scholarly journals Bound to History: Leoncia Lasalle’s Slave Narrative from Moca, Puerto Rico, 1945

Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Ellen Fernandez-Sacco
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Family Histories ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
Colonial Government

The only slave narrative from Puerto Rico is included in Luis Diaz Soler’s Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico (1953; 2002). This article considers this embedded account as part of the literature of slave narratives to address a gap in the literature; this is perhaps due to the account’s singularity and brevity. Beyond this, the other source for understanding the experience of enslaved women in Puerto Rico is through legal and parish documents, generated by a colonial government and church supportive of slavery. As a result, lives under enslavement are quantified statistically, and the lack of oral history or personal accounts hampers understanding of the effects of enslavement from an individual perspective. Documenting such a life comes with its own set of issues, as shown here by demonstrating the limits of various archival resources. There is no one methodology to follow to reconstruct lives and family histories under slavery, an institution designed to prevent the formation of a historical sense of self and agency. Factoring in familial connections makes my own location as a researcher visible, as knowledge is not neutral. Despite its brevity, considering Leoncia Lasalle’s account, and that of her daughter, Juana Rodriguez Lasalle, in terms of its multiple contexts—microhistory, similarities with U.S. and Cuban slave narratives, family histories, and the archive—reveals the constructed nature of the idea of historical knowledge, which also has implications for genealogical practice involved with slavery and life post-emancipation.

scholarly journals Bliżej biednego — doświadczenia i potrzeby badawcze

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 183-199
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Tarkowska
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
Participatory Approaches ◽  
Family Histories ◽  
The Family ◽  
Personal Accounts

This paper discusses the ongoing evolution of research into poverty, with the profound and thorough reformulation of the researcher–respondent relationship, which has blurred the distinction between the researcher and research subject. The researcher–respondent roles have merged, turning the research subject into the agent and respondents into researchers inquiring into their own conditions. This process has evolved through the first British ‘second-hand’ inquiries into poverty, analyses of personal documents (diaries), oral history traditions, the family histories presented by Oscar Lewis, personal accounts, monographs of communities, and recent participatory approaches to poverty research such as the ‘Poverty First Hand’ project.

“Scrap-Heap Storiesˮ: Oral Narratives of Labour and Loss in Scottish Mining and Manufacturing

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-2018) ◽  
pp. 8-21
Author(s):  
Arthur McIvor
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Job Loss ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Oral Narratives ◽  
Industrial Work ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Plant Closures ◽  
The Impact

This article is an attempt to comprehend deindustrialisation and the impact of plant downsizing and closures in Scotland since the 1970s through listening to the voices of workers and reflecting on their ways of telling, whilst making some observations on how an oral history methodology can add to our understanding. It draws upon a rich bounty of oral history projects and collections undertaken in Scotland over recent decades. The lush description and often intense articulated emotion help us as academic “outsidersˮ to better understand how lives were profoundly affected by plant closures, getting us beyond statistical body counts and overly sentimentalised and nostalgic representations of industrial work to more nuanced understandings of the meanings and impacts of job loss. In recalling their lived experience of plant run-downs and closures, narrators are informing and interpreting; projecting a sense of self in the process and drawing meaning from their working lives. My argument here is that we need to listen attentively and learn from those who bore witness and try to make sense of these diverse, different and sometimes contradictory stories. We should take cognisance of silences and transgressing voices as well as dominant, hegemonic narratives if we are to deepen the conversation and understand the complex but profound impacts that deindustrialisation had on traditional working-class communities in Scotland, as well as elsewhere.

