Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas

Nicole N. Aljoe, Ian Finseth, Nicole N. Aljoe, Ian Finseth

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780813936390
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Remapping the Early Slave Narrative
• Irony and Modernity in the Early Slave Narrative: Bonds of Duty, Contracts of Meaning
• Trials and Confessions of Fugitive Slave Narratives
• “They Us’d Me Pretty Well”: Briton Hammon and Cross-Cultural Alliances in the Maritime Borderlands of the Florida Coast
• Uncommon Sufferings: Rethinking Bondage in A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man
• Narrating an Indigestible Trauma: The Alimentary Grammar of Boyrereau Brinch’s Middle Passage
• “The Most Perfect Picture of Cuban Slavery”: Transatlantic Bricolage in Manzano’s and Madden’s Poems by a Slave
• Seeking a Righteous King: A Bahamian Runaway Slave in Cuba
• Literary Form and Islamic Identity in The Life of Omar Ibn Said
• Coda: Animating Absence
• Notes on Contributors
• Index