Antebellum Slave Narratives 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.

Metanarratives of Slavery

I had to see. I needed to see how I had been taught to see. I decided to go back. —Robin Coste Lewis (“Epilogue” 146) In the late 1980s, Hortense J. Spillers observed that slavery had become “primarily discursive” (29)—known not through any sort of direct knowledge but through the “cultural units” of the stories that have attempted to describe the institution (32). Those units, as Spillers would demonstrate in her analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe, were heavily influenced by the white-supremacist imagination. Most recorded testimony from enslaved people has been mediated by the white gaze, either through the expectations of the white abolitionists who published antebellum slave narratives or the primarily white interviewers of the Federal Writers’ Project’s Slave Narrative Collection.1 Meanwhile, US popular culture has been dominated by sensational white-authored depictions of slavery, from blackface minstrelsy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1936). Mirroring the violence of official archives (Hartman, “Venus” 10), the resulting gaps and distortions in the popular imagination pose a challenge to writers and artists who wish to meaningfully grapple with enslavement. Some contemporary narratives of slavery have sought to redress the impact of white perspectives: The most famous example is Beloved (1987), which Toni Morrison has described as her attempt to “fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left” (“Site” 113) as a result of their “shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it” (110). Many contemporary depictions of slavery take a different approach, however. Instead of restoring what is missing in the record and reversing the historic influence of white expectations, these works seek to inhabit and examine that influence, creating frankly double-visioned art and literature.

Destroyed Documents and Racial Vulnerability in the Literature of Slavery’s Legal Afterlife

AbstractThis article argues that Black writers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a critical knowledge of how legal documentation functions to produce racialized structures of power and Black vulnerability at law. In literature that reckons with slavery’s legal afterlife, particularly antebellum slave narratives, post-Reconstruction novels, and neo-slave narratives, Black authors frequently represent legal documents as pivotal to legal personhood and theorize how these documents produce vulnerability to violence and dispossession. The adversarial relationship with contract law that Black people have experienced throughout US history has uniquely positioned Black writers to produce a critical knowledge of law’s structures of power. These writers reveal the mechanisms by which legal authorities manipulated the legal contracts that as texts stipulated protections for Black subjects yet in practice failed to accomplish those protections when white legal authorities refused to carry them out. Building on critical race theory and law and literature scholarship, this article proposes a heightened awareness for how race interacts with legal procedure, particularly during the material processes involved in a document’s creation and execution. Focusing on law’s materiality, this article uncovers an understudied literary vein in which Black authors represent documents as materially fragile and vulnerable to destruction in order to theorize law as a series of practices enacted by persons inhabiting bodies marked by race.

“My Copy-Book was the Board Fence, Brick Wall, and Pavement”: Material Texts in Antebellum Slave Narratives

Les spécialistes d’histoire et de littérature africaine-américaine ont longuement commenté les scènes d’apprentissage de la lecture et de l’écriture qu’on trouve dans les récits d’esclaves africains-américains, en mettant l’accent sur leur dimension émancipatrice. Ils ont prêté moins d’attention à la matérialité même de l’écrit dans ces récits. On trouve dans les récits d’esclaves une variété étonnante de documents écrits, manuscrits aussi bien qu’imprimés, produits ou non par les esclaves : lettres, billets griffonnés, papiers d’identité, laissez-passer, cahiers d’écolier, journaux, livres, etc. Les esclaves évoluent dans un monde de textes, avec lesquels ils interagissent de multiples manières. Ces textes sont produits et déchiffrés, mais aussi détournés, envoyés par la poste, détruits, voire ingérés, y compris par des hommes et des femmes incapables de les lire. Quels écrits les esclaves mobilisent-ils dans leur lutte pour l’émancipation ? Comment les mobilisent-ils ? Quel est leur rapport à l’écrit et qu’en reste-t-il une fois la liberté obtenue ? Telles sont les questions auxquelles cet article tente de répondre, à partir de l’étude de quelques récits publiés entre 1845 et 1861.

