Elizabeth Keckley and Freedom’s Labor

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Janaka B. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth Keckley

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
Elizabeth Keckley ◽  
Critical Conversation ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
And Gender

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women. Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or “witnessing”—trauma to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature, articulating a theory of reading (or “dual-witnessing”) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. The book then places its original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in American literature. This book also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.

Exposing Mary Lincoln: Elizabeth Keckley and the Rhetoric of Intimate Disclosure

2013 ◽  
Vol 78 (5) ◽  
pp. 405-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Shawn Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth Keckley

Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-33
Author(s):  
Candice Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Elizabeth Keckley

Freedom and Ballgowns: Elizabeth Keckley and The Work of Domesticity

2001 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth Keckley

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

An Unlikely Friendship: A Novel of Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley (review)

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (9) ◽  
pp. 382-382
Author(s):  
Hope. Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth Keckley

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document