The Trope of the Papers: Rethinking the (Un)Documented in African American Literature

MELUS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-125
Author(s):  
Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Undocumented Immigrant ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Sojourner Truth

Abstract I argue for a reconceptualization of undocumentedness, the experience of being undocumented, from an experience that is simply a result of the modern immigration regime to an experience that is a result of interlocking systems of oppression and resistance to them that has shaped Blackness and the vision for black liberation. I make this argument by defining and tracing the trope of the papers—the use of legal and extralegal documents to examine and document African Americans’ and other people of African descent’s relationship to the nation-state—in the slave narrative and the neo-slave narrative. I offer a close readings of slave narratives, including Sojourner Truth’s The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, and neo-slave narratives, including Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and Gayl Jones’s Mosquito (1999), to illustrate the significance of the undocumented immigrant in African American literature and demonstrate that writers of African American literature have been thinking intensely about undocumentedness, although not in the way undocumentedness is typically understood.

Post-Black Satire

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-140
Author(s):  
Yogita Goyal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paul Beatty ◽  
Distinct Body

This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.

scholarly journals Portraits of Piety

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Bailey
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Real Thing ◽  
Black Writing ◽  
The Many ◽  
Generic Strategies

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.

From Absence to Flight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Power Movement

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

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.

Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Illegal Trade ◽  
Economic Gain ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature

In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to postrevolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding of the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.

scholarly journals Music of Survival: A Search for Identity in the Works of Richard Wright

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Shadan Jafri
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
American Life ◽  
The People

The complexly changing nature of American life and the vigorous versatility and all-encompassing spread of the written record are the marks of American literature. Social forces always make their imprint on literature. Especially in America where the democratic processes bring the people into immediate familiarity with and sensitive response to cultural forces, the literature has responded quickly to such pressures. African American literature consists of the literary work by the writers of Afro-origin settled in USA. The category“ slave narratives” were writings by people who had experienced slavery. It described their journeys to independence and their survival struggles. The concepts explored and issues raised were racism, slavery, and social equality.

scholarly journals Domestic Violence and Psychological Oppression in Alice Walker’s the Color Purple

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4S4) ◽  
pp. 66-67
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Color Purple

African-American literature is otherwise known as slave narratives. The popular African-American writers are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker etc. The Color Purple is a well-known epistolary novel written by Alice Walker in 1983. The novel brought her a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983. This is a novel about a young fourteen year old black girl. She is tortured physically, emotionally, sexually by her step father and her husband. Later on she develops an intimate relationship with Shug. It has changed her life topsy-turvy. The poor, ugly, innocent, oppressed, inferior woman tremendously changed as a woman of self confident, beautiful and proud human being.

The Travels of William and Ellen Craft: Race and Travel Literature in the 19th Century

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Brusky
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
The 19Th Century

Describing their move north in an escape from slavery, William and Ellen Craft's slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), offers a peculiar form of travel literature. The notion that slave narratives chronicle movement has not gone unrecognized. Indeed, scholarship on 20th-century African-American literature often argues the thematic importance of a journey motif that some trace to antebellum America. Blyden Jackson, for example, notes that African-American “literature bears within itself content, as well as themes and moods, reflecting the Great Migration” (xv), the period from early to mid-20th century, which Marcus E. Jones says actually began before the Civil War when blacks fled the South for the urban, industrial North (30). And Robert Stepto has identified two basic types of journeys in African-American literature: one of “ascent” in which “an ‘enslaved’ and semiliterate figure [travels] on a ritualized journey to a symbolic North,” and one of “immersion,” which is a “ritualized journey into a symbolic South” (6). Such discussions of journey motifs, however, have not yet led to an examination of slave narratives as travel literature.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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