Reconsidering the Slave’s Irony: journeys and innovations in the early slave narrative form

Prose Studies ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-230
Author(s):  
Stefan Wheelock
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative

Gestures Against Movements: Henry Box Brown and Economies of Narrative Performance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Narrative Performance

This chapter traces the various circuits—economic, narrative, performative—that structure black abolitionist textual production through the cultural work of Henry Box Brown. Building on Daphne Brooks’s analysis of Brown’s texts in particular, this chapter argues that we should consider black abolitionist performance in tandem with narrative performance: the unruly narrative gestures uncontained by the slave narrative form or the expectations of its primarily white readership. While Brown’s use of illustration and panorama allow us to read the slave narrative anew, the chapter claims that ex-slave narrators utilized a similar recognition of the iconicity of the black body and visual savvy in their narratives, producing rhetorical performances that challenge the ideological containment of the slave narrative. In attending to the textual aspects of visual culture, the chapter brings to light Brown’s insurgent iconoclasm which emerges to disrupt the “discursively claustrophobic tone and form” of even his most constrained 1849 narrative.

Behind the Scenes and Inside Out: Elizabeth Keckly’s Use of the Slave Narrative Form

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
White House ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Inside Out ◽  
Racial Slavery

Advancing a formal reading of Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), this chapter shows how Elizabeth Keckly undermines the ideological presumptions that link blackness with enslavement and whiteness with literacy and truth by inverting the racial protocols underlying slave narratives’ conventions of authentication. In Behind the Scenes it is Keckly’s letters that authenticate Mary Lincoln’s version of events, Tad Lincoln’s reading lesson which is included in place of her own, and the narrative gaze is primarily on the white bodies within the text as they take shape in her vocation, dress-making. In overturning these race rituals, which rely on fixed notions of “black” and “white,” Keckly challenges the racial protocols of the slave narrative and exposes how the form itself has been organized by the visual logic of racial slavery.

Introduction: Representational Static

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Performance Theory ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
And Performance

Using contemporary artwork as a lens onto the textual visuality of 19th-century slave narratives, this introduction to Fugitive Testimony works backwards historically to excavate ex-slave narrators’ challenge to authenticating conventions, and therefore their challenge to the assumptions motivating racial classification itself. The introduction argues that the book’s unique focus on the recursive nature of the slave narrative form unifies what have been three distinct phases of the genre’s criticism within the academy—historical, literary, and cultural studies approaches—and contributes to the historiographical contours of Atlantic studies. Drawing on literary analysis, art history, and visual and performance theory, the book connects vital early literary critical accounts of the slave narrative that examine the genre’s conventions of authentication and issues of literacy with later cultural studies approaches, including those advanced by Lindon Barrett, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, and Michael Chaney.

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.

Mimetic Desire and the Complication of the Conventional Neo-Slave Narrative Form in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Ignatius Chukwumah
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Tragic Hero ◽  
Racial Slavery

AbstractWhen critics declare that Edward P. Jones’s The Known World represents moral turpitude, capitalist proclivities, slavery, and whittling of white supremacy, their assertions are in order. But they often miss accounting for how The Known World, which bears some indices of the neo-slave narrative owing to its appropriation of the incidents of slavery in a novelistic platform, complicates its sub-tradition. This work investigates the text’s two-fold complication. First, Jones complicates the neo-slave narrative form by depicting slavery from a little known perspective of intra-racial slavery amongst black people. Then, he casts a white character, and not a black one, in the mold of a classical tragic hero. Mimetic desire, René Girard’s concept for an individual’s imitation of a prior model’s behavior, is drawn on to bare characters’ actions that accentuate both strands of complication. As the basis of all human action that includes rivalry, violence, and scapegoating, mimetic desire unravels the ‘mystery’ surrounding the sort of slavery overwhelmingly acknowledged by critics as untraditional in The Known World and the tragedy, also unique to the neo-slave narrative form, it gives rise to.

Racial Violence, Racial Capitalism, and Reading Revolution: Harriet Jacobs, John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Black Bodies

Meditating on the continued racial speculation on black bodies in our contemporary moment, the epilogue brings the link between racial violence, capitalism, and evidentiary epistemology into sharper focus. Drawing on Harriet Jacobs’s insights into the role racial violence-as-spectacle plays in the construction of wealth, the epilogue considers what ex-slave narrators bring to contemporary debates around racial violence, such as the debate over whether or not police body cameras will resolve or lessen unremitting episodes of police brutality on people of color. While the book opens with an analysis of contemporary visual slave narratives at the end of the 20th century, the epilogue ends with a consideration of the slave narrative form in the 21st century, considering works that contribute to contemporary figurations of slavery but are not all strictly within the slave narrative tradition I have defined, including John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker.

Perlaksanaan Kaedah Pembelajaran Berasaskan Projek dalam Pengajaran dan Pembelajaran Kaedah Fiqh

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-23
Author(s):  
Mohd Aderi Che Noh ◽  
Normurni Mohamad ◽  
Adibah Hasanah Abd Halim ◽  
Absha Atiah Abu Bakar
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Mechanical Engineering ◽  
Project Based Learning ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Learning Methods ◽  
Engineering Program ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
Interview Methods

This study aims to see the implementation of project based learning methods (PBL) implemented by lecturers in the Science, Technology and Engineering P&P processes in Islam as an effort to enhance students' understanding in the Fiqh Method. Respondents in this study were students of second semester, Diploma of Mechanical Engineering program, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politeknik Banting. Observation and interview methods are used for data collection purposes. The data were analyzed descriptively and presented in narrative form. The findings show that PBL activity is a fun and enjoyable P&P activity for students. Abstrak Kajian  ini  bertujuan  untuk  melihat  perlaksanaan  kaedah  pembelajaran  berasaskan  projek  (PBL)  yang dilaksanakan  oleh  pensyarah  dalam  proses  P&P Sains,  Teknologi  dan  kejuruteraan  dalam  Islam  sebagai usaha  meningkatkan  kefahaman  pelajar  pelajar  dalam  tajuk  Kaedah Fiqh.  Responden  dalam  kajian  ini adalah   terdiri   daripada   pelajar   semester   dua   progran   Diploma   Kejuruteraan   Mekanikal,   Jabatan Kejuruteraan  Mekanikal,  Politeknik  Banting.  Kaedah  pemerhatian  dan  temu  bual  digunakan  bagi  tujuan pengutipan data. Data dianalisis secara deskriptif dan dipersembahkan dalam bentuk naratif. Dapatan kajian menunjukkan aktiviti PBL merupakan aktiviti P&P yang disukai dan menyeronokkan bagi para pelajar.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

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