Slave Narratives Research Articles

Reclaiming Black (Female) Subjectivity and the Othered Gaze in Harriet's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Analyzing White Representation in the Black Imagination

This essay explores the representation of whiteness and the reclamation of black (female) subjectivity in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by a black female author during the antebellum period, Jacobs’ narrative offers a unique critique of the hegemonic power structures that defined her era. The essay examines how Jacobs uses her narrative to subvert the dominant racial and gender ideologies, presenting whiteness as the Other and reclaiming her identity and agency through the act of writing. By analyzing the text through the theoretical lenses of Slave Narrative, Feminist Discourse, and Otherism, this paper highlights the complex ways in which Jacobs negotiates her subjectivity in a society that systematically denies (her) black humanity.

“THE ACTUAL SCALE OF BREATHING”

Contemporary work in Black Studies reflects the urgency of integrating lived experience into scholarly work. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe employ autobiographical frames and anecdotes in their writing in order to legitimate historically undervalued forms of knowledge production, and, as Hartman writes, to “counter the violence of abstraction.” Despite the efficacy of this methodology, however, the move itself remains under-theorized, even as scholars advocate for the necessity of taking seriously the intellectual labor and output of Black female academics. “The Actual Scale of Breathing” examines the genealogy of Black feminist writers from slave narratives to the contemporary who find themselves in the impossible position of wanting to speak from experience but find the work of self-disclosure harmful. I argue that these writers innovate form to both refuse unearned access to interiority – specifically to white readers – while at the same time cultivating community through the incorporation of a polyphonic authority.

The Slave Narrative on Spanish Moors in the Maghrib

ABSTRACT In 1609 Philip III signed a decree to enforce the expulsion of Moriscos from Spain. This article examines the fate of the expelled Spanish Moriscos once they arrived in the Maghrib through the narrative of two Christian slaves. Examining unexplored Vatican and Spanish sources, this contribution reveals how the identity of the Spanish Moriscos continued to be questioned years after their expulsion. It retraces the sociopolitical effects of the expulsion of Spanish Moriscos showing how the sense of marginalization and displacement of the Moriscos followed them into the Maghrib, where they found themselves at the margin of society because their status as true Muslims continued to be doubted. The two Christian slaves noted the mistreatment of those called the “Taragins.” The poor treatment they received from the local Maghrebi because of their foreignness prolonged their longing for Spain for generations after their arrival in the Maghrib. The process of marginalization did not stop with their expulsion and can be perceived as one of the cultural legacies of the Spanish Empire.

Prospects for the Study of Harriet Jacobs

ABSTRACT Jean Fagan Yellin’s 1987 annotated edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, Written by Herself, documenting Jacobs as the author and the narrative as nonfiction, ushered in a wave of Jacobs scholarship. Yellin’s Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2003) and the two-volume Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (2008), along with criticism on Incidents in the context of sentimentalism and slave narratives, helped spur another generation of scholarship and popular interest in Jacobs. Jacobs is now found as a source in fields spanning from the expected literature and history to medicine, psychology, political theory, aging, girlhood, and religious studies. This survey of scholarship appearing after the publication of Papers highlights religion, health, biographical studies of Jacobs and her circle, and analysis of Jacobs in popular culture as areas of development and urges more engagement with the archival sources available for Jacobs’s life after the publication of Incidents.

Reclaiming History: The Role of Memory in Afro-American Literature

This research explores the pivotal role of memory in Afro-American literature, focusing on its multifaceted functions as a tool of resistance, cultural preservation, and historical reinterpretation. Memory in Afro-American literature emerges as a dynamic force that not only documents personal and collective experiences but also challenges dominant narratives of oppression and erasure. Through a nuanced examination of literary works spanning from slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass' "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" (1845) to contemporary novels like Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (1987), this study illuminates how memory serves as a means of reclaiming agency and identity amidst historical trauma.The research discusses critiques of relying on memory in literature, acknowledging concerns about subjectivity and historical accuracy. It argues that memory in Afro-American literature transcends mere recollection, offering profound insights into the complexities of African American experiences and histories. By exploring examples such as Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937) and James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" (1963), the study demonstrates how Afro-American authors use memory to confront systemic injustices, preserve cultural heritage, and inspire social activism.Ultimately, Afro-American literature's enduring legacy lies in its ability to reshape historical narratives through the transformative power of memory. By interrogating memory's intersections with literature and activism, this research invites readers to engage critically with the past and envision a future grounded in truth, empathy, and reconciliation. Through its exploration of memory's role in shaping identity, justice, and cultural resilience, Afro-American literature continues to provoke thought and inspire meaningful dialogue on the enduring legacies of slavery, segregation, and the ongoing quest for equality.

