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This paper explores the ritual and spiritual significance of baptism during the Antebellum period. Historical accounts suggest that enslaved Africans possessed a keen interest in the rite despite numerous restrictions placed on it by the Christian Church. While it is possible that enslaved persons found the rite and subsequent symbols of the Christian faith to be similar to previously held African beliefs – something that may have contributed to the conditions under which they recognized and eventually protested their bondage – various slave narratives reveal that the rite was often reinterpreted to fit the specific needs and agendas of persons who participated in it. To that end, the paper concludes that for diasporic Africans, baptism ultimately came to be viewed as a form of mystical-political engagement – a ritual whose end was the existential, spiritual, and physical liberation of a people from bondage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a unique examination of the 1930s Federal Writers' Project interviews, focusing on the narratives of three formerly enslaved women – Matilda Brooks, Carrie Nancy Fryer, and Rachel Sullivan. They share the experience of having been enslaved by the same man, Francis W. Pickens, on his South Carolinian plantations. Through the lens of these narratives, the article investigates the complex interplay between personal memory and historical context, acknowledging the inherent challenges these accounts present due to their creation during the racially prejudiced era of the Jim Crow South and the economic hardship of the Depression. These interviews provide a singularly concentrated insight into the contest over the enslaved experience between those enslaved, their interlocuters, and their enslaver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the abolitionist narrative, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, through the anthropological lens of ethnography. Equiano’s account, though not without controversy, contributes to the evolution of an African cultural consciousness that would span across multiple continents. In that sense, while this autobiography seems to follow the literary pattern of its contemporary slave narratives, it is also countercultural and qualifies as “anti-ethnography”. The review presented here focuses on two sections of Equiano’s work: (1) the Afrocentric account of Ibo culture and (2) the cultural commentary regarding enslavement in the Americas. For each section, Equiano’s deviation from the traditional slave narrative is highlighted and analyzed.

This essay considers the abolitionist narrative, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, through the anthropological lens of ethnography. Equiano's account, though not without controversy, contributes to the evolution of an African cultural consciousness that would span across multiple continents. In that sense, while this autobiography seems to follow the literary pattern of its contemporary slave narratives, it is also countercultural and qualifies as "anti-ethnography". The review presented here focuses on two sections of Equiano's work: (1) the Afrocentric account of Ibo culture and (2) the cultural commentary regarding enslavement in the Americas. For each section, Equiano's deviation from the traditional slave narrative is highlighted and analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary work in Black Studies reflects the urgency of integrating lived experience into scholarly work. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe employ autobiographical frames and anecdotes in their writing in order to legitimate historically undervalued forms of knowledge production, and, as Hartman writes, to "counter the violence of abstraction." Despite the efficacy of this methodology, however, the move itself remains under-theorized, even as scholars advocate for the necessity of taking seriously the intellectual labor and output of Black female academics. "The Actual Scale of Breathing" examines the genealogy of Black feminist writers from slave narratives to the contemporary who find themselves in the impossible position of wanting to speak from experience but find the work of self-disclosure harmful. I argue that these writers innovate form to both refuse unearned access to interiority – specifically to white readers – while at the same time cultivating community through the incorporation of a polyphonic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. citizens are debating whether slavery and white supremacy are core constituents of the United States, whether white children should be troubled by learning the brutalities of slavery and life under Jim Crow laws, and whether racial reparations are due to African Americans for the centuries of economic, political, and social oppression they have endured. While many white folks prefer to ignore or demean calls for reparations, others have turned to reparative genealogy. They are inquiring deeply into their ancestors' relationships to chattel slavery and white supremacy, committed to reckoning with their own and their ancestors' racial debts. They seek to develop what sociologist W. E. Du Bois called "double consciousness." In order to protect themselves, African Americans had to try and see through the eyes of white people, as well as their own. But white folks too rarely attempt to see themselves through the eyes of Black people. During slavery, how were whites seen by Blacks? Philosopher George Yancy urges white people to engage in the work of developing double consciousness so they can see, as most people of color do, the pernicious white and class advantages that haunt us. My ancestors were enslavers in North Carolina. I turned to slave narratives from Black North Carolinians to distill what they observed about white people. Their descriptions point to individual and cultural pathologies: dehumanizing, pathological narcissism, authoritarian character, greed, cruelty, sadism, the policing of racial borders, paranoia, absence of deserved shame and moral injury. These understandings underline some of the psychosocial tasks before us as white people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship on the autobiography Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb prioritizes Bibb’s masculinity and the impact of slavery on Black families, often overlooking the complex experiences of enslaved Black women such as Bibb’s first wife Malinda within such a narrative. Amy Lewis’s article “Who’ll Speak for Malinda?” distinguishes itself by offering an alternative narrative focusing on Malinda’s experience. My paper builds on Lewis’s work by arguing that despite condemning slavery, Bibb’s narrative inadvertently perpetuates Malinda’s symbolic annihilation. Through a close reading of Bibb, my study attempts to reveal how enslaved women’s experiences are often omitted, trivialized, and condemned in American antebellum literature. By devoting particular attention to the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved women, this paper responds to Amy Lewis’s call for alternate narratives and offers a critical shift in reading and interpreting depiction and omission of Black women in ex-enslaved narratives throughout nineteenth-century antebellum America. This approach has the potential to uncover the complex realities of Black women to offer valuable insights into their lives and experiences, thus challenging dominant interpretations of slave narratives.

