Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives of the Black Diaspora

2014 ◽  
pp. 19-36
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Diaspora

Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura T. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The Self ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
First Person ◽  
White American ◽  
Political Turn

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.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 317-322
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Full Diversity ◽  
Large Numbers

The epilogue notes that kinship, privilege, occupation, intragroup status, and social mobility affected crucial transitions in self-awareness as well as class awareness among the narrators. Growing self-respect kindled in many narrators a desire for a future that coalesced around an imagined free self. Narrating this process of inner growth individualized and liberated African American personhood in mid-century literature. Slave narratives from this generation created the most sophisticated commentary on caste and class in the South to be found in nineteenth-century American literature. In the late nineteenth century, former slaves continued to publish autobiographies in large numbers. Their experiences in slavery and perspectives on it were often very different from those of the antebellum narrators. Without taking into account the slave narratives published between 1865 and 1901, our comprehension of slavery and the full diversity of African American self-portraiture in the slave narrative will remain limited and partial.

The Psychological Aftereffects of Racialized Sexual Violence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy McDaniels-Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
After Effects ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The Mind

This chapter examines the psychological after effects of racialized sexual violence. Although few formal nineteenth-century records of mental illness, mental instability, or depression exist, written and oral slave narratives recount how “the entire life of the slave was hedged about with rules and regulations.” Samuel Cartwright, a well-known physician in the antebellum South, had a psychiatric explanation for runaway slaves, diagnosing them in 1851 as suffering from “drapetomania.” Classified as “a disease of the mind,” Cartwright defined drapetomania as a treatable and preventable condition that caused “negroes to run away.” Cartwright's published work established the foundation for “racism's historic impact” on black mental health. Indeed, Cartwright's pseudo-science, a potent mix of religion, pro-slavery politics, and medicine, forged a powerful connection between mental illness and race continued by subsequent generations of physicians and psychologists.

Faulkner and the Freedom Writers: Slavery’s Narrative in Business Records from Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism to Twenty-First-Century Neoabolitionism

2017 ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Calvin Schermerhorn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Harriet Beecher Stowe ◽  
New South ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
First Century ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Imaginative Literature

This chapter contextualizes and explores the interplay of historical narrative and imaginative literature, surveying the historiography to which Faulkner and later writers contributed. Drawing on categories formulated by historian David W. Blight, it races a dialectical movement from an “abolitionist script” (grounded in antebellum ex-slave narratives) that “contrasted the humanity of enslaved people with the instrumentality of paper used to mediate slave transactions,” through a proslavery rhetoric that ignored economic context and ascribed paternalistic qualities to slaveholders, to an uneasy synthesis in antislavery novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who decried “slavery's immoral accounting” while generally “affirm[ing] plantation paternalism.” The postbellum years saw a similar cycle, as emancipationist and white supremacist scripts collided before New South writers combined elements of both into a sentimental “reconciliationist script” that won popular support and influenced many of the era's professional historians.

Runaway Genres

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yogita Goyal
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Alternative Conceptions ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Minority Literature ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Diaspora Literature

Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today—from unlawful detention to sex trafficking, the refugee crisis, genocide—this project reads a vast range of contemporary literature, showing how the literary forms used to tell these stories derive from the antebellum genre of the slave narrative. Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, the book forwards alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offer a chance not just to rethink the legacy of slavery itself, but also to assess its ongoing relation to race and the human. Taking form seriously in discussions of minority literature, the book examines key genres associated with the slave narrative: sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman. By offering a theory of form and how it travels, the book argues for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of an ethical globalism. Traversing multiple genres and disciplines, the book speaks to African diaspora and African American studies, transnational and world literatures, American studies, postcolonial and global studies, and human rights. Showing how slavery provides the occasion not just for revisiting the Atlantic past but for renarrating the global present, Runaway Genres creates a new map of contemporary black diaspora literature.

Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arna Bontemps
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Literary Societies ◽  
Columbian Exposition

This chapter examines Negro literature in Illinois, beginning with the literary societies, orators, and slave narratives of the nineteenth century. The Illinois Negroes' interest in literature had been recorded almost a decade before the Civil War by the organization of the Chicago Literary Society. Prior to 1861, there had been thirty-five works of Afro-American authorship published and sold in the United States; at the time of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago more than 100 had been issued. This chapter considers the literary turn marked by the dialect poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Edwin Campbell, and James David Corrothers, along with the free verse of Fenton Johnson. It also discusses the works of other Negro writers such as Frank Marshall Davis, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemp, as well as those of a number of white scholars, poets, and novelists from Illinois who had written sympathetically about African Americans.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Great War ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Chattel Slavery

`So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!' These words, said to have been uttered by Abraham Lincoln, signal the celebrity of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first American novel to become an international best-seller, Stowe's novel charts the progress from slavery to freedom of fugitives who escape the chains of American chattel slavery, and of a martyr who transcends all earthly ties. At the middle of the nineteenth-century, the names of its characters - Little Eva, Topsy, Uncle Tom - were renowned. A hundred years later, `Uncle Tom' still had meaning, but, to Blacks everywhere it had become a curse. This edition firmly locates Uncle Tom's Cabin within the context of African-American writing, the issues of race and the role of women. Its appendices include the most important contemporary African-American literary responses to the glorification of Uncle Tom's Christian resignation as well as excerpts from popular slave narratives, quoted by Stowe in her justification of the dramatization of slavery, Key to Uncles Tom's Cabin.

Enslavement and the Temporality of Childhood

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-59
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Chinn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
The People ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Formative Experiences

Abstract This article explores how thinking about the time of childhood through the lens of US slavery forces us to rethink both phenomena. According to many of the people who lived through it, enslaved childhood was a shifting, episodic phenomenon that had multiple points of definition. Throughout the nineteenth century, as their adult selves looked back on their early years, formerly enslaved people adopted a number of different strategies to understand and narrate how they came to be who they were and what their formative experiences meant in terms of the trajectory of their lives. They wrote within a literary culture that was itself partially responsible for creating (and certainly was instrumental in promoting and perpetuating) the temporal understanding of childhood as unidirectional, progressive, and only tangentially connected to material reality. But they also described quite different temporal patterns for slave childhood. These patterns are the focus of my analysis here: how African American narrators negotiated their vexed relationship to childhood as both never- and always-children in order to challenge the growing consensus on how childhood could and should be staged in literary texts. My primary sources are narratives by formerly enslaved people, written, as most slave narratives were, primarily but not exclusively for white readers.

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