The Slave Ship as the Chronotope of the Black Atlantic: Interaction between Space and Time as Reflected in the Antebellum Slave Narrative

The Slave Ship as the Chronotope of the Black Atlantic: Interaction between Space and Time as Reflected in the Antebellum Slave Narrative

Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 by William L. Andrews

Reviewed by: Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 by William L. Andrews Joycelyn K. Moody (bio) Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 William L. Andrews Oxford University Press, 2019, 389 pp. ISBN 9780190908386, $42.95 hardcover. In "Equal in Paris" (1955), an essay collected in his Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin describes wading through "a sea of acquaintances" in the City of Lights, where he "knew almost no one" (103). He categorizes the persons he did know (or more precisely, knew of), inscribing a hierarchy: Many people were eliminated from my orbit by virtue of the fact that they had more money than I did, which placed me, in my own eyes, in the humiliating role of a free-loader; and other people were eliminated by virtue of the fact that they enjoyed their poverty, shrilly insisting that this wretched round of hotel rooms, bad food, humiliating concierges, and unpaid bills was the Great Adventure. It couldn't, however, for me, end soon enough, this Great Adventure. . . . (103) Before his 1987 death in Saint Paul de Vence, Baldwin could count among his Great Adventures a terrifying stint in a Parisian jail one Christmas season. In "Equal in Paris," he imagines social groupings—tiers of persons in Paris that included "a whole body of people for whom crime was the only possible career" (114). That December, Baldwin raged at being bound among men he deemed "the very scrapings off the Paris streets" (109) and entirely unlike himself. Moreover, while "that evening in the commissariat [he] was not a despised black man," as he would have been regarded in his native New York, imprisoned in Paris he is instead an "ironical Américain" (107). Jailed among "old, old men. . . . And men not so old. . . . And young men. . . . And North Africans, old and young," Baldwin grows increasingly disconcerted, such that "I was unable to accept my imprisonment as a fact, even a temporary fact. I could not . . . accept my present companions as my companions. And they, of course, felt this and put it down, with perfect justice, to the fact that I was an American" (111). His rising hysteria notwithstanding, Baldwin perceives, "The question thrusting up from the bottom of my mind was not what I was, but who. And this question, since a what can get by with skill but a who demands resources, was my first real [End Page 363] intimation of what humility must mean" (107). Baldwin's essay ends with his freedom regained when an acquitted French intermediary recruits another American—an attorney who had once employed Baldwin—to "appear as a character witness" and convince the trial judges that Baldwin's case deserved a merry dismissal, for like them, he was at "a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real" (113, 115, 116). There is no mention of James Baldwin and none of Paris in Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865, but I thought repeatedly of "Equal in Paris" while reading William L. Andrews's monumental study of the ways formerly enslaved authors of antebellum slave narratives inscribed hierarchies among enslaved Black people and white Americans approximately 100 years before Baldwin was jailed in Paris. For just as the jailed Baldwin declares himself "American," and thus due certain privileges denied the French criminal element he considers beneath him, the formerly enslaved authors Andrews examines identify and insinuate echelons within the slaveocracy that position slave entitlement as an advantage they have managed to seize. As Andrews asserts, while class was by no means a term that had a set definition or application for African American writers up to 1865, a significant group of mid-century slave narrators often invoked terms suggestive of class as well as status to comment on social and economic hierarchies among the enslaved as well as whites in the antebellum South. (38) As the preeminent scholar of North American slavery and Southern literature for the past fifty years and the founding curator of the digital database Documenting...