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The publication of Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994) coincided with a conference that I co-organised with her called 'Modernity, Culture and "the Jew"' (1994). We both expected the conference to be a modest event, but it turned out to be over-subscribed with many hundreds in attendance. In the light of our conference, my essay explores some of the reasons why the 1990s was thought of as an 'age of testimony' which is addressed in Auto/biographical Discourses and subsequent essays by Laura. The essay will then compare the playfulness of the autobiographical genre with the ethical seriousness of Holocaust testimonies and slave narratives. At the heart of the essay is Laura's conceptualisation of autobiography and its connections with those who write testimonial memoirs in extremis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how antebellum slave narratives by self-liberated individuals in the United States, which were circulated and read in Canada, are contextualized within a wider body of little-known stories about slavery in Canada. Critics have argued that antebellum slave narratives by self-liberated people are part of the Canadian literary canon, but they have not explored the connection between slave narratives and Canadian newspapers, which recirculated narratives about slavery. This article uses Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext, functioning as the “threshold” to a text, to place a slave narrative back into the threshold of the newspaper that framed it for its religious readers. The self-liberated Wesleyan preacher and abolitionist Thomas H. Jones first arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick in May 1851, and in 1853 his narrative was reprinted in Saint John. The article shares the results of research on two religious newspapers in Nova Scotia and three popular Saint John newspapers, 1851–53, arguing that Thomas H. Jones’s The Experience of Thomas Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years was read within a context that gave priority to its evangelical imperatives. Through examining a wider body of newspaper narratives that feature fictional enslaved African American characters and function as moral tales for evangelical readers, this article provides a more contextual reading of Jones’s narrative in Nova Scotia. When we place booklength slave narratives back into a wider body of newspaper narratives, it problematizes an oversimplified view of Canadian antislavery divorced from other imperatives and agendas. Book-length narratives, in their US and Canadian circulation context, should be read alongside lesser-known newspaper narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship on the autobiography Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb prioritizes Bibb’s masculinity and the impact of slavery on Black families, often overlooking the complex experiences of enslaved Black women such as Bibb’s first wife Malinda within such a narrative. Amy Lewis’s article “Who’ll Speak for Malinda?” distinguishes itself by offering an alternative narrative focusing on Malinda’s experience. My paper builds on Lewis’s work by arguing that despite condemning slavery, Bibb’s narrative inadvertently perpetuates Malinda’s symbolic annihilation. Through a close reading of Bibb, my study attempts to reveal how enslaved women’s experiences are often omitted, trivialized, and condemned in American antebellum literature. By devoting particular attention to the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved women, this paper responds to Amy Lewis’s call for alternate narratives and offers a critical shift in reading and interpreting depiction and omission of Black women in ex-enslaved narratives throughout nineteenth-century antebellum America. This approach has the potential to uncover the complex realities of Black women to offer valuable insights into their lives and experiences, thus challenging dominant interpretations of slave narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Equiano's turn to performance and spectacle in his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in relation to the eighteenth-century stage practice known as "freedom of the scenes." Widely regarded as the "prototype" of all subsequent slave narratives, the Narrative is infused with instances of racial mimicry, including whiteface and blackface, as well as self-fashioning through dress and style—scenes that evince potential for understanding Equiano's more radical abolitionist vision. In foregrounding race and mimicry, Equiano not only takes on the techniques of what was emerging in his lifetime as "blackface," but he reverses the dynamic, appropriating "whiteness" in whiteface acts in order to offer a sustained critique of racial injustice. By strategically positioning himself before audiences through mimicry, fashion and style, Equiano demonstrates how performance cultures help Black Atlantic subjects to constitute themselves as a people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Versants: Revista Suiza de Literaturas Románicas is the property of University Library of Bern and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article seeks both to model an approach to African and diasporic ethnonyms and to contribute to a long-running debate on the significance of "Mina"/ "Amina," an ethnonym that was widespread throughout the Americas. In a narrow sense, it argues that the term "Amina," as used in one key source, C.G.A. Oldendorp's history of the Moravian missions in the Danish Caribbean, signified the Asante state, specifically, and not the broader pan-Akan identity implied in some sources, nor the narrower "Aquambo" identity that emerges from others. More broadly, it proposes that the proper historical contextualization of ethnonyms is essential to understanding the process of identity formation in the Diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to skepticism about authenticity, facts became a central trope in the American slave-narrative genre. Authors bolstered their credibility by emphasizing factual details about the barbarity of enslavement on Southern plantations. Based on interviews conducted with Cudjo Lewis, believed to be the last known surviving African slave in America, Zora Neale Hurston's posthumously published Barracoon expands the slave narrative's borders by unpacking the ramifications of transnational betrayal. Lewis's harrowing memory of the African culprits who captured and sold him to white slave traders complicates the slave narrative's adherence to facts. Although the transatlantic slave trade, created and operated by Europeans and Americans, was a greater evil than the slave-trading practices carried out by Africans, Lewis's betrayal by his own African neighbours reveals an existential trauma often ignored by the facts of slave narratives. Barracoon is Hurston as her most subversive, choosing to explore the unresolved complications of a truthful lived experience instead of the clarifying comfort of contained facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory implies a connection with the past that is indirect, mediated by the imagination and desire, transmitted to descendants or generations that have no memory of the traumatic event, but it can also entail a possible yearning to reconnect with the historical past as testimony, remembering and collective memory. This article focuses on this reconnection with the past with the aim of reading, questioning and analyzing traumatic memories of times past in selected works by four nineteenth and twentieth-century African American women writers (Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison) whose texts and characters carry the burden of traumatic memories and the will to share postmemories.

