scholarly journals Harriet Jacobs: forerunner of gender studies in slave narratives and african american women's literature

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Sedano Vivanco
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Harriet Jacobs

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

MELUS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-125
Author(s):  
Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Undocumented Immigrant ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Sojourner Truth

Abstract 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.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

Post-Black Satire

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-140
Author(s):  
Yogita Goyal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paul Beatty ◽  
Distinct Body

This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.

From Absence to Flight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Power Movement

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

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.

Watching from Below: Racialized Surveillance and Vulnerable Sousveillance

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-314
Author(s):  
Kelly Ross
Keyword(s):  
Smart Phone ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
First Century ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Simultaneous Operation ◽  
Explanatory Theory ◽  
Surveillance Studies

By relying on Foucauldian panopticism as a universally explanatory theory, surveillance studies has collapsed two separate issues: the power relations between watcher and watched and the visibility or nonvisibility of the watcher. The presumption that the watcher's visibility or nonvisibility is irrelevant is especially dangerous for observers of color, who are already more vulnerable because of racial hypervisibility. This essay examines the simultaneous operation of surveillance (watching from above) and sousveillance (watching from below), both predicated on racial hypervisibility. To demonstrate the continuity of racial hypervisibility across a broad historical period, I compare the risks taken by sousveillants of color making smart‐phone recordings of police brutality in the twenty‐first century with the dangers faced by visible African American sousveillants in nineteenth‐century slave narratives by Charles Ball, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. (KR)

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