Slave Narratives
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Slave Narratives

3 articles on Slave Narratives

• Slave Narratives

  Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

  Word Count: 10970      Includes:  Early Slave Narratives | Importance of Religion in Late-Eighteenth-Century Narratives | Slave Narratives after 1808 | Slave Narratives as Literature | Slave Narratives as Autobiography, Biography, and Fiction | Literacy: Imparting Voice, Inciting Change | Charles Ignatius Sancho: The Art of Letters | Olaudah Equiano: The Mastery of Language | Mary Prince: The Power of Truth | Bibliography | Bibliography | Bibliography

  [This entry contains three subentries dealing with slave narratives from the colonial period to the Civil War. The first article provides a discussion of the themes of American slave narratives and important early examples, while the second article provides a discussion of specific slave narratives from the perspective of literature, antislavery propaganda, and biography or autobiography. The third article provides a discussion of the slave narratives written by African former slaves in lateeighteenth-century Britain, and how they used memory to document their histories.]

  On 24 June 1700 Judge Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts published the first American antislavery document, The Selling of Joseph. In his essay

  InJohn ...
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• Slave Narratives

  Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

  Word Count: 1433      Includes:  Bibliography

  Written autobiographies and oral testimonies by escaped or freed slaves. At the conclusion of her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison sums up her retelling of one slave family's experience: “It was not a story to pass on.” There are certainly logical reasons why the story of Slaverymight never have been passed on. One, the reason Morrison suggests, was its sheer horror and trauma—those who lived through it may not have wanted to remember their experiences. A second is more practical: it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, which meant that the act of putting a story on paper was generally prohibited to them. But neither of these reasons kept former slaves from passing on their stories and leaving a record about what living as a piece of property had been like. These ...
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• Slave Narratives

  Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition

  Word Count: 6687      Includes:  Added Burdens | Storytelling Devices | Master and Mistress | Bibliography

  Slave narratives written by women occupy a special place in the long history of antebellum slave narration because female slaves suffered additional burdens based on gender. As the emancipated slave Harriet Jacobs noted, those qualities of beauty and femininity long honored in all cultures became a special curse for the female slave, because these attributes often led to sexual abuse by slave owners and overseers and male slaves. In Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), this problem is examined in several episodes in which a vulnerable female slave is forced into sexual relationships with men. These incidents, related by Cassy in Chapter XXXIV, “The Quadroon's Story,” can be considered a slave narrative in microcosm, one that exhibits the essential characteristics of the slave narrative genre. And in ...
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