This article argues that Black writers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a critical knowledge of how legal documentation functions to produce racialized structures of power and Black vulnerability at law. In literature that reckons with slavery's legal afterlife, particularly antebellum slave narratives, post-Reconstruction novels, and neo-slave narratives, Black authors frequently represent legal documents as pivotal to legal personhood and theorize how these documents produce vulnerability to violence and dispossession. The adversarial relationship with contract law that Black people have experienced throughout US history has uniquely positioned Black writers to produce a critical knowledge of law's structures of power. These writers reveal the mechanisms by which legal authorities manipulated the legal contracts that as texts stipulated protections for Black subjects yet in practice failed to accomplish those protections when white legal authorities refused to carry them out. Building on critical race theory and law and literature scholarship, this article proposes a heightened awareness for how race interacts with legal procedure, particularly during the material processes involved in a document's creation and execution. Focusing on law's materiality, this article uncovers an understudied literary vein in which Black authors represent documents as materially fragile and vulnerable to destruction in order to theorize law as a series of practices enacted by persons inhabiting bodies marked by race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of the "Plantationocene," or how plantation slavery has influenced climate history, and the social consequences of racial capitalism. The slave narrative "Slavery in the United States," by Charles Ball, and the contemporary neo-slave narratives "The Water Dancer," by Ta-Nehisi Coates and "The Underground Railroad," by Colson Whitehead, are examined.

