scholarly journals African Muslim Slaves: Literacy and Arabic Narratives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruba Bouzan
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Men I ◽  
Distant Interaction

This thesis examines African Muslim slaves and their Arabic writings that influenced their enslavement. The first part of my research considers the historical context that weaves two American presidents together with their distant interaction with Muslim slaves. It also discusses three prominent Muslim slaves in American history: Ayyub bin Suleiman, Abdul Rahman Ibrahima, and Omar ibn Said. Throughout the discussion of the lives of these three men, I analyze their Arabic writing and their use of mimicry throughout, and the ways in which this influenced their patrons’ views of them. The second part explores their differing levels of Arabic literacy and how they were subject to varying degrees of Arabization and exoticization. The last part discusses the absence of their writing in the field of American literature and the American slave narrative genre while arguing for their inclusion in these areas.

Shifting Grounds in Japanese American Studies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasuko Takezawa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
American History ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Matter Production

By taking the examples of translations associated with “race” and “class” used in early Japanese American history, this chapter calls attention to the changes of the meaning and associated epistemological transformations through the translation of these terms from Japanese to English. It also provides the historical context in which Japanese American studies developed in Japan and discusses the strength and weakness of the field in Japan and in the United States with focus given to such issues as subject matter, production of knowledge, and socio-political context.

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.

Laziness in American Literature: The Inaugural Moment

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-144
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Ladyga
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Participation ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Didactic Literature ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Speaking Truth To Power ◽  
Romantic Aesthetics

The chapter serves as a historical prelude to chapters on modernism and postmodernism, by providing a historical context for how the trope of laziness evolved in American literature prior to the 20th century. First, it looks at how the motif of laziness functioned in early Puritan literature, how this function was broadened in 18th-century secular and religious didactic literature, and how it eventually developed into an aesthetic device in the Early Republic, when the new trope of laziness combined high Romantic aesthetics of the pastoral with unrefined motifs of vagabondage and delinquency, and in this way addresses the culture’s desire for freedom from the norm of collective labour and from patterns of inclusion and exclusion within the consensual networks of social participation. Second, the chapter explores the difference between the familiar Romantic topos of idleness, which has no subversive potential with respect to ethical normativity and the topos of laziness, which does. Walt Whitman’s trope of loafing is reread here via the Cynical tradition of performative indomitability as parrhēsia, or speaking truth to power. Herman Melville’s experiments with haptic poetics of laziness in Typee are interpreted as a critique of Romantic moralism and the emerging ethico-aesthetic norm of productivity.

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.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Larry E. Morris
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
First Person ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
Representative Selection ◽  
Selection Of

Ever since the summer of 1829, when newspapers began announcing the forthcoming publication of the Book of Mormon, that text has been the object of both praise and ridicule, a situation that shows no signs of easing almost two hundred years later. Scholars agree, however, that understanding the primary documents surrounding the origin of the Book of Mormon is essential to understanding its significance in American history. This volume presents a representative selection of those source documents, emphasizing first-person accounts produced close to the time of the events in question. Embracing such values as balance, fairness, openness, integrity, and the willingness to be self-critical, the introductions and annotation accompanying each document set the events in their historical context.

A Flute Made of Human Bone: Blood Meridian and the Survivors of American History

Prospects ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 461-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy L. Parrish ◽  
Elizabeth A. Spiller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Literature ◽  
American History ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
American Institution ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Blood Meridian ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
European Values

Seventy years after its publication, librarians at the New York Public Library catalogued Moby Dick with other books that explored the finer points of whaling. In making this bibliographic classification, librarians at this most American exemplar of that most American institution, the public lending library, read Melville's novel not as a great national epic but as an instance of the particular, the regional, the ethnic, the vocational. Given that American readers (not to mention critics of American literature) continue to be more interested in the particular than the epic, it is not surprising that Melville's successor, Cormac Mc-Carthy's epic Blood Meridian (1985), has failed to attract the critical attention it deserves. Writing resolutely against the contemporary grain, McCarthy treats American history and identity as if it were a continuous whole. Although revisionist, McCarthy's version of American history offers little comfort to those who would rewrite American history from the point of view of the peoples who were obliterated so that American history might fulfill its Destiny. Where a typical revisionist history might read Manifest Destiny as a story about Europeans and European values destroying local lands and cultures, McCarthy insists that this kind of history is fragmentary because it depends on a denial of the fact that we only arrive at such critical positions of moral superiority because we are the survivors and successors to this Destiny. His novel examines the burgeoning American empire of the mid-19th century not to indulge in the compensatory pleasures of self-accusation but to remind us of how particularizing versions of history necessarily deny how we have become to be who we are.

“Sweet Home”: Audre Lorde's Zami and the legacies of American Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
MONICA B. PEARL
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
American Life ◽  
Forms Of Life

Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a “biomythography,” suggesting that the life of an African American lesbian cannot be told in any previously available generic forms of life-writing or self-expression, Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions – the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story – rendering it, after all, not a marginal text, but rather a text that falls obviously and firmly in a tradition of American literature. Both traditions turn siginificantly on the trope of “home,” of finding a home where one belongs. In finding the “home” that she is seeking not, ultimately, geographically, but, rather, generically – in the very text she is writing – Lorde's life story also ends up signifying the similarity of these two ostensibly disparate forms: the slave narrative and the coming out story, suggesting a common narrative trajectory of marginal American identities in the tradition of American life-writing.

The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History

1983 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 954
Author(s):  
Norman R. Yetman ◽  
Marion Wilson Starling
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Slave Narrative

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.

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