Enslavement and the Temporality of Childhood

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-59
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Chinn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
The People ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Formative Experiences

Abstract This article explores how thinking about the time of childhood through the lens of US slavery forces us to rethink both phenomena. According to many of the people who lived through it, enslaved childhood was a shifting, episodic phenomenon that had multiple points of definition. Throughout the nineteenth century, as their adult selves looked back on their early years, formerly enslaved people adopted a number of different strategies to understand and narrate how they came to be who they were and what their formative experiences meant in terms of the trajectory of their lives. They wrote within a literary culture that was itself partially responsible for creating (and certainly was instrumental in promoting and perpetuating) the temporal understanding of childhood as unidirectional, progressive, and only tangentially connected to material reality. But they also described quite different temporal patterns for slave childhood. These patterns are the focus of my analysis here: how African American narrators negotiated their vexed relationship to childhood as both never- and always-children in order to challenge the growing consensus on how childhood could and should be staged in literary texts. My primary sources are narratives by formerly enslaved people, written, as most slave narratives were, primarily but not exclusively for white readers.

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.

scholarly journals Music of Survival: A Search for Identity in the Works of Richard Wright

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Shadan Jafri
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
American Life ◽  
The People

The complexly changing nature of American life and the vigorous versatility and all-encompassing spread of the written record are the marks of American literature. Social forces always make their imprint on literature. Especially in America where the democratic processes bring the people into immediate familiarity with and sensitive response to cultural forces, the literature has responded quickly to such pressures. African American literature consists of the literary work by the writers of Afro-origin settled in USA. The category“ slave narratives” were writings by people who had experienced slavery. It described their journeys to independence and their survival struggles. The concepts explored and issues raised were racism, slavery, and social equality.

Imperialism, Botany and Statistics in early Nineteenth-Century India: The Surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762–1829)

1986 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marika Vicziany
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Data Base ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Early Years ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Economy ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The People

Buchanan arrived in India in 1794 and left in 1815. He was employed by the East India Company for these twenty years in a number of capacities but he is chiefly remembered today for two surveys he conducted: the first of Mysore in 1800 and the second of Bengal in 1807–14. These surveys have long been used by historians, anthropologists and Indian politicians to depict the nature of Indian society in the early years of British rule. Recently economic historians, Bagchi in particular, have used the ‘statistical’ tables compiled by Buchanan as a data base against which later statistical evidence about the Indian economy is measured. Bagchi believes that by doing this he can furnish firm proof of the extent to which British rule was detrimental to the people of India in the nineteenth century.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Great War ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Chattel Slavery

`So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!' These words, said to have been uttered by Abraham Lincoln, signal the celebrity of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first American novel to become an international best-seller, Stowe's novel charts the progress from slavery to freedom of fugitives who escape the chains of American chattel slavery, and of a martyr who transcends all earthly ties. At the middle of the nineteenth-century, the names of its characters - Little Eva, Topsy, Uncle Tom - were renowned. A hundred years later, `Uncle Tom' still had meaning, but, to Blacks everywhere it had become a curse. This edition firmly locates Uncle Tom's Cabin within the context of African-American writing, the issues of race and the role of women. Its appendices include the most important contemporary African-American literary responses to the glorification of Uncle Tom's Christian resignation as well as excerpts from popular slave narratives, quoted by Stowe in her justification of the dramatization of slavery, Key to Uncles Tom's Cabin.

Composing in Black and White

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Jean Graham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Ambiguous Position

This chapter examines how Sam Lucas (1840–1916), one of the most popular black performers of the late 1870s and 1880s, was able to transcend the restrictions imposed on black entertainers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, mainly through his songs that deploy ideologically laden codes to signify social constructions of race. Renowned for his songs, comic ingenuity, pleasing tenor voice, nimble dance steps, and dramatic intensity, Lucas holds the distinction of being the only African American to perform in the genres of blackface minstrelsy, variety and vaudeville, turn-of-the-century black musical comedy, and film (as a lead character). This chapter considers Lucas’s “black-coded” and “white-coded” songs and relates them to his deliberate attempt to manage his ambiguous position between sociocultural groups. To illuminate Lucas’s strategy of code-switching, a selective biography of Lucas based on primary sources and his own narratives is presented.