Sisterhood and After

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaretta Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Cultural Taste

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement explores the individual and collective memories of women at its heart. Spanning at least two generations and four nations, and moving through the tumultuous decades from the 1970s to the present, the narrative is powered by feminist oral history, notably the British Library’s Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. The book mines these precious archives to bring fresh insight into the lives of activists and the campaigns and ideas they mobilised. It navigates still-contested questions of class, race, violence, and upbringing—as well as the intimacies, sexualities and passions that helped fire women’s liberation—and shows why many feminists still regard notions of ‘equality’ or even ‘equal rights’ as insufficient. It casts new light on iconic campaigns and actions in what is sometimes simplified as feminism’s ‘second wave’, and enlivens a narrative too easily framed by ideological abstraction with candid, insightful, sometimes painful personal accounts of national and less well-known women activists. They describe lives shaped not only by structures of race, class, gender, sexuality and physical ability, but by education, age, love and cultural taste. At the same time, they offer extraordinary insights into feminist lifestyles and domestic pleasures, and the crossovers and conflicts between feminists. The work draws on oral history’s strength as creative method, as seen with its conclusion, where readers are urged to enter the archives of feminist memory and use what they find there to shape their own political futures.

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.

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.

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.

Captivity, Desire, Trade

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Classic Period ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
The World ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
Set Up

This chapter continues the discussion of Equiano/Vassa's autobiography, focusing on its role in the literary tradition as the most important eighteenth-century slave narrative in order for Barrett to set up the long tradition of the fugitive slave narrative in its pre-classic (prior to 1800), classic (1830–1865), and postbellum (1865 and later) versions. It then turns to a number of fugitive slave narratives and related abolitionist texts from the classic period: William Grimes's Narrative of the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1855); James Bradley's 1835 journalistic account of his own enslavement; David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (1829); Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).

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.

‘A way to be me’: Autobiographical reflections of autistic adults diagnosed in mid-to-late adulthood

Autism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136236132110506
Author(s):  
Rozanna Lilley ◽  
Wenn Lawson ◽  
Gabrielle Hall ◽  
Joanne Mahony ◽  
Hayley Clapham ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Autism Diagnosis ◽  
Late Adulthood ◽  
Autistic People ◽  
Autistic Adults ◽  
Autistic Identity ◽  
Over Time

In this article, we report on an oral history study documenting the lives of autistic adults in Australia. This qualitative study, co-produced with autistic researchers, offers insight into the lived experiences of autistic adults diagnosed in mid-to-late adulthood. Oral history methodology was utilised to understand the experiences of autistic adults who grew up in an era before autism was well-known. The 26 interviewees were born before 1975, receiving a clinical autism diagnosis after age 35 years. All interviews were conducted by autistic researchers, transcribed and thematically analysed by a team of autistic and non-autistic researchers using the six-step process outlined by Braun and Clarke. We identified four themes relating to perceptions of the self: being different, exploring identity, the suffering self and being Autistic. Some interviewees reported a direct relationship between trauma, negative self-conceptions and suffering. For most, formal diagnosis had positive impacts on sense of self, contributing to a greater focus on strengths. Contra research suggesting autistic impairments in self-awareness, these interviewees demonstrated a deep capacity for self-reflection, highlighting the variability of autistic lives and the socio-historical contexts that shape individual biographies, including experiences of stigma and discrimination as well as the empowering potential of identifying as autistic. Lay abstract Using oral history methods, we interviewed and recorded 26 autistic adults in Australia about their life history. We wanted to better understand interviewees’ self-reflections about their lives. The interviewers were autistic researchers and the interviews were analysed by autistic and non-autistic researchers. All of the adults we interviewed were born before 1975 and formally identified as autistic after age 35 years. This group of people is sometimes referred to as ‘late-diagnosed autistic adults’. In general, there is not much research done about autistic adults and even less is known about those diagnosed late in life. In this article, we explore what these adults said about their sense of self and how that changed over time. These autistic adults told us about many negative experiences, including trauma, which had shaped how they think about themselves. For most, autism diagnosis had a very positive impact on their sense of self, allowing them to understand more about their own past and to feel good about their autistic identity. Previously some researchers have said that autistic people have a limited or impaired sense of self. Instead, our results show some autistic people can actually reflect deeply on their lives and their changing sense of self-identity over time.

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