Inverting History in Octavia Butler's Postmodern Slave Narrative

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narrative

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

THE (SLAVE) NARRATIVE OF JANE EYRE

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sun-Joo Lee
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
The West ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Indian Slavery ◽  
At Home

InImperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.

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.

scholarly journals The Neo-Gothic Imaginary and the Rhetoric of Loss in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

2019 ◽  
pp. 271-279
Author(s):  
Patrycja Antoszek
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Black Subjectivity

The aim of my paper will be to discuss the African-American reworking of the Gothic tradition in Colson Whitehead’s neo-slave narrative. I want to argue that the figure of the protagonist Cora may be seen as the embodiment of losses that span over generations of black women. Cora’s melancholia is a strategy of dealing with the horrors of slavery and a sign of a black woman’s failed entry into the Symbolic. While the novel’s narrative technique is a symbol of the ever-present past that haunts black subjectivity, the underground railroad may be read as a metaphor for the repressed content of American national unconscious.

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