Transcript African American Slave Narrative • Equiano's Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) considered as the.

African American Slave
Narrative
• Equiano's Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the
African (1789) considered as the formative
example early in the tradition
• The book established the emblematic subtitle
“written by himself/herself”
• Most well-known examples of the 19th century:
Frederick *Douglass, William Wells *Brown, and
Harriet A. *Jacobs
• “end of the tradition:” thousands of oral histories
of former slaves gathered by the Federal
Writers' Project in the 1920s and 1930s
• Purposes:
– narratives became virtual testaments in the
hands of abolitionists proclaiming the
antislavery gospel during the antebellum era
in the United States
– exposed the inhumanity of the slave system
– Truth/authenticity: proving both the credibility
of the personal account and its representative
quality for the treatement of slaves in general
– gave evidence of the humanity of the African
American, esp. the intellectual equalities and
capacities of African Americans
• Importance of the narrative as evidence of
intellectual acumen
• Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of
Virginia
• “Comparing them by their faculties of memory they
are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I
think once could scarcely be found capable of
tracing and comprehending the investigations of
Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull,
tasteless, and anomalous. [. . .] But never yet could I
find that a black had uttered a thought above the
level of plain narration: never see even an
elementary trait of painting or sculpture. [. . .] Misery
is often the parent of the most affecting touches in
poetry.—Among the blacks is misery enough, God
knows, but no poetry. [. . .] Religion indeed has
produced a Phyllis Whateley [sic.]; but it could not
produce a poet. The compositions published under
her name are below the dignity of criticism. The
heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the
author of that poem.”
• Slave narratives were the dominant genre
of writings by African Americans during
and after the Civil War
• They reached from a few pages in length
to large, independently published volumes
(e.g. Frederick Douglass and Harriet
Jacobs)
• earliest slave narratives have strong
affinities with popular white American
accounts of Indian captivity and Christian
conversion in the New World
• first known American slave narrative, A
Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings,
and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton
Hammon, a Negro Man (1760)
• Most narratives from the late eighteenth
century decry the slavery of sin much
more than the sin of slavery
• with the rise of the militant *antislavery
movement in the early nineteenth century
came a new demand for slave narratives
that would highlight the harsh realities of
slavery itself
• abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison
were convinced that the eyewitness
testimony of former slaves against slavery
would touch the hearts and change the
minds of many in the northern population
of the United States who were either
ignorant of or indifferent to the plight of
African Americans in the South
• by mid 19th century developed a
standardized form of autobiography in
which personal memory and a rhetorical
attack on slavery blend to produce a
powerful expressive tool both as literature
and as propaganda
• Antebellum slave narratives are typically have a
center of the slave’s account with a white
framing apparatus “authenticating” the slave’s
narrative and experience
• Framing by whites attest to the reliability and
good character of the narrator and calls attention
to what the narrative will reveal about the moral
abominations of slavery
• former slave's contribution to the text centers on
his or her rite of passage from slavery in the
South to freedom in the North
• Influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Most well-known and most successful:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave, Written by
Himself (1845)
• Selling more than thirty thousand copies in
the first five years
• Garrison’s preface: focusing on
representativeness of Douglass
experience, but also acknowledging his
individuality
• Frederick
Douglass
(18181895)
•
•
Source:
www.pbs.org
• Douglass: focusing on the slave as an
evolving person who is striving for physical
and mental/spiritual freedom
• Narratives increasingly highlighting
rhetorical self-consciousness by
incorporating into their stories trickster
motifs from African American folk culture,
extensive literary and Biblical allusions,
and a picaresque perspective on the
meaning of the slave's flight from bondage
to freedom
• 1850s and 60s:
– Crisis of the Fugitive Slave Law and
beginning of the Civil War
– In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855),
Douglass revealed that his search for freedom
had not reached its fulfillment among the
abolitionists
– personal dedication to civil rights activism in
the North as well as agitation against slavery
in the South
– Harriet Jacobs: the first African American
female slave to author her own narrative
– shows how sexual exploitation made slavery
especially oppressive for black women
Harriet Jacobs (18131897)
Source:
• in demonstrating how she fought back and
ultimately gained both her own freedom
and that of her two children, Jacobs
proved the inadequacy of the image of
victim that had been pervasively applied to
female slaves in the male-authored slave
narrative
• Quotation: “My master had power and law
on his side; I had a determined will. There
is might in each” (Incidents in the Life of a
Slave GirI)
• Advertisement
for the capture
of Harriet
Jacobs
(Edenton, N.C.,
1835).
• After the Civil War:
– Narratives stress need to establish African
American communities and institutions
– Less focus on individual struggle for freedom
– emphasizing that slaves not only survived
their bondage but were well-prepared by its
rigors to take care of themselves both
individually and communally
– slave narrators after emancipation argued the
readiness of the freedman and woman for full
participation in the new social and economic
order
• Most prominent: Booker T. Washington's
Up from Slavery (1901)
• promotion of African American progress
and interracial cooperation
• Great Depression helped spur the gradual
return to autobiography of themes of
resistance and struggle against
oppression
• E.g.: Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945)
• Recent adaptations of the slave narrative:
– The Autobiography of Malcolm X
– Toni Morrison, Beloved
• antebellum slave narrator portrays slavery
as a condition of extreme physical,
intellectual, emotional, and spiritual
deprivation, a kind of hell on earth
• Precipitating the narrator's decision to
escape is some sort of personal crisis,
such as the sale of a loved one or a dark
night of the soul in which hope contends
with despair for the spirit of the slave
• Impelled by faith in God and a
commitment to liberty and human dignity
comparable (the slave narrative often
stresses) to that of America's founders, the
slave undertakes an arduous quest for
freedom that climaxes in his or her arrival
in the North
• renaming oneself and dedicating one's
future to antislavery activism
• Sold and circulated at anti-slavery
meetings; published and distributed in
England; multiple editions