Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas

by Nicole N. Aljoe (Editor), Ian Finseth (Editor)

Overview

Focusing on slave narratives from the Atlantic world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this interdisciplinary collection of essays suggests the importance—even the necessity—of looking beyond the iconic and ubiquitous works of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. In granting sustained critical attention to writers such as Briton Hammon, Omar Ibn Said, Juan Francisco Manzano, Nat Turner, and Venture Smith, among others, this book makes a crucial contribution not only to scholarship on the slave narrative but also to our understanding of early African American and Black Atlantic literature.

The essays explore the social and cultural contexts, the aesthetic and rhetorical techniques, and the political and ideological features of these noncanonical texts. By concentrating on earlier slave narratives not only from the United States but from the Caribbean, South America, and Latin America as well, the volume highlights the inherent transnationality of the genre, illuminating its complex cultural origins and global circulation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813936390
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	11/14/2014
Series:	New World Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	500 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nicole N. Aljoe, author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709–1838, is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University. Ian Finseth, author of Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860, is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Texas.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Remapping the Early Slave Narrative Nicole N. Aljoe 1

Irony and Modernity in the Early Slave Narrative: Bonds of Duty, Contracts of Meaning Ian Finseth 17

Trials and Confessions of Fugitive Slave Narratives Gretchen J. Woertendyke 47

"They Us'd Me Pretty Well": Briton Hammon and Cross-Cultural Alliances in the Maritime Borderlands of the Florida Coast Jeffrey Gagnon 74

Uncommon Sufferings: Rethinking Bondage in A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man Keith Michael Green 101

Narrating an Indigestible Trauma: The Alimentary Grammar of Boyrereau Brinch's Middle Passage Lynn R. Johnson 127

"The Most Perfect Picture of Cuban Slavery": Transatlantic Bricolage in Manzano's and Madden's Poems by a Slave R.J. Boutelle 143

Seeking a Righteous King: A Bahamian Runaway Slave in Cuba José Guadalupe Ortega 171

Literary Form and Islamic Identity in The Life of Omar Ibn Said Basima Kamel Shaheen 187

Coda: Animating Absence Kristina Bross 209

Notes on Contributors 225

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas is... an exciting collection because of the light it sheds on the transnational experiences of African-descended slaves and on the literary agency of understudied black authors.

Journal of American History

This volume of essays presses national, linguistic, and religious boundaries to critically engage early autobiographical writings recounting slave experiences and movements. It puts English-speaking and Protestant discourse into conversation with Hispanophone and Arabic-African texts, while simultaneously broadening our sense of what qualifies as a ‘slave narrative.’

Philip Gould

Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas is a timely reassessment of a genre that not only testifies to experiences of bondage and flight, to the potential acquisitions of freedom and franchise; it is a genre that, if interpreted expansively, is stylistically diverse, thematically rich, and remarkably transnational in its narration of New World African agency and thought prior to the 1845 rise of Frederick Douglass. This book admirably attends to ‘the global nature and circulation of the slave narrative’ across the US South as well as the Caribbean, South America, and Latin America—a broad scope especially distinctive and innovative in slave narrative studies today.

Gene Andrew Jarrett

"This volume of essays presses national, linguistic, and religious boundaries to critically engage early autobiographical writings recounting slave experiences and movements. It puts English-speaking and Protestant discourse into conversation with Hispanophone and Arabic-African texts, while simultaneously broadening our sense of what qualifies as a ‘slave narrative.’ "—Philip Gould, Brown University, author of Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America

" Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas is a timely reassessment of a genre that not only testifies to experiences of bondage and flight, to the potential acquisitions of freedom and franchise; it is a genre that, if interpreted expansively, is stylistically diverse, thematically rich, and remarkably transnational in its narration of New World African agency and thought prior to the 1845 rise of Frederick Douglass. This book admirably attends to ‘the global nature and circulation of the slave narrative’ across the US South as well as the Caribbean, South America, and Latin America—a broad scope especially distinctive and innovative in slave narrative studies today. "—Gene Andrew Jarrett, Boston University, author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature

" Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas is... an exciting collection because of the light it sheds on the transnational experiences of African-descended slaves and on the literary agency of understudied black authors. "—author of Journal of American History

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