The People versus Zephyr Davis: Law and Popular Justice in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dale
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Popular Justice ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Shortly after 3 P.M. on February 27, 1888, Eddie Dwyer, one of the young employees at Greene's Boot Heel Factory in Chicago, began to clear empty sacks out of a closet in the rear of the factory so that coal could be loaded into the room. After pulling out roughly five sacks, Eddie called out that there seemed to be something else in the closet. Investigation established that the something else was the body of another employee, fourteen-year-old Maggie Gaughan, who had been missing all day and apparently had been hacked to death with the hatchet found beneath her body. Suspicion quickly centered on the factory foreman, a seventeen-year-old African American named Zephyr Davis, who was away from the factory on an errand at the time the body was discovered. That suspicion became certainty when Davis did not return from the errand, driven away, as he later admitted, by the crowds he saw gathered outside of Greene's when he returned.

scholarly journals Maritime in the Literary Works during The Kaḍiri- Majapahit Period (XII –XVI Centuries)

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-32
Author(s):  
Titi Surti Nastiti
Keyword(s):  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Initial Study ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Supplementary Information ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Maritime Culture ◽  
The People ◽  
Textual Data ◽  
Ancient Literature

Kerajaan-kerajaan masa Jawa Kuno dikenal sebagai negara agraris. Meskipun demikian tidak menjadikan kerajaan-kerajaan tersebut hanya bergerak di bidang pertanian saja, tetapi juga di bidang kemaritiman. Informasi yang menjelaskan kehidupan dan aktivitas kemaritiman pada masa Jawa Kuno didapatkan dari data arkeologis dan tekstual berupa prasasti, berita asing, dan naskah. Data tekstual yang dipakai sebagai sumber, umumnya dibagi ke dalam sumber primer dan sekunder. Sumber primer dianggap sebagai data yang lebih akurat dibandingkan dengan sumber sekunder, karena merupakan dokumen penting dan ditulis pada masanya. Data tekstual yang dianggap sebagai sumber primer adalah prasasti dan berita asing (tambo Dinasti Cina dan berita dari orang Eropa terutama Portugis), sedangkan yang dianggap sumber sekunder adalah naskah terutama karya sastra. Tujuan dari penulisan ini adalah mengungkapkan berbagai hal terkait aktivitas kemaritiman pada masa Jawa Kuno, terutama yang digambarkan dalam karya-karya sastra. Ternyata dalam karya sastra dari masa Kaḍiri-Majapahit banyak menuliskan tentang hal-hal yang berhubungan dengan kemaritiman, baik jenis perahu, perahu karam, bajak laut, maupun aktivitas masyarakat pesisir. Metode yang dipakai dalam penelitian ini adalah deskriptif analisis dengan pendekatan kualitatif. Hasil dari kajian ini memperlihatkan bahwa karya-karya sastra meskipun dianggap sebagai data sekunder, namun dari tulisan karya sastra terdapat kebenaran data yang tidak didapatkan dalam data primer. The kingdoms of the Old Javanese period were known as agrarian. However, this does not make these kingdoms only engaged in agriculture but also the maritime sector. Much information that contains maritime culture and activities during the Old Javanese period was acquired from various archaeological and textual data such as ancient inscriptions, foreign records, and texts. Textual data used as sources segmented into primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are considered more accurate than secondary sources because the primary sources record many events written at that time. Textual data that are considered primary sources are ancient inscriptions and foreign evidence such as the Chinese Dynasty tambo and European records, mostly Portuguese. Meanwhile, secondary sources such as ancient manuscripts, mainly ancient literary texts. This study aims to reveal various affairs related to maritime activities in the Old Javanese period, especially those expressed and portrayed in ancient literature. By the initial study, ancient literature from the Kaḍiri-Majapahit period contains many things related to maritime culture, both types of watercraft, shipwrecks, pirates, and the activities of the people who lived in the seacoast environment. The method used in this study is descriptive analysis with a qualitative approach. This study shows not much description of the maritime culture in Old Javanese inscriptions as the primary sources. However, it figures prominently in literary texts that contained many interesting facts. Historical information about maritime affairs in the Old Javanese period can be interpreted in more detail with supplementary information from literary texts as secondary sources.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Songs of the spirit from Dufftown

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Shelagh Noden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Liturgical Music

Following the Scottish Catholic Relief Act of 1793, Scottish Catholics were at last free to break the silence imposed by the harsh penal laws, and attempt to reintroduce singing into their worship. At first opposed by Bishop George Hay, the enthusiasm for liturgical music took hold in the early years of the nineteenth century, but the fledgling choirs were hampered both by a lack of any tradition upon which to draw, and by the absence of suitable resources. To the rescue came the priest-musician, George Gordon, a graduate of the Royal Scots College in Valladolid. After his ordination and return to Scotland he worked tirelessly in forming choirs, training organists and advising on all aspects of church music. His crowning achievement was the production, at his own expense, of a two-volume collection of church music for the use of small choirs, which remained in use well into the twentieth century.

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