The paper presents a conceptual map of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese translations of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Solomon Northup from 1920 to the present. It considers the problems and advantages of a regional East Asian translation history, including issues of internationalism, sharing mass traumas and resistances, ideological misappropriation, reader reception, and de-centering analytic binarisms. The paper then turns to paratexts to discuss the numerous translations of Washington's Up from Slavery, particularly the social development messages these translations sought to promote throughout East Asia. Given declining reader interest in Booker T. Washington in the twenty-first century, it then examines the more recent popularity of Frederick Douglass in translation editions as a symbolic leader of resistance against slavery. A conclusion addresses the East Asian translation history of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave and the contemporary status of translated slave narratives as a global commodity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a globalized world in which cultural contaminations represent a direct challenge for education, it is essential to provide teaching tools that facilitate students' approach to global history issues. In order to try to explain the origin and evolution of complex phenomena such as slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, it is necessary to use teaching materials that allow students to understand their fundamental characteristics in a simple but critical way. Black Codes and slave narratives can be useful resources in this perspective.

Food is never just food; it is also an instrument of power in a Foucaultian sense. Food is simultaneously a rhetorical tool of dominance and a means of insubordination/defiance. As depicted within slave narratives food is a site of material and symbolic struggle, serving as a means of oppression and resistance. In this study I will examine how enslaved African Americans used the production and consumption of food, as well as discourse about food, as a rhetorical means of resistance. While Michel Foucault produced the theoretical scaffolding that rethinks power and resistance, his theories can be placed in a productive dialogue with the rhetorical studies of Kenneth Burke, Gillian Symon’s general conception of rhetorical resistance, as well as more specifically with James Scott’s and Elizabeth Janeway’s theories of the everyday resistance of the “weak.” Through these analytical lenses, I will place particular focus upon the role of food in slave narratives as a rhetorical means of defining and disputing identity, of establishing and violating various boundaries, and of challenging the status quo of plantations.

The value of the interviews conducted with the formerly enslaved of America's South by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s can tell us much not just about antebellum enslavement but about the long-term emotional impact for families and individuals of the Civil War. They can provide a different perspective from the immediate responses to the war experience that scholars whose focus is on the refugee experience, the refugee camps, and the health crises that often accompanied freedom have relied on. Although the reliability of childhood memories has been questioned, for this article the extent to which accurate recall of enslavement in older age is compromised by chronological distance or neurological condition is less important than the ways in which in the Civil War is located within the autobiographical memory of the interviewee. What it finds is that the emotional echoes of that conflict are more complicated than we might suppose, evincing a combination of pride in personal as well as familial involvement in support of the Union, veiled critiques of enslaver behaviour during the war, and accounts of active involvement in escaping enslavement that together constructed an emancipatory narrative without the trauma and terror of an enslaved past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Res Rhetorica is the property of Polish Rhetoric Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The purpose of this academic paper is to analyze and understand the history of racism, its origins and its reason for being. The importance of this study is that racism is today a serious problem that is claiming several lives. Understanding its origins is essential to achieve a society in which this mentality has been completely eradicated and deconstructed. Beginning in the 15th century with the arrival of the first Europeans in Africa, the theme of the slave trade, the discovery of America and the first movements for the liberation of slaves will be discussed. Once the history of the era of segregation and its liberation in the United States has been recounted, the evolution of the Black Lives Matter fight will be analyzed and with it, the events in America with the George Floyd affair and the BLM demonstrations. Slavery, abolitionism and its origins in the Quaker community, segregation, civil war, and the institutionalized racism in which we live today will be analyzed. Mentions of the stories known as "slave narratives," will also be included. Thus, it has been concluded that racism has been a part of the modern world for centuries. It has shaped much of what today's society is, so getting rid of it will be a difficult task, but very necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the 2nd of November 2018, an unusual gathering took place at the Theatre Hall of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka where Paul Lovejoy, a Professor of History at York University in Canada, was hosted as the guest lecturer. His lecture dwelt on Gustavus Vassa (Olaudah Equiano) and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Representation, Identity and Reality. The curiosity of faculty members and students at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka around the thought process of this leading Africanist Historian made for a very fruitful event. The various debates raised by the iconoclastic scholar tampered with my sense of judgment as the convener; thus, I was convinced to re-evaluate Equiano's narratives, particularly focusing on its gender dimension as well as its exploration of women's involvement in pre-colonial Igbo warfare. This paper examines the views of academics on Equiano's narratives on warfare, especially Equiano's various enigmatic assumptions he raises. In lieu of this, the thesis of this paper is that contemporary Igbo studies have a lot to gain from Equiano's narratives in the reconstruction of the historiography of pre-colonial Igbo warfare, especially regarding the neglected role that women have played, as this is a fact not readily accepted by many professional Igbo historians. Furthermore, using Equiano's narratives, this paper concludes that women were relegated in traditional Igbo settings, and the claim that Igbo society was democratic and republican was over exaggerated by nationalist historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes the installation of a lyrical circuit in Havana in the early 19th century, in order to observe opera and slavery as themes that appear intertwined in three narratives dated from that same time and place: Autobiografía de un esclavo, by Juan Francisco Manzano, Cecilia Valdés, by Cirilo Villaverde, and Viaje a La Habana, by the Countess of Merlin, all of which were authored by the Cuban writers between 1834 and 1844. All three draw a multifaced panorama of 19th century Havana, in which opera is portrayed as an axis in the city's cultural and social gears, and slavery is the element that puts in motion and lubricates those gears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an examination of Cuban sociologist Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón, a ethnographic oral history of the life of an ex-slave, this essay consider the manners in which radical anti-slavery have been remembered and appropriated into national narratives, with attention to who has taken the responsibility of textualizing these memories, and who these memories are purported to represent.  Barnet’s Biografía narrates the life of Esteban Montejo (circa 1860-1973), a man born into Cuban slavery at the end of the nineteenth century, and provides the reader with a transcription of Montejo’s spoken testimony of his experiences as a slave, as a fugitive, as a paid mill-worker, and as a revolutionary independence fighter which was published during his lifetime as a testament to the trajectory of Cuban national identity.  To rescue his story and make it known nationally and internationally represents the hegemonic cultural authorities desire to create a more representative national imaginary through the inclusion of radical black figures.

