Narratives of Dependency

Textual Representations of Slavery, Captivity, and Other Forms of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies

Elke Brüggen, Marion Gymnich

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111381916
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: Social Sciences

Given that strong asymmetrical dependencies have shaped human societies throughout history, this kind of social relation has also left its traces in many types of texts. Using written and oral narratives in attempts to reconstruct the history of asymmetrical dependency comes along with various methodological challenges, as the 15 articles in this interdisciplinary volume illustrate. They focus on a wide range of different (factual and fictional) text types, including inscriptions from Egyptian tombs, biblical stories, novels from antiquity, the Middle High German Rolandslied, Ottoman court records, captivity narratives, travelogues, the American gift book The Liberty Bell, and oral narratives by Caribbean Hindu women. Most of the texts discussed in this volume have so far received comparatively little attention in slavery and dependency studies. The volume thus also seeks to broaden the archive of texts that are deemed relevant in research on the histories of asymmetrical dependencies, bringing together perspectives from disciplines such as Egyptology, theology, literary studies, history, and anthropology.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction – Narratives of Dependency: Examining the History of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies through the Lens of Narrative Texts
• ‘I Am the Champion Who Has No Peer!’: The Language of Dependency in the Tomb ‘Biographies’ of Two Ancient Egyptian Nomarchs
• Narrating Dependency: The Relationship between David and Solomon of Jerusalem and Hiram of Tyre in Hebrew Bible Traditions
• Transforming Exodus – Second Temple Liberation Narratives from the Perspective of Historical Narratology
• Slavery and its Narratives in Ancient Novels – Stories of ‘Decline and Fall’?
• The Dark Side of Proximity: Advice and Betrayal in the Middle High German Rolandslied
• Dependency Narrated in a Biographic Manual from the Mamluk Sultanate: The al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ fī aʿyān al-qarn al-tāsiʿ by al-Sakhāwī (1427–1497)
• Slave Voices in Ottoman Court Records – A Narrative Analysis of the Istanbul Registers from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
• Narrativity and Dependency: The Captivity of an Ottoman Official in Saint Petersburg (1771–1775)
• ‘The Suffering of the Russians’: The Narration of Captivity and Suffering in the Imaginations about the Ottoman Stranger in Pavel Levašov’s Writings
• Context Matters – The Importance of the Narrative Situation and Actors who Transmit Information for Representations of Experienced Captivity: The Case of the Enslaved Russian Captive Iakov Zinov’ev (1838)
• Narrative, Affective Communities, and Abolitionist Cosmopolitanism in the American Gift Book The Liberty Bell (1839–1858)
• Narrative Self-Representations of Enslaved People under Slavery Regimes – Myth or Reality?
• Reading Asymmetrical Dependencies in the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Women Travelers in Ottoman Lands
• Hierarchies and Dependency as a Narrative Legitimation Strategy for Female Leadership in an Islamist Framework: A Case-Study of Zainab al-Ghazali’s Prison Memoirs
• Tattooed Dependencies: Sensory Memory, Structural Violence and Narratives of Suffering among Caribbean Hindu Women
• Index