A representação do sujeito diaspórico em O livro dos negros, de Lawrence Hill

As neonarrativas de escravidão surgiram no cenário literário norte-americano com a publicação de Jubilee, de Margaret Walker (1966), porém só tiveram efetivo reconhecimento nos anos oitenta, com o lançamento de Beloved, de Toni Morrison (1987). Concebidas como “romances contemporâneos que assumem a forma, as convenções e a voz narrativa em primeira pessoa das narrativas de escravos produzidas antes da Guerra Civil” (RUSHDY, 1997), foram, aos poucos, se distanciando desse modelo e hoje podem ser consideradas transnacionais e globais, bem como dialógicas, polifônicas e transgenéricas, segundo Judith Misrahi-Barak (2014). Nessa perspectiva e com o suporte teórico dos Estudos Culturais e do conceito pós-moderno de metaficção historiográfica, este trabalho propõe a análise da representação do sujeito diaspórico em O livro dos negros, do canadense Lawrence Hill (2014), que tem por temática a trajetória de escravos durante a vigência do sistema escravagista. Ao deslocar a voz narrativa para o oprimido, Hill desafia o discurso da História, escovando-a a contrapelo.

Conjure Women, Root Men, and Normative Visions of Freedom in Antebellum Slave Narratives

Conjure Women, Root Men, and Normative Visions of Freedom in Antebellum Slave Narratives

« Neither be , nor own , a slave ! »

This essay focuses on the reception of antebellum slave narratives. While recognizing that slave narratives were predominantly directed toward a white middle-class northern audience, I argue that their intended and actual readership included other groups such as Southerners, African Americans, and children. Drawing on a variety of primary sources I study some of the ways these groups may have read and understood the narratives.

The Restored Literary Behaviors of Neo-Slave Narratives: Troubling the Ethics of Witnessing in the Excessive Present

The Restored Literary Behaviors of Neo-Slave NarrativesTroubling the Ethics of Witnessing in the Excessive Present Jesse A. Goldberg (bio) Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. —Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl When I'm telling you something don't you ever ask if I'm lying. Because they didn't want to leave no evidence of what they done—so it couldn't be used against them. And I'm leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And you children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up. —Gayl Jones, Corregidora Early in Gayl Jones's 1975 novel Corregidora, the protagonist Ursa remembers her Great Gram's charge to her descendants, a charge which is instructional for reading the neo-slave narrative genre. Great Gram signifies on the convention by which antebellum slave narratives' authors (and those who wrote their paratextual authenticating documents) had to (re)assert throughout their writing that they were not lying. Such (re)assertions both reinscribed and sought to defy the charge that the enslaved subject could not be trusted to bear witness to truth, whether in a court of law or otherwise.1 Great Gram's slap and assertion trans/re-figures Harriet Jacobs's (et al.) insistence on veracity from a plea for readers' sympathy and trust to an attempt to, as Christina Sharpe emphasizes, "make redress to the law itself" (Monstrous Intimacies 40). Insofar as Great Gram's slap and assertion both repeat and revise the antebellum slave narrative's insistence on truth and call forward in time to a deferred moment of future justice, they illustrate a model for what I call restored literary behaviors. Restored literary behaviors trouble the linear temporality and "social logic" of rupture which are implicitly present in the neo in the phrase neo-slave narrative and explicitly appealed to in Ashraf Rushdy's insistence on figuring the Black Power movement not only as a moment of inspiration, but as a moment of "origin" for the form itself in his seminal 1999 book, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Rather than reading neo-slave narratives as encompassing a genre with a defined moment of origin, as Rushdy does, I argue through a close reading of Sherley Anne Williams's 1986 novel Dessa Rose and Toni Morrison's 2008 novel A Mercy that neo-slave narratives embed the past, present, and future together in an "excessive present" within their texts and thus enact both [End Page 57] continuity and rupture through literary acts which reach back in time in order to call into the future through engaging with and making demands on the immediately present readers to bear the burden of witnessing. And then, given the familiarity of the invocation of "witnessing" as an ethical demand in African Americanist literary studies, I also, through Fred D'Aguiar's 1997 novel Feeding the Ghosts, gesture towards the limits of witnessing as an end in itself, such that "making demands" in this sense denotes witnessing as a means, not an end, of ethics. In other words, witnessing is not the point, but rather the actions that follow from witnessing are. Of course, the notion of texts making demands on their own readers is a signal attribute of the nineteenth-century slave narrative. While the specific techniques used by authors of slave narratives vary too much to suggest uniformity in mode of appeal, it is clear that slave narratives were aimed towards abolition and therefore explicitly addressed readers through the use of second-person interpellation, thus creating a dialogue between narrator and reader. To use Toni Morrison's words: "Whatever the style and circumstances of the narratives, they were written to say principally two things. One: 'This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but that also represents the race.' Two: 'I write this text to persuade other people—you, the reader, who is probably not black—that we are human beings worthy of God's grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery'" ("The Site of Memory" 66...

