Racial Violence, Racial Capitalism, and Reading Revolution: Harriet Jacobs, John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Black Bodies

Meditating on the continued racial speculation on black bodies in our contemporary moment, the epilogue brings the link between racial violence, capitalism, and evidentiary epistemology into sharper focus. Drawing on Harriet Jacobs’s insights into the role racial violence-as-spectacle plays in the construction of wealth, the epilogue considers what ex-slave narrators bring to contemporary debates around racial violence, such as the debate over whether or not police body cameras will resolve or lessen unremitting episodes of police brutality on people of color. While the book opens with an analysis of contemporary visual slave narratives at the end of the 20th century, the epilogue ends with a consideration of the slave narrative form in the 21st century, considering works that contribute to contemporary figurations of slavery but are not all strictly within the slave narrative tradition I have defined, including John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker.

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)

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.

Unsentimental Historicizing: The Neo-Slave Narrative Tradition and the Refusal of Feeling

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Rail Network ◽  
The Us ◽  
Liberal Citizenship

Abstract Rooted partially in the US sentimental tradition, neo-slave narratives often feature lyrical language, emphasize the emotional experience of enslaved characters, and evoke the reader’s sympathy and empathy. Highlighting the use of sentimental conventions in neo-slave narratives including Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (2007), and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), this essay explores the tension between sentimentality and the radical political goals of neo-slave narratives. This essay analyzes Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) as a neo-slave narrative that rejects rather than revises sentimental conventions. The novel’s central conceit, a literal subterranean rail network, illustrates how anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism interlock to materially and discursively enable the US nation-state and liberal citizenship; sentimental conventions facilitate processes of containment and capture that allow this infrastructure to function smoothly rather than disrupting it. In contrast, Underground foregrounds the prosaic over the lyrical, veils the interiority of its characters, and unsettles the reader’s desire to feel with or for the humanity of the enslaved. The novel models an alternative way of engaging slavery as an infrastructure, gesturing toward a mode of fugitive affiliation premised on acts of tangible care rather than affective identification or the possession of interiority.

Behind the Scenes and Inside Out: Elizabeth Keckly’s Use of the Slave Narrative Form

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
White House ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Inside Out ◽  
Racial Slavery

Advancing a formal reading of Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), this chapter shows how Elizabeth Keckly undermines the ideological presumptions that link blackness with enslavement and whiteness with literacy and truth by inverting the racial protocols underlying slave narratives’ conventions of authentication. In Behind the Scenes it is Keckly’s letters that authenticate Mary Lincoln’s version of events, Tad Lincoln’s reading lesson which is included in place of her own, and the narrative gaze is primarily on the white bodies within the text as they take shape in her vocation, dress-making. In overturning these race rituals, which rely on fixed notions of “black” and “white,” Keckly challenges the racial protocols of the slave narrative and exposes how the form itself has been organized by the visual logic of racial slavery.

Introduction: Representational Static

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Performance Theory ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
And Performance

Using contemporary artwork as a lens onto the textual visuality of 19th-century slave narratives, this introduction to Fugitive Testimony works backwards historically to excavate ex-slave narrators’ challenge to authenticating conventions, and therefore their challenge to the assumptions motivating racial classification itself. The introduction argues that the book’s unique focus on the recursive nature of the slave narrative form unifies what have been three distinct phases of the genre’s criticism within the academy—historical, literary, and cultural studies approaches—and contributes to the historiographical contours of Atlantic studies. Drawing on literary analysis, art history, and visual and performance theory, the book connects vital early literary critical accounts of the slave narrative that examine the genre’s conventions of authentication and issues of literacy with later cultural studies approaches, including those advanced by Lindon Barrett, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, and Michael Chaney.

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.

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.

The Color of COVID-19: An Exposition of Endemic Disadvantage

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janaki Nair ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Police Brutality ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
Entire Country ◽  
The Right

“I can’t breathe.” These are the three words that reverberated in epic proportions across an entire country, resulting in one of the biggest movements for racial equity in decades. It called for action against police brutality in America, and demanded that racially-motivated violence be stopped forever. One would think the right to breathe is an undeniable one, but the year 2020 has disproved that notion in more ways than one. As the relentless COVID-19 continues to spread, I implore you to consider this question – has the pandemic put people of color in yet another situation where they cannot breathe?

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.

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