South

This essay offers a new, transnational reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South(1854-55), a novel that has traditionally been read in national terms. As a sailor, Frederick Hale belongs to a profession that connects the cotton-producing American South to the cotton-manufacturing British North. This alternate "North and South" resituates Gaskell's novel in transatlantic terms and offers a new, racialized prism through which to view the novel's central conflict between master and man. By historicizing Frederick's narrative within the nineteenth-century transatlantic antislavery movement, I argue that Frederick's metonymic connection to slavery expresses itself in his narrative's generic proximity to the American slave narrative. I consider the implications of Frederick's cosmopolitanism and suggest that it anticipates Gaskell's agonized feelings about the American Civil War, an internecine conflict that places at its center the problem of slavery.

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...

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Jason Haslam and Julia Wright.CAPTIVATING SUBJECTS: WRITING CONFINEMENT, CITIZENSHIP, AND NATIONHOOD IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Reviewed by: Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century Sean Grass (bio) Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Jason Haslam and Julia Wright; pp. viii + 270. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005, $55.00 Can, $55.00. For those who see more critical possibilities in Victorian prison narratives than those we typically associate with Michel Foucault, Captivating Subjects will come as a welcome relief. It is not Foucault's fault, of course, that some Victorianists have reduced the complexities of Discipline and Punish (1977) to simpler worries over detective work or omniscient narration. But the fact remains that we have often neglected the prison's broader cultural and narrative significations, especially in its relation to first-person writing during the nineteenth century and textual representations of Victorian subjects. As Jason Haslam and Julia Wright remark in their introduction, they intend "to add to recent calls to recognize the social and cultural centrality—and exemplarity—of captives" to the formation of nineteenth-century national, sexual, and racial identities and, in a broader sense, to the rise of the novel (4). As they claim in their first sentence, our long preoccupation with Foucault "has tended to limit [studies of the prison] to the specific practices of institutionalized imprisonment" (3), which was only one kind of captivity present in nineteenth-century social and textual landscapes. Slavery, transportation, torture, kidnapping, and serfdom all contributed to nineteenth-century conceptions of individual and national identities that were conceived almost inevitably along economic and racial lines. Dividing eight essays into three sections devoted to imprisoned subjects, class and nation, and racial otherness in nineteenth-century captivity narratives, Haslam and Wright attempt to remedy such omissions. They succeed and in the process revise our understanding of the textual and cultural implications of nineteenth-century confinement. Six of the eight essays in Captivating Subjects address narratives written in England between 1780 and 1920, and those by Frank Lauterbach, Monika Fludernik, and Christine Marlin deal with specifically Victorian instances of captivity. As Lauterbach writes, the [End Page 364] tendency "has been to view the effect of prisons on inmates" instead of regarding the prison as primarily classificatory, "a means of social identification rather than personal subjection" (114). Like American slave narratives, Victorian prison narratives do more—or at least other—than shed documentary light on the horrors of captivity, for they reveal above all the strategies by which captive subjects accounted for experiences of convicthood that always already belonged to a larger system of cultural meaning. For Victorians, as Lauterbach and Fludernik show, prisons signified the worst elements of English society: drunkards, vagrants, swindlers, hardened ruffians, and habitual thieves. As a consequence, even when captive subjects exposed the brutalities of the prison, they did so by defining themselves against other inmates; in doing so, they drew from and reinforced contemporary notions of Victorian confinement. By showing these tendencies in specific Victorian prison narratives, Lauterbach and Fludernik argue persuasively that captivity narratives tended to harden class, ethnic, and other divisions in Victorian England. Marlin's account of prison administrator and sometime author Major Arthur Griffiths reminds us that not all Victorian writers were as hysterical as Charles Reade or as dogmatic as Charles Dickens when writing about the secrets of the Victorian prison. These three essays are exceptionally useful for a specialist in Victorian literature. But scholars of nineteenth-century British, American, and continental literatures will benefit from reading the volume in its entirety. Other chapters include John MacKay's on Russian serf narratives; Tess Chakkalakal's on The Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789); Wright's on Romantic-era Irish nationalism and political prisoners; and Jennifer Costello Brezina's on American captives of Barbary pirates during the late 1700s. These essays are generally strong—especially Brezina's, which gives an excellent account of the way that American captivity narratives forged national identity and cultural cohesion by inculcating collective fear of and antipathy toward the racial and religious others of Africa's Barbary coast. As Wright puts it, writing of Charles Hamilton Teeling's Personal Narrative of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (1828), such captivity narratives helped to...

Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century Sean Grass (bio) Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Jason Haslam and Julia Wright; pp. viii + 270. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005, $55.00 Can, $55.00. For those who see more critical possibilities in Victorian prison narratives than those we typically associate with Michel Foucault, Captivating Subjects will come as a welcome relief. It is not Foucault's fault, of course, that some Victorianists have reduced the complexities of Discipline and Punish (1977) to simpler worries over detective work or omniscient narration. But the fact remains that we have often neglected the prison's broader cultural and narrative significations, especially in its relation to first-person writing during the nineteenth century and textual representations of Victorian subjects. As Jason Haslam and Julia Wright remark in their introduction, they intend "to add to recent calls to recognize the social and cultural centrality—and exemplarity—of captives" to the formation of nineteenth-century national, sexual, and racial identities and, in a broader sense, to the rise of the novel (4). As they claim in their first sentence, our long preoccupation with Foucault "has tended to limit [studies of the prison] to the specific practices of institutionalized imprisonment" (3), which was only one kind of captivity present in nineteenth-century social and textual landscapes. Slavery, transportation, torture, kidnapping, and serfdom all contributed to nineteenth-century conceptions of individual and national identities that were conceived almost inevitably along economic and racial lines. Dividing eight essays into three sections devoted to imprisoned subjects, class and nation, and racial otherness in nineteenth-century captivity narratives, Haslam and Wright attempt to remedy such omissions. They succeed and in the process revise our understanding of the textual and cultural implications of nineteenth-century confinement. Six of the eight essays in Captivating Subjects address narratives written in England between 1780 and 1920, and those by Frank Lauterbach, Monika Fludernik, and Christine Marlin deal with specifically Victorian instances of captivity. As Lauterbach writes, the [End Page 364] tendency "has been to view the effect of prisons on inmates" instead of regarding the prison as primarily classificatory, "a means of social identification rather than personal subjection" (114). Like American slave narratives, Victorian prison narratives do more—or at least other—than shed documentary light on the horrors of captivity, for they reveal above all the strategies by which captive subjects accounted for experiences of convicthood that always already belonged to a larger system of cultural meaning. For Victorians, as Lauterbach and Fludernik show, prisons signified the worst elements of English society: drunkards, vagrants, swindlers, hardened ruffians, and habitual thieves. As a consequence, even when captive subjects exposed the brutalities of the prison, they did so by defining themselves against other inmates; in doing so, they drew from and reinforced contemporary notions of Victorian confinement. By showing these tendencies in specific Victorian prison narratives, Lauterbach and Fludernik argue persuasively that captivity narratives tended to harden class, ethnic, and other divisions in Victorian England. Marlin's account of prison administrator and sometime author Major Arthur Griffiths reminds us that not all Victorian writers were as hysterical as Charles Reade or as dogmatic as Charles Dickens when writing about the secrets of the Victorian prison. These three essays are exceptionally useful for a specialist in Victorian literature. But scholars of nineteenth-century British, American, and continental literatures will benefit from reading the volume in its entirety. Other chapters include John MacKay's on Russian serf narratives; Tess Chakkalakal's on The Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789); Wright's on Romantic-era Irish nationalism and political prisoners; and Jennifer Costello Brezina's on American captives of Barbary pirates during the late 1700s. These essays are generally strong—especially Brezina's, which gives an excellent account of the way that American captivity narratives forged national identity and cultural cohesion by inculcating collective fear of and antipathy toward the racial and religious others of Africa's Barbary coast. As Wright puts it, writing of Charles Hamilton Teeling's Personal Narrative of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (1828), such captivity narratives helped to...

Literature and film: a guide to the theory and practice of film adaptation

List of Illustrations. Notes on Contributors. Preface. Acknowledgments. Introductory Essay: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation: Robert Stam. 1. Improvements and Reparations at Mansfield Park: Tim Watson (Princeton University). 2. Keeping the Carcass in Motion: Adaptation and Transmutations of the National in The Last of the Mohicans: Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (California State University, Channel Islands). 3. The Discreet Charm of the Leisure Class: Terence Daviesa s The House of Mirth: Richard Porton (Cineaste magazine). 4. In Search of Adaptation: Proust and Film: Melissa Anderson (CUNY Graduate Center). 5. The Grapes of Wrath: Thematic Emphasis through Visual Style: Vivian C. Sobchack (UCLA). 6. Cape Fear and Trembling: Familial Dread: Kirsten Thompson (Wayne State University). 7. The Carnival of Repression: German Left Wing Politics and The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum: Alexandra Seibel (New York University). 8. Serial Time: Bluebeard in Stepford: Bliss Cua Lim (University of California, Irvine). 9. Boyz 'N the Hood Chronotope: Spike Lee, Richard Price, and the Changing Authorship of Clockers: Paula J. Massood (Brooklyn College, CUNY). 10. Defusing The English Patient: Patrick Deer (New York University). 11. Carnivals and Goldfish: History and Crisis in The Butcher Boy: Jessica Scarlata (New York University). 12. Mild Revisionism, Failed Revolts: Esquivela s and Araua s Like Water for Chocolate, A Retrospective View: Dianna C. Niebylski (University of Kentucky). 13. Beloved: The Adaptation of an American Slave Narrative: Mia Mask (New York University). 14. Oral Traditions, Literature and Cinema in Africa: Mbye Cham (Howard University). 15. Memory and History in the Politics of Adaptation: Revisiting the Partition of India in Tamas: Ranjani Mazundar (Jamia Millia Islamia). 16. The Written Scene: Writers as Figures of Cinematic Redemption: Paul Arthur (Montclair State University). Index

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...

The Technique of Sorrow: Patrick MacGill and the American Slave Narrative

It is only fitting, in the heyday of the Celtic Tiger, that Ireland and its diaspora have been lionized. Television documentaries have been busy exhuming the contributions of the Irish to American culture, while booksellers' shelves bulge with offerings of Irish ascendancy. The Irish now enjoy the sympathetic advan tages of the underdog, as their popularly perceived winsomeness attests, Irish suffering underscores Irish nobility and so there has been an outpouring of novels documenting Irish hardship, a necessary complement to books of praise?thus the ubiquitous Angela's Ashes and a number of derivative novels. Australian-born Thomas Kennealy went back to his Irish roots and returned with The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World (1999), a fitting annunciation of the new view of the Irish. But it was not always so. The days when Irish identity carried the stigma of racial inferiority lie within living memory. In an era when the social construc tion of race is an established principle, as historian Ira Berlin would have it, the Irish have been rediscovered in a different fight. In the American labor hierar chy, Irish immigrants shared common cause with blacks until they achieved full racial assimilation, as Noel Ignatiev claims in How the Irish Became White (1995), Ignatiev's introduction asserts that

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.'