The Power of the Neo-Slave Narrative Genre

The Power of the Neo-Slave Narrative Genre Joan Anim-Addo (bio) and Maria Helena Lima (bio) One of the many reasons and necessities for the mass movements of peoples, war leads them all. It is estimated that when the final numbers of the displaced come out—those running from persecution, conflict, and generalized violence in today's world (including refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons)—the number will far surpass sixty million. Sixty million. And half of all refugees are children. I don't know the number of the dead. —Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others Do the slave narratives in fact represent a distinct literary genre? If not, why not? If so, what are its distinguishing characteristics? Are these characteristics relatively uniform throughout its history? What are the sources of variation and change? Is change great or small during that history? Are the narratives a popular or an elite literary form? Do they represent a species of autobiography? Why (and how) do they begin? Why (and how) do they come to an end? Such questions converge in the cluster of meanings implicit in the term authority: the condition of begetting, beginning, continuing, and controlling a written text. In Hegelian terms, the issues are parentage, propriety, property, and possession. —John Sekora, "Black Message/White Envelope" Since the last decades of the twentieth century, writers across the Black Atlantic have attempted to recover elements of the narrative structure and thematic configuration of slave narratives. The main reasons for this seemingly widespread desire to rewrite a genre that officially lost its usefulness with the abolition of slavery are the will to re-affirm the historical value of the original slave narrative and to reclaim the humanity of the enslaved by (re)imagining their subjectivity. While the initial questions John Sekora asks of antebellum slave narratives (our second epigraph) can be starting points in the exploration of almost any literary genre, he identifies the issues of authority and property as applying mostly to the writing that had freedom as its immediate telos. Indeed, slave narrators often took great liberties in the telling of their presumably distinct and peculiar stories of bondage and escape, shaping their narratives in such a manner as to produce the greatest political and emotional effect. Even if some of the antebellum narrators did not own their own bodies, they managed to have some authority in constructing the version of their lives they wished known. Because of such silences in slave narratives due to authorial [End Page 3] compromises to white audiences and to self-masking from a painful past, the neo-slave narrative works as "a kind of literary archeology," as Toni Morrison describes it, a need to access the interior life of slaves via her imagination to bear witness to "the interior life of people who didn't write [their history] (which doesn't mean that they didn't have it)" and to "fill in the blanks that the slave narrative left" ("Site of Memory" 192, 193). Writing about neo-slave narratives, Ashraf Rushdy defines such "palimpsest narratives" as fiction in which a contemporary African American character is "forced to adopt a bi-temporal perspective that shows the continuity and discontinuities from the period of slavery" (5). In these narratives, "the present is always written against a background where the past is erased but still legible" (Rushdy 8). The genre has been deployed to redress the gaps and misrepresentations of dominant history through narrative to fulfill what Clarisse Zimra describes as "the ethical imperative of inventing a past that would otherwise disappear" (60). These gaps and silences reflect the fact that part of the history of slavery is irretrievable. In such an approach to retelling history, one is forced to relive the past by becoming immersed in it. Rememory, as Morrison defines it, is an active process of reconstitution that involves passing on the story in such a way that it becomes real, embodied, lived through the storyteller's mediation. Attempting to differentiate the slave narrative from autobiography, James Olney identifies symbolic memory as the process by which people not only repeat their past experience but also reconstruct that experience, imagination becoming a necessary element of...