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

Teaching Black Diaspora Stories with Digital Archives in the Classroom

One of the prime difficulties in the current teaching environment is educating students to make use of research skills that teach them not only how to be good historians but also how to be critical thinkers who can engage and evaluate sources. This piece focuses on the use of well-managed digital archives, which provide students with a focused set of research materials that help build a foundational point of historical inquiry. In addition to discussing the pedagogical benefits of such research, emphasis is also placed on specific assignments centered on several online databases, including “The Land Act Legacy Project Collection” of the South African History Archive (SAHA), the African Activist Archive of Michigan State University, and the “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938” of the Library of Congress. If these current times have taught anything, it is that digital literacy and proper research methods are essential components in understanding information during times of political and cultural change. By engaging with the stories in these digital archives, students learn about the diversity of opinions and opportunities that defined these stories of the Black diaspora throughout the twentieth century and beyond.

Looking in the mirror held up by North Carolina slave narratives: White folks confronting the psychosocial legacy of slavery

AbstractU.S. citizens are debating whether slavery and white supremacy are core constituents of the United States, whether white children should be troubled by learning the brutalities of slavery and life under Jim Crow laws, and whether racial reparations are due to African Americans for the centuries of economic, political, and social oppression they have endured. While many white folks prefer to ignore or demean calls for reparations, others have turned to reparative genealogy. They are inquiring deeply into their ancestors' relationships to chattel slavery and white supremacy, committed to reckoning with their own and their ancestors' racial debts. They seek to develop what sociologist W. E. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” In order to protect themselves, African Americans had to try and see through the eyes of white people, as well as their own. But white folks too rarely attempt to see themselves through the eyes of Black people. During slavery, how were whites seen by Blacks? Philosopher George Yancy urges white people to engage in the work of developing double consciousness so they can see, as most people of color do, the pernicious white and class advantages that haunt us. My ancestors were enslavers in North Carolina. I turned to slave narratives from Black North Carolinians to distill what they observed about white people. Their descriptions point to individual and cultural pathologies: dehumanizing, pathological narcissism, authoritarian character, greed, cruelty, sadism, the policing of racial borders, paranoia, absence of deserved shame and moral injury. These understandings underline some of the psychosocial tasks before us as white people.

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

The Slave Narrative and the Modern Constitution: Latourian Agency in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

This essay demonstrates that Bruno Latour’s work can shed light on an important genre of social and literary history: the slave narrative. Reading The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) alongside Latour’s texts including We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and Reassembling the Social (2005), I argue that Equiano’s Interesting Narrative can be interpreted as a rejection of and corrective to what Latour calls the “modern constitution,” the idea of a divide between the human and the nonhuman, that served to justify European oppression of nonhumans both literal and merely legal and figurative. By demonstrating how Equiano, like Latour, highlights the agency of not only enslaved humans but also nonhuman entities, this reading suggests that the slave narrative is not only a political form but also potentially an ecological form.

