African Muslim Slaves: Literacy and Arabic Narratives

This thesis examines African Muslim slaves and their Arabic writings that influenced their enslavement. The first part of my research considers the historical context that weaves two American presidents together with their distant interaction with Muslim slaves. It also discusses three prominent Muslim slaves in American history: Ayyub bin Suleiman, Abdul Rahman Ibrahima, and Omar ibn Said. Throughout the discussion of the lives of these three men, I analyze their Arabic writing and their use of mimicry throughout, and the ways in which this influenced their patrons’ views of them. The second part explores their differing levels of Arabic literacy and how they were subject to varying degrees of Arabization and exoticization. The last part discusses the absence of their writing in the field of American literature and the American slave narrative genre while arguing for their inclusion in these areas.

SLAVE RESISTANCE AND DECOLONIZING CARIBBEAN HISTORY IN ANDREA LEVY’S THE LONG SONG

Set during the final days of Slavery on the island of Jamaica, Andrea Levy’s 2010 novel, The Long Song is a neo-slave narrative that explores the nature of slave resistance and colonial historiographical control. When read through a postcolonial lens, The Long Song takes the form of a counter-discourse, where the main character of Miss July offers a corrective to the dominant white narratives of Caribbean history. This essay argues that the experience of resistance in Levy’s narrative is one of literary mimicry, analysing July’s written resistance as it answers back to and confronts the colonial narratives that disregard the oppressed individual experience from history. Levy, in reanimating the history of Jamaican slavery by aligning her text with the unheard ‘History From Below’ perspective, demonstrates and replicates the unreliable narratives orchestrated by those ‘From Above’. As such, both Levy and her fictional July employ a method of historiographic metafiction to reclaim the previously silenced voice of the Jamaican slaves that the hegemonic White Planter class seek to oppress and obliterate from historical record. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0751/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

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

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.

The Train Is Always Leaving

Director Barry Jenkins’s body of work to date demonstrates an exquisite devotion to the art of blackness as an aesthetic and cultural practice. On the occasion of Jenkins’ latest work—the television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 book, The Underground Railroad—Film Quarterly contributor Michael Gillespie speaks with Jenkins about his craft, his process, and his acutely cinephilic attention to black visual and expressive culture. The series poses a stunningly exacting sense of the slave narrative coupled with an ambitious charting of antebellum nineteenth-century America, at once familiar and uncanny. As visual historiography, The Underground Railroad enacts an irreconcilable challenge to the writing of history and, furthermore, to the political and aesthetic capacities of televisual seriality. Jenkins’s conception of the series resonates as a fantastical and haunting restipulation of the idea of America—and a crucial reimagining of the rendering of blackness.