“Returning to Mississippi by Choice”: Autobiographical Self-Location and the Performance of Black Masculinity in James Meredith’s Three Years in Mississippi

JAMES H. WATKINS Berry College “Returning to Mississippi by Choice”: Autobiographical Self-Location and the Performance of Black Masculinity in James Meredith’s Three Years in Mississippi IN THE OPENING CHAPTER OF HIS MEMOIR THREE YEARS IN MISSISSIPPI (1966), James Meredith describes the rural homeplace in Attala County, Mississippi, where he grew up as a child, conflating it with the strong patriarchalfigure of his father, Moses “Cap” Meredith, to whom thebook is dedicated. “If anyone was a king in his own domain,” Meredith observes, “it was Cap. It was as if our eighty-four acres constituted a sovereign state and we neither recognized nor had any diplomatic relations with our neighboring states” (19). Casting the farm as an isolated oasis of African American dignity and self-respect surrounded by a desert of white southern racism, Meredith positions it not only as a kind of psychic destination—the locus of his personal mythology of autonomous individualism—but also as validation of his decision to return from military service abroad to the heart of the Jim Crow South after a ten-year absence, a return that was occasioned by his intention to apply for admission to the all-white University of Mississippi: “As I remembered my old home, I was certain that I was returning to Mississippi by choice” (20). In an act of autobiographical self-location, the expatriate author uses his memoir to stake a claim to his home state, but as his emphasis on the sovereignty of Cap Meredith’s farm suggests, that gesture involves an identification not only with the rural over the urban, but with autonomy over community. In turn, Meredith’s deployment of autonomous individualism over more relational and collective forms of subjectivity ultimately stresses exceptional over representative selfhood. As a result, Three Years in Mississippi fails to conform to a pattern identified by Margo V. Perkins, in which autobiographies by civil rights and Black Power activists, like those by former enslaved people in the previous century and contemporary social 254 James H. Watkins justice activists, “tend to subordinate the uniqueness of [the author’s] own experience to the way in which it reflects the shared reality of many” (26). While Meredith’s tendency to emphasize his individual agency at the expense of the story of the larger struggle undermines some of the testimonial power specific to autobiography, it nevertheless sheds valuable light on the problematic construction of African American masculinity during this pivotal point in the struggle for racial equality in the South.1 By the time Meredith finished writing Three Years in Mississippi, he had already earned his place in history as the first openly African American student to attend and graduate from the University of Mississippi.2 To accomplish this feat he had withstood death threats for two years during the period of legal challenges to the state of Mississippi. When he finally matriculated into the school on September 30, 1962, under the protection of a force of federal Marshals, a three-day riot ensued, resulting in the deaths of two innocent bystanders and scores of injuries. In order to secure his personal safety, National Guard troops were deployed throughout Meredith’s entire career at Ole Miss, during which time he claims he was nevertheless harassed and subjected to profanity from fellow students on a daily basis. “I had been at the university ten months,” he writes, “before I ever descended the fifteen or twenty steps [of his dormitory building] without someone calling me nigger” (274). Many familiar with Meredith’s successful campaign to desegregate Ole Miss also know that three years after his graduation he 1 Although memoirs and autobiographies are fictions in the sense that they contain the individual author’s subjective recollection of past experiences, they nevertheless are accordedaspecialrepresentationalauthoritynotgiventoimaginativeliterature.Lejeune argues that when the name of the author, protagonist, and narrator align, a “pact” between author and reader is established in which truth claims are accorded a different form of authority than is found in fiction (13-15, 21). Since the antebellum slave narrative, members of marginalized groups have used the representational authority of the first-person singular to challenge official histories and witness for social justice, but that authority is...