Maternal slavery and Gothic melancholy in Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Vâlidem (My Mother) and Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics

AbstractLate Ottoman writers whose mothers were formerly enslaved were haunted by the mother’s arrested mourning for her lost mother/land in the Caucasus. “Intimate biofiction” by these writers – potential masters and sons of slaves – offers a unique narratorial point of view distinct from first-person slave narratives and third-person abolitionist literature. Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s long narrative elegy, Vâlidem (My Mother), written at the time of her death around 1897 and published with a sequel in 1913, triangulates the mother/land, the father/land, and the son on his diplomatic and exilic itinerary. In Ottoman Turkish and aruz meter, Hamid imagines the melancholic crypt of the mother, the paradigmatic child of Gothic literature who remains undead – a phantom haunting her own progeny. In a melancholic inversion of loss, Circassia is reincarnated as the mother/land who lost her. Hamid’s mother is resurrected in a sequel to give birth to the sons of the new fatherland. Her narrative overwritten once again, the same mother appears in Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics alongside the nanny who stayed. The metonymic chain of exilic replacement mothers extends even to Hamid’s last, teenage bride from Belgium.

Following Laura Marcus: from autobiography to testimony

ABSTRACT The publication of Laura Marcus’s Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994) coincided with a conference that I co-organised with her called ‘Modernity, Culture and “the Jew”’ (1994). We both expected the conference to be a modest event, but it turned out to be over-subscribed with many hundreds in attendance. In the light of our conference, my essay explores some of the reasons why the 1990s was thought of as an ‘age of testimony’ which is addressed in Auto/biographical Discourses and subsequent essays by Laura. The essay will then compare the playfulness of the autobiographical genre with the ethical seriousness of Holocaust testimonies and slave narratives. At the heart of the essay is Laura’s conceptualisation of autobiography and its connections with those who write testimonial memoirs in extremis.

On Failing to Get Out

ABSTRACT: This article juxtaposes the film Get Out with visual media ostensibly within and outside of the film's genre to expand our understanding of horror, the psychoanalytics of spectatorship and identification, and the work of critical race theory. Yoking together horror and the slave narrative, I highlight the moments when identification shifts between the protagonist and the antagonist, a subject split that engenders neither wholesale resistance nor complete identification but an irresistible collusion between both.

Slavery between Greed and Survival in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave is a powerful memoir and slave narrative that reveals the barbarity and inhumanity of the 19th-century American slave trade. Through his firsthand account of being kidnapped and sold into slavery, Northup exposes the greed, deceit, violence, and subjugation that drove white slave traders and masters to dehumanize and commodify black people for their own economic gain. Northup's narrative sheds light on the brutality of slavery and how it stripped both enslaved people and white slaveholders of their humanity. The book illustrates the horrors of slavery, from the physical and emotional abuse inflicted upon enslaved people to the use of religion to justify and uphold the system of slavery. Northup's narrative emphasizes the helplessness, impotence, and oppression of black slaves, particularly those who were born free but were abducted and sold into slavery like himself. Ultimately, the book reflects the resilience and determination of enslaved people to survive in a violent, oppressive, and hostile world.

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.

Converted Republic: Lemuel Haynes, Timothy Dwight, and the Anti-Racist Politics of the Republican Sermon

Abstract: This essay explores the under-examined philosophy of evangelical republicanism that preacher-reformers Lemuel Haynes and Timothy Dwight developed at the end of the eighteenth century. To demonstrate their evangelical critique of classical republicanism, Haynes and Dwight invented a new genre: the republican sermon, which allowed them to champion evangelicalism's understanding of disinterested virtue as a corrective to self-serving ambitions that dominated ancient republics. Civic republicans believed that elite white men were the only ones disinterested enough to contribute to politics and participate in the public sphere. By contrast, evangelicals transformed disinterestedness from an intellectual attribute to an affective quality available to all persons who had undergone a conversion experience. Because evangelical republicans vacate individual interests and consider all persons to be dignified and worthy of benevolence, their approach to condemning race-based injustices does not accord with the autobiographical impulse of antebellum genres like the slave narrative. Instead, evangelical republicans like Haynes protest slavery and racism by disinterestedly focusing on the suffering that all Black Americans collectively experience.

Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture by Michaël Roy (review)

Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture by Michaël Roy (review)

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

To the Issue of the Evolution of Questionnaires of Prisoners and Slaves from Circassia who Fled to Russia in 1810–1857 (using the example of “Circassian Slave Narratives”)

To the Issue of the Evolution of Questionnaires of Prisoners and Slaves from Circassia who Fled to Russia in 1810–1857 (using the example of “Circassian Slave Narratives”)