scholarly journals Aspects of the Narratives of Slavery in the Afro-American Literature as Represented by Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass’ Works

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-109
Author(s):  
Hasan Marwan Yahay Al Saleem
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
American People ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
White American ◽  
Male Side ◽  
American Society ◽  
Free People

Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) are two very significant works to show slave narratives Afro-American Literature. They provide many aspects in attempting to portray the complex sufferings and different kinds of frustrations, especially that the threat to the existence of their families and their rights as human beings in American society. The works present real stories and scenes lived by both writers in that dark era. The article makes a kind of comparison between them to highlight how both sexes suffered to the same extent. Jacobs represented the female side while Douglass represented the male side of black slaves in America through their works. The article aims to shed light on the brutal effect of slave and the crimes of the racist white American people upon these vulnerable people in a society of an ideal country in which the worst forms of racism are still practiced and the murder of George Floyd’s crime is not far from us. Therefore, it is the duty of the free people of the whole world to expose these heinous acts and work to prevent them and support the oppressed.

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)

scholarly journals The Emperor Jones is the Reflection of the Black White Struggle: Modern American Drama

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-104
Author(s):  
Haider Ibrahim Khalil ◽  
Abdullah Mohd Nawi ◽  
Ansam Ali Flefil
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
White People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Analyse Data ◽  
Clash Of Cultures ◽  
American Society

The Emperor Jones is the best viewpoint of O’Neill’s plays in depicting the black white people. This play exposes the portraying of black white conflict as modernism ideology. This play is focused on the suffering and the oppression of people. In this study, the scholar uses the qualitative method as storytelling type. In theoretical framework, the critical race theory is related to this study to analyse the speech which tackles the plot, characters and setting according to the concepts of clash of cultures. This study/ this paper also shows the clashes of culture in American society. Furthermore, the implication of this paper will be presented/ indicate the social, educational, linguistic and cultural style. In fact, this paper will add something to American literature by generalizing this study to other studies about black white people. In sum, this paper is to reflect the philosophy of O’Neill in portraying the black white people. The scholar uses the critical race theory to explain the struggles/ conflicts among the human beings. The researcher also uses the qualitative approach and narrative technique to analyse data. In the same way, the data/ material is collected by textual methods and analyse by the narrative approach. This study can be generalized to another study about O’Neill’s perspectives in depicting the black white people. 

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.

scholarly journals OF MICE AND MEN: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN THE LIFE OF AMERICAN SOCIETY VIA READING STEINBECK'S NOVELLA

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-95
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
American People ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literature And Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Of Mice And Men ◽  
American Society

This paper investigates new perspectives in the novel Of Mice and Men by the American writer John Steinbeck. However it studies the most important issues exposed by Steinbeck in American literature and society; these issues became as their existence in different aspects, more specifically the social relationships and enhancing the economic systems. The paper also discusses different issues concerning the life of American people in the era of Great Depression; with this kind of story American people interact with the events displayed by the writer. Therefore, this story reflects their struggle and goals towards fulfilling better lives. It also studies the sense of friendship in American society in particular and society in general. Actually the soft relationship between George and Lennie depicts the hope and love and how to overcome any obstacles which sometimes we meet in our lives. The paper also explains briefly the role of women played in the American society in the thirties of the last century. Moreover, Steinbeck actually promotes women in society throughout the character Curley's Wife and how she challenged all the difficulties she faced not just to be a successful factor in society but also she proved that without woman the movement of our daily life will completely stop

scholarly journals COLORISM IN TONI MORRISONS GOD HELP THE CHILD

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 450-453
Author(s):  
Makwana Ajay
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
White Skin ◽  
White American ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
African Descendants ◽  
Dark Color ◽  
American Society

The present paper has been specifically designed to scrutinize the aspect of colorism in Toni Morrisons well acclaimed novel God Help the Child. African American literature is an academic body of writing produced by African descendants residing in America. The literary canon of African- American literature emerged in late part of 18th century in oral forms like sermon, gospel, music, jazz, blues and spirituals. African American writers have deliberately expressed their painful agony, racial segregation, social injustice and ill treatment which they tolerated in white American society. Toni Morrison was a prolific female novelist of African-American literary writing. Morrisons eleventh novel God Help the Child prominently deals with colorism, racism and child abuse. Conceptually, the term Colorism was coined by Alice Walker to address the superiority of lighter or white skin over the dark. Colorism has its genetic roots in racism because without racism the standardization of color conflict would not be exist. The novel unfolds the story of Bride, also known as Lula Ann who is born with dark black color. She receives ill treatment by her own parents and gets negative rejection because of having black skin. Brides dark color ruins her golden childhood period. Louis Bridewell rejects Bride from accepting as his baby. Similarly, Sweetness breeds Bride with harsh treatment and cruelty. The research study will primarily focus on to address the color conflict faced by child protagonist Lula Ann.

Slave Narratives

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ernest
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Autobiographical Accounts

Slave narratives emerged in the 18th century to testify to the inhumanity of the practice of slavery. Often autobiographical accounts, but sometimes written by others or dictated to an amanuensis who took dictation, these accounts were celebrated in the United States as a powerful new genre, and they became associated primarily with slavery in the United States. Published both before and after the abolition of slavery, the narratives were never devoted solely to the abolition of slavery. Rather, they were attempts to represent the experiences, and argue for the authority, of those who experienced first-hand the ideological contradictions and the racial oppression fundamental to the maintenance of the system of slavery. These were stories deeply relevant long after the legal end of slavery—but the slave narratives were for many years either overlooked or decidedly dismissed as reliable historical sources, and they were not recognized as valuable literary documents for even longer. Eventually, historians and literary scholars alike began to embrace this genre of writing and recognized as well that it was a genre defined less by form than by purpose. Although often associated with book-length autobiographies by such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, or Booker T. Washington, the genre of slave narratives has come to include virtually any testimony of the enslaved, related in whatever form. What has come to matter, in the end, is precisely the authority of the enslaved that early writers struggled to establish.

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.

Longing, Nostalgia, and Golden Age Politics: The American Jeremiad and the Power of the Past

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Political Ideal ◽  
American Society

I assess several politically powerful ways of drawing on the past in the search for solutions to problems in the present. To probe these dynamics, I turn to the American jeremiad, a longstanding form of political rhetoric that explicitly invokes the past and laments the nation's falling-away from its virtuous foundations. I begin by focusing on the Christian Right's traditionalist jeremiad, which offers both nostalgic and Golden Age rhetoric in its assessment of the United States' imperiled national promise. I argue that, despite differences in the historical location of their ideals and the significant rhetorical power that they bring to political life, such nostalgic and Golden Age narratives represent a constraining political ideal, one ultimately incapable of doing justice to an increasingly diverse American society. I argue furthermore that there is another strand of the American jeremiad and conclude by sketching a different way of drawing on the past, a progressive jeremiad epitomized by the thought of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Such a jeremiad is also deeply rooted in the American tradition and offers a far more promising contribution to a diverse and pluralistic American future.

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