Cheap Editions, Little Books, and Handsome Duodecimos: A Book History Approach to Antebellum Slave Narratives

In this essay I look at three canonical antebellum slave narratives from a book-historical perspective – the narratives of James Williams (1838), Frederick Douglass (1845) and Solomon Northup (1853) – to show that despite similarities in terms of content, these works differed greatly in both formal and cultural terms. While Narrative of James Williams was published as a piece of antislavery propaganda and wholly embedded in abolitionist discourse, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was a much more personal literary endeavor which involved Douglass himself as well as informal abolitionist networks. Released a year after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the context of the “Uncle Tom mania” of the early 1850s, Twelve Years a Slave was, to a large extent, a commercial venture that capitalized on the latest literary trend. Each of these three narratives, therefore, occupied a different space in antebellum print culture. By examining how these texts were published and circulated, I show that generalizations about antebellum slave narratives – slave narratives as bestsellers, as directed toward a Northern white audience, as a distinct genre recognizable by all – distort the complex history of this literary tradition. I finally argue that acknowledging the heterogeneous nature of what we usually perceive as a homogeneous whole gives us a better sense of how these texts might have been variously received and consumed in the decades preceding the Civil War.

African Atrocity, American Humanity: Slavery and Its Transnational Afterlives

This essay argues that contemporary American conceptions of African atrocity are haunted by the specter of slavery, which structures the ways in which a relation between the United States and Africa is imagined. Francis Bok’s memoir, Escape from Slavery (2003), and Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What (2006) reveal the stakes of this literary haunting, where the canonical Atlantic genre of the antebellum slave narrative is called into play to narrate contemporary Sudanese stories, thus refashioning the politics of race and diaspora for a neoliberal age. Reading for the formal and ideological exchanges between subject, author, and amanuensis, the essay shows how the discourse of modern slavery relies on sentimental humanism to generate a seemingly new way for Americans to imagine themselves as global citizens, constituting themselves as global via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity.

Frances Smith Foster: A Select Bibliography

In this final tribute, we offer a sampling of Frances Smith Foster's published work. Because the SSAWW Lifetime Achievement Medal recognizes the recipient's support of and impact upon the work of others as well as her own scholarly contributions, we have also included a short selection of volumes published by former students of Foster whose work she advised or supervised. BOOKS AUTHORED 'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Teaching with The Norton Anthology of African American Literature: A Guide for Instructors. New York: Norton, 1997. With Helen R. Houston. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives. Westport: Greenwood, 1979; znd ed. Madison: U of Wisconsin P. 1994. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. BOOKS EDITED Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies. New York: Feminist, 2010. Ed. with Stanlie M. James and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Love and Marriage in African America: An Anthology. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2007. La Familia en Africa y la Diaspora Africana: Estudio Multidisciplinar/Family in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Salamanca: Almar-Anglistica, 2004. Ed. with Olga Barrios. Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley. Chicago: R. R. Donnelley, 1998; Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. The Concise Oxford Companion to African American New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Ed. with William L. Andrews and Trudier Harris. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2001. Ed. with Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American New York: Norton, 1997. Ed. with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nellie Y. McKay, et al; 2nd ed., 2004; 3rd ed. in press. The Oxford Companion to African American New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Ed. with William L. Andrews and Trudier Harris. Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W Harper. Boston: Beacon, 1994; 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon, 1995. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. New York: Feminist, 1990. ESSAYS Unraveling the Strands. Part of Hidden in Plain Sight: Colloquy with Annette Gordon-Reed on The Hemingses of Monticello. American Literature 47.2 (2012): 449-51. Anyway, We Certainly Don't Want to Be Lumped in with Black Studies!' True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School. Ed. Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 2011. 219-34. Genealogies of Our Concerns, (African) American Print Culture, and Transcending Tough Times. American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 368-80. Looking Back Is Tricky Business ...) Narrative 18.1 (2010): 19-28. Mammy's Daughters; Or, the DNA of a Feminist Sexual Ethics. Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies. Ed. Bernadette J. Brooten. New York: Palgrave, 2010. 267-86. Ports of Call, Pulpits of Consultation: Rethinking the Origins of African American Literature. A Companion to African American Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 45-58. With Kim D. Green. Race and Literary Politics. A Companion to American Literature and Culture. Ed. Paul Lauter. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 316-27. With Cassandra Jackson. Early African American Women's Literature. The Cambridge Guide to African American Women's Ed. Angclyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009, 15-31. With LaRose Davis. Afterwords; Or, Whistling 'Dixie' on the Front Porch of My Southern Home. Southern Quarterly 45. …