The aim of this paper is to study the Spanish translations of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, two neo-slave narratives that were published in the 1970s. It examines how Black English, the lexicon of slavery, and proper nouns have been recreated in the Spanish target texts. The linguistic variety spoken by the secondary characters in Flight to Canada and by the slaves in Kindred makes readers aware of the language of the dispossessed Other. Butler’s and Reed’s novels were published simultaneously in Spain in 2018 and translated by Amelia Pérez de Villar and Inga Pellisa, respectively. This paper observes how translators’ choices play a key role in the portrayal of alterity in literary texts.

Review of Slavery and Class in the American South A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840-1865, by William L. Andrews.

The article explores the life of formerly enslaved African American dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley. Topics discussed include her significant association with former U.S. First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, the controversies surrounding her 1868 memoir "Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House," and the relationship between Black and White women in the Southern U.S. during the 19th century.

After escaping from slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Frederick Douglass transformed himself into a national figure for freedom, a stance he conveyed through his prolific writings. A review of Douglass' three autobiographies and speeches, two recent scholarly biographies, and destination management organization (DMO) websites in three key states were conducted. The review revealed several key omissions in the tourism promotion of Douglass by DMOs in relation to places and properties mentioned in his writings and by his biographers. These omissions were investigated by consulting independent literary tourism scholarship and by conducting on-the-ground observations in Talbot County, Maryland. The results of the overall review suggest possible improvements in future tourism policymaking and action, specifically, the addition of new Frederick Douglass sites and activities to join existing ones promoted on DMO websites. This research also revealed the need for a public-private partnership between official state-, city- and county-level DMOs with key landowners in Talbot County, Maryland to pursue more access to the properties where Douglass was a slave. Such a partnership could also seek funding for and help determine the ideal placement of a Douglass-themed national-level historic park in the landscape of Douglass' enslavement. Lessons learned from this research can be applied to any literary figure to document current literary tourism opportunities, identify omissions and to propose additional sites and activities, not just African Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]