Aspects of the Narratives of Slavery in the Afro-American Literature as Represented by Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass’ Works

Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) are two very significant works to show slave narratives Afro-American Literature. They provide many aspects in attempting to portray the complex sufferings and different kinds of frustrations, especially that the threat to the existence of their families and their rights as human beings in American society. The works present real stories and scenes lived by both writers in that dark era. The article makes a kind of comparison between them to highlight how both sexes suffered to the same extent. Jacobs represented the female side while Douglass represented the male side of black slaves in America through their works. The article aims to shed light on the brutal effect of slave and the crimes of the racist white American people upon these vulnerable people in a society of an ideal country in which the worst forms of racism are still practiced and the murder of George Floyd’s crime is not far from us. Therefore, it is the duty of the free people of the whole world to expose these heinous acts and work to prevent them and support the oppressed.

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

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.

Female and Unfree in America: Captivity and Slave Narratives

This study analyses two seminal American memoirs that depict female captivity: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) by Mary Rowlandson and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). My aim is to discuss, using the tools of Critical Race Theory, the intersections of gender and race, focusing on how the two women’s femininity, as well as their individuality, is linked to Christianity and motherhood.

Collective Memory and Cultural Trauma in Female-Authored African American Life Narratives

Este estudo examina a relação entre memória coletiva e escravidão como um trauma cultural em textos autobiográficos afro-americanos de autoria feminina no início do desenvolvimento dessa tradição na literatura afro-americana. O corpus literário enfoca, respectivamente, a narrativa de Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), e o livro de memórias da Guerra Civil de Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S. C. (1902). Ambos textos trazem memórias subterrâneas (POLLAK, 1989) de mulheres afro-americanas do período antebellum e do período da Guerra Civil Americana que desafiam as memórias nacionais e a história americana.