Making Waves on the Black Atlantic: The Case of John Anderson

The once celebrated, now neglected case of John Anderson reveals a rare moment of conflict between two modes of black publicity in Anglo-American law and letters on the eve of emancipation. As a fugitive from justice as well as from service, Anderson marked a disruption in the legal–literary continuum linking the colonial gallows tradition to the antebellum slave narrative. Eluding the due process that affirmed the criminous slave's legal personhood, Anderson ultimately could not perform the civic eligibility modelled by other internationally famous former fugitives such as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

“Verticality Is Such a Risky Enterprise”: The Literary and Paraliterary Antecedents of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist

Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999) tells the story of a black female elevator inspector who “intuits” the machines' safety. The protagonist searches for both those responsible for the apparent sabotage of an elevator for which she was responsible and the blueprints for “the Black Box,” the perfect elevator. The novel announces its participation in the tradition of African American literature by performing numerous standard tropes; it responds to the call of antebellum slave narratives by linking literacy and freedom and addresses topics such as double consciousness, invisibility, passing, and racial uplift. The ambiguity of its setting, which is congruent with its assertion of the inherent ambiguities of language and of individual and generic identities, marks The Intuitionist as an example of “postmodern” fiction. An analysis of the novel's allusions to the paraliterary genres of detective fiction and comic books reveals how its race consciousness and postmodernism inform each other. Samuel R. Delany theorizes paraliterature as the discursive other against which “literature” is defined. The Intuitionist takes paraliterature seriously so as to (1) pay homage to Edgar Allan Poe and participate in recent critical approaches to the father of detective fiction that read him in the context of the racial discourse of his day, and (2) critique the hierarchical thinking that both banishes comics to the realm of the “subliterary” and sustains racist ideology. In this sense, The Intuitionist reveals verticality to be “a risky enterprise.”

Portraits of Piety

This paper first examines the use of authenticating devices in the antebellum slave narratives and then goes on to analyze how the these authorial strategies are carried over from African-American autobiography into two fictionalized autobiographies from the 1850s. In particular, the paper argues for including portrayals of black religious belief as one of the many generic strategies used by antebellum slave narrators to convince their potentially skeptical audience that they were reading "the real thing." In investigating how authenticating strategies are incorporated into Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) and Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (1855-61?), the relative artistic success of the two writers is evaluated and the implications of borrowing techniques from autobiography for fiction discussed. By looking at texts from the 1850s, a decade when the slave narrative reached its height in popularity and the first fictional works in African-American literature were being composed, a glimpse is gained into a transitional moment in black writing.

