Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley

1989 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Elizabeth Keckley

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.

Emerging Class Awareness

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-62
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Caste Status ◽  
David Walker ◽  
Key Terms

Chapter 1 examines key terms pertaining to socioeconomic distinction, particularly “caste,” “status,” and “class,” as they apply to mid-century narratives. The chapter notes factors that differentiated the enslaved economically as well as socially, among them types of work, kinship, and connections to whites. It explains the importance of class awareness to the slave narrative and differentiates that awareness from standard ideas about class consciousness. Also discussed are commonalities of experience shared by most of the fifty-two African American slave narrators whose life stories are the focus of this book. Concluding the chapter is an overview of discourse involving class critique and social advancement among African Americans as articulated by black writers from David Walker to Martin R. Delany and Frederick Douglass. The widening range of class-inflected ideas expressed in mid-century narratives attests to an emerging class awareness in contemporary essays and journalism, as well as autobiography, by black Americans.

Captivity, Desire, Trade

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Classic Period ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
The World ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
Set Up

This chapter continues the discussion of Equiano/Vassa's autobiography, focusing on its role in the literary tradition as the most important eighteenth-century slave narrative in order for Barrett to set up the long tradition of the fugitive slave narrative in its pre-classic (prior to 1800), classic (1830–1865), and postbellum (1865 and later) versions. It then turns to a number of fugitive slave narratives and related abolitionist texts from the classic period: William Grimes's Narrative of the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1855); James Bradley's 1835 journalistic account of his own enslavement; David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (1829); Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).

Sight Unseen: Contemporary Visual Slave Narratives

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
New Model ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Establishing and examining an archive of contemporary visual slave narratives—including Glenn Ligon’s Narratives and Runaways series (1993), Kara Walker’s Slavery! Slavery! (1997) and Narratives of a Negress (2003), and Ellen Driscoll’s The Loophole of Retreat (1991)—this chapter reframes critical debates on the slave narrative around the visual stakes of the form and advances a new model of reading the slave narrative founded on attention to the historical and aesthetic dislocations and disjunctions accentuated in contemporary visual slave narratives. Concluding with an analysis of Frederick Douglass’s visual intervention in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, specifically, his metaphorical assertion, “You have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave was made a man,” the chapter argues that both contemporary artists and 19th-century ex-slave narrators produce representational static to evade the racial constraints on their artistic production.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Yogita Goyal
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Global South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Charles Johnson ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Octavia Butler ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Literature Culture

The introduction explores the revival of slavery in contemporary culture, ranging over examples of trauma from literature, culture, and politics. It assesses the valence of analogy as an analytic for racial and comparative critique. It lays out the key features of the slave narrative (by Frederick Douglass, for example) and examines the principal concerns of the neo-slave narrative by writers like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Charles Johnson. It then traces the shift from Atlantic to global as the slave narrative frames experiences of human rights violations across the Global South. Then, the introduction considers the uses of genre for thinking about race, showing how race and form have always been entangled.

Fugitive Testimony

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Elizabeth Keckley ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Narrative Performance ◽  
Kara Walker ◽  
Glenn Ligon

Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and post-bellum literary slave narratives and visual art, the book redraws the genealogy of the slave narrative in light of its emergence in contemporary art and brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre’s central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of the narrative to provide an eyewitness account of his or her own enslavement. The book takes as its starting point the evocation of the slave narrative in works by a number of current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, and uses the representational strategies of these artists to decode the visual work performed in 19th-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, and Henry Box Brown. Focusing on slave narratives’ textual visuality and aspects of narrative performance, rather than the intermedial, semiotic traffic between images and text, the book argues that ex-slave narrators and the contemporary artists under consideration use the logic of the slave narrative form against itself to undermine the evidentiary epistemology of the genre and offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.

Frederick Douglass and the Work of Freedom: Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic in the Fugitive Slave Narrative

Prospects ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 229-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Cassuto
Keyword(s):  
Daily Practice ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
The South ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Status ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
Human Connection

When Frederick L. Olmstead came face to face with slavery in his travels through the South, he wrote that it was “difficult” to treat a human as property, but “embarrass[ing]” to treat property as human. Olmstead's dilemma encapsulates the difficulties that white slaveholders had in objectifying their slaves. American slaveholders tried to treat the slave as property, but couldn't consistently maintain that stance because they understood all along that the slave was human. Furthermore, the owners had to exploit that humanity in daily practice in order to manage the slave as property. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this conflict in action when he visited the South and witnessed the treatment of slaves: “Not wishing to raise them to their own level, [the owners] keep them as close to the beasts as possible” (emphasis added). Tocqueville's qualification is important. The masters do not succeed in turning the slaves into beasts; they can only approximate doing so. (The “almost” that Tocqueville includes in the epigraph quotation above further suggests this key gap.) Tocqueville's phrasing shows that he sees slaves as people who are being degraded to the status of objects — but who are nonetheless not objects. Moreover, Tocqueville's use of “we” suggests that he is not the only one who sees them as people. For Tocqueville and others unnamed, the slaves retain their human connection. They are not things, but people who are being uneasily forced into the category of “thing.”

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