The Slave Narrative in African-American Literature: A Study of Solomon Northup, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs

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.

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Slavery and Class in the American South

10.1093/oso/9780190908386.001.0001 ◽

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.

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Post-Black Satire

Runaway Genres ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479829590.003.0004 ◽

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.

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Portraits of Piety

The AnaChronisT ◽

10.53720/kdtt3978 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 14 ◽

Author(s):

Ted Bailey

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Religious Belief ◽

African American Literature ◽

Slave Narratives ◽

Slave Narrative ◽

Real Thing ◽

Black Writing ◽

The Many ◽

Generic Strategies

This paper first examines the use of authenticating devices in the antebellum slave narratives and then goes on to analyze how the these authorial strategies are carried over from African-American autobiography into two fictionalized autobiographies from the 1850s. In particular, the paper argues for including portrayals of black religious belief as one of the many generic strategies used by antebellum slave narrators to convince their potentially skeptical audience that they were reading "the real thing." In investigating how authenticating strategies are incorporated into Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) and Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (1855-61?), the relative artistic success of the two writers is evaluated and the implications of borrowing techniques from autobiography for fiction discussed. By looking at texts from the 1850s, a decade when the slave narrative reached its height in popularity and the first fictional works in African-American literature were being composed, a glimpse is gained into a transitional moment in black writing.

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Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

Ethnic Studies Review ◽

10.1525/esr.2009.32.1.55 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 55-76

Author(s):

Quan Manh Ha

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

Black Experience ◽

Racial Issues ◽

Black Voices ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

One Year ◽

Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

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