Reading Religion in African American Narratives

Reading Religion in African American Narratives Ethel Young-Minor (bio) Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Slave Narrative. By Yolanda Pierce. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005. 151 pp. $59.95 cloth. Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction. By James W. Coleman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. 252 pp. $42.95 cloth. The first decade of twenty-first century literary analysis introduces two arresting treatments of how religious discourse informs the African American narrative tradition: Hell Without Fires by Yolanda Pierce and Faithful Vision by James Coleman. Pierce’s work considers the spiritual narratives of five African Americans: George White (1810), John Jea (circa 1811), Solomon Bayley (1825), Zilpha Elaw (1845), and David Smith (1822). The book’s central premise is that antebellum African American writers understand hell as two distinct concepts; the spiritual hell of biblical narratives and the earthly hell blacks of this milieu experienced through “daily physical and psychological suffering.” Pierce argues that as antebellum writers became conscious of both realms of hell, and subsequently located ways to deflate the power of earthly hell, they became both God-possessed and self-possessed. They were then equipped to enact communal change. Each chapter provides interesting history and information about these often overlooked, yet important writers. Pierce’s chief contributions to [End Page 155] the scholarship of antebellum literature, however, are found in her novel critiques of George White and Solomon Bayley. While many critics have customarily dismissed White’s connection to the black community because of his membership in a majority-white denomination, Pierce dismantles this notion. She calls attention to autobiographical information and radical movements in White’s sermons that display a desire to speak back to white authority and to create a self-possessed “black” identity in a world that sought to deny him that right. The chapter centered on Solomon Bayley, like other portions of Pierce’s work, often becomes heavy-handed in its offering of summary; however, she eventually uses this summary to undergird her argument that Bayley offers a revolutionary and bold stance against American racism. She emboldens his stance by suggesting, “Bayley voices in his narrative what [Phillis] Wheatley is unwilling or unable to address in her poetry; the fact that the Negro in America could and would never be entirely free.” In précis, Pierce’s exploration of rarely treated narratives adds an integral layer to scholarly dialogues about intersections of race and religion in black narratives. The book’s proposition that the Christian concept of hell did more than terrorize enslaved blacks opens important new pathways for examining Christianity as a positive wellspring in the construction of early black American identity. James Coleman’s Faithful Vision is a masterful consideration of how African American faith systems influence the writings of African Americans. Coleman defines African American “Faithful Vision” as a complex network of supernatural beliefs that has real implications in the everyday lives of African Americans. In Coleman’s designations, Faithful Vision contains diverse spiritual and intellectual traditions. Even as the Judeo- Christian Bible rests in the center of the tradition, Coleman believes that interpretations of the Bible can be influenced by myriad traditions, among them naturalism, postmodernism, womanism, and hoodoo/voodoo (Coleman uses the terms with a slash so my usage here reflects his own). Coleman puts forward Faithful Vision as a critical component of black cultural efforts to place their daily struggles in historical context; as such, it informs a cultural ethos that suggests that no matter how arduous things appear in the immediate reality, black Americans should remember that God “didn’t bring us this far to leave us.” Coleman successfully intermingles brief personal narrations of Faithful Vision with intense critiques of how African American writers approach Faithful Vision through literary treatments in the latter half of the twentieth century. The first two chapters brilliantly construct [End Page 156] Coleman’s frame of Faithful Vision as a lens that grows out of the cultural tradition that writers themselves have established. He then expertly treats an imposing list of writers from the African American literary tradition, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Ellease Southerland...

‘How a Slave was Made a Man’: Negotiating Black Violence and Masculinity in Antebellum Slave Narratives

In the manner in which they portrayed black masculinity, fugitive slave autobiographies published in the 1840s represented a sharp break from abolitionist narratives produced during the previous decade. Unlike anti-slavery authors writing in the 1830s, slave narrators of the 1840s deliberately renounced any connection between black manhood and a willingness to commit horrific acts of retributive violence against whites. At the same time, fugitive slave authors insisted on the admirable manliness of the African American men they depicted, including themselves as the protagonists of their stories. The return that radical abolitionist authors made to a glorification of black violence in the 1850s marks the publication of slave narratives in the 1840s as an exceptional moment in the history of antislavery literature. The popular success of these narratives, contrasted with the unpopularity of the more violent antislavery texts of the 1830s and the 1850s, also reveals the fears of black violence that white Americans harboured throughout the antebellum period and fugitive slave authors' consciousness of those fears.