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

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.

Scottish Romanticism and Collective Memory in the British Atlantic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth McNeil
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Age Of Revolution ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Critical Site

Charting the transatlantic movements of Scottish literature in the Age of Revolution, this book provides an in-depth examination of Scottish Romantic literary ideas on memory and their influence among various cultures in the British Atlantic. The book brings into relief a distinct Scottish historiography, in which a temporality of modernity takes shape in the forms, tropes and categories of a mode of historical understanding we now would term collective or cultural memory. The study traces this emergent mode in Scottish history writing, both fictional and non-fictional, as it circulated throughout the Atlantic world. It offers a threefold engagement with Scottish Romantic, transatlantic and memory studies while drawing from the perspectives and insights of other critical frameworks – such as indigenous, Black Atlantic and francophone Canada. Examining a range of writing modes such as memoirs, slave narratives and emigrant fiction in various regional and national contexts, the book covers familiar Scottish writers, such as Walter Scott and John Galt, and less familiar ones, such as Anne Grant, Thomas Pringle, and John Gabriel Stedman. It follows other recent studies in making the case for the Atlantic world as a critical site in the making of a culture of modernity while bringing to light the fundamental contribution of Scottish Romantic writing to this culture.

Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura T. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The Self ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
First Person ◽  
White American ◽  
Political Turn

Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.

Slave Narratives

1978 ◽  
pp. 21-46
Author(s):  
Ruth Miller ◽  
Peter J. Katopes
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives
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