Ever since the publication of the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, autobiographical testimonies were a mainstay of the abolition movement in the United States. Being or having been held as slaves and all the attendant injury is the very theme of the documents in question, which are testimonies, rather than theoretical works, because the authors maintained the first-person point of view. Since autoethnography aims at overcoming the preset mentality of the researcher in order to gain (...) insight into what it is like to live in a particular social environment, slave narratives, beyond any abolitionist agenda, may serve as a paradigm for autoethnographic interpretation of historic sources. For an understanding of the authentic perspective of the speakers, external redactions need to be filtered out when reading those documents. On the other hand, certain tropes are worth considering (such as ignorance of the speaker’s date and place of birth or stereotypical names) because these narrative gestures indicate the state of mind of the narrator. I will propose methods for finding interpretive tools to identify the Self and the world of the slave-narrators. Such interpretation relies on the close reading of narratives as I will show by examples. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is defined by Miranda Fricker as injustice done to people specifically in their capacities as knowers. Fricker argues that this injustice can be either testimonial or hermeneutical in character. A hearer commits testimonial injustice against a speaker by assigning unfairly little credibility to the speaker’s testimony. Hermeneutical injustice exists in a society when the society lacks the concepts necessary for members of a group to understand their social experiences. We argue that epistemic injustice is necessary to permit the (...) functioning of race-based chattel slavery and that this necessity is illustrated in slave narratives. The testimonies of slave narratives like those of Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Mary Prince identify and transform a culture of race-based epistemic hermeneutic and testimonial injustice. Through telling their stories, these agents establish their capacity as knowers and thus resist the epistemic injustice that undergirds the oppressive system of race-based chattel slavery. The authors of slave narratives not only identify race-based epistemic injustice, but actively fight against it. (shrink)

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th–century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19th–century Maryland and the other in 20th–century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time–periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization (...) of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America's bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler's fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler's fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Framed by a critical assessment of R. M. Hare’s classic paper “What Is Wrong With Slavery?,” this article argues that traditional forms of philosophical analysis miss chattel slavery’s specifically racialized harm. A crucial reason is the failure to attend to how slavery was experienced by those who were enslaved. To remedy this neglect, and adapting Calvin Warren’s reading of the Dred Scott decision, I show that slave narratives are rich philosophical resources for thinking about the existential reality of (...) enslavement and that they anticipate later insights from the Afro-pessimist and Black nihilist traditions. I conclude by showing how these insights construe the harm of chattel slavery in ways that are inexpressible through the kinds of traditional philosophical sense-making that Hare pursues. (shrink)

In this article, we explore two related questions. First, under what conditions, if any, can a Black person trust a white person to be a reliable ally in the context of a society founded on racial slavery? Second, under what conditions, if any, can a Black person trust a white person to be a reliable ally in the context of a white supremacist society? We follow Karen Jones and Nancy Nyquist Potter in arguing that allies must not only be competent, (...) conscientious, and accurately self-assess their epistemic capacities, but they must also signal their trustworthiness in advance to those who would trust them. Furthermore, we argue based on our readings of the slave narratives of Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass that allies must display social awareness of the social context that they share with those who would trust them and the power dynamics involved in that social context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 15 Candice Lyons Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space In the fall of 1867—just two years after the conclusion of the American Civil War—former First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, finding herself in dire financial straits, traveled incognito to New York. She hoped to sell select pieces from her famed wardrobe (...) in order to supplement her income, which was, at the time, rather meager. Accompanying the recently widowed socialite was her self-described “modiste” and “confidante ” Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved African American dressmaker who had been “intimately associated” with Lincoln for years.1 Despite the various measures undertaken to ensure the scheme’s success, including attempts to extort monied East Coast Republicans and strategic appeals to the press, it ultimately proved fruitless. Political nemeses seized on the opportunity to publicly mock Lincoln, who was seen as an “extravagant and improper” social climber, for her “pecuniary embarrassment,” treating the public auction of her clothing as a spectacle akin to the World Fair.2 Eventually, the former First Lady was forced to retreat to her home in Chicago, leaving Keckley behind to tend to her affairs. 1. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2015): Location no. 406, 54, 53. 2. Carolyn Sorisio, “Unmasking the Genteel Performer: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes and the Politics of Public Wrath,” African American Review 34 (2000): 20; Keckley, Behind the Scenes, Location no. 1321. 16 Candice Lyons This decision, however, left the ordinarily sought-after seamstress in dire straits of her own, given that the time she was compelled to dedicate to what would come to be known as “The Old Clothes Scandal ” necessitated closing down her then-thriving business in Washington, DC.3 This, coupled with the fact that indemnification for her services was not forthcoming from Mrs. Lincoln, was likely at least partially at the root of Keckley’s decision to publish her now-infamous memoir, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years A Slave and Four Years in the White House in 1868.4 Keckley explained that she penned her autobiographical text in a bid to “defend [her]self” and Lincoln against charges of impropriety following the New York incident. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, the book’s release had the exact opposite effect: Keckley’s literary disclosures were met with scorn, regarded by large swaths of white Americans, including some of the same people who had been most vocal in their condemnation of Mary Todd Lincoln, as constituting a set of socially impermissible transgressions of class, race, and gender. Sales of the book were subsequently suppressed, Keckley’s relationship with Lincoln (who had been caught off guard by the text’s release) came to an abrupt end, and there was even a brief, parodic pamphlet produced, titled Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman Who Took in Work from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis, which cast the entire ordeal as a sort of (racist) cautionary tale.5 Given the clear disdain held for Lincoln by people across the political spectrum at the time, it can be difficult to make sense of the visceral reaction prompted by Keckley’s airing of the controversial figure’s dirty laundry (pun intended). Considering the ways Behind the Scenes implicitly challenged the fixity of hierarchical distinctions between Black and white, employee and employer, however, repudiation of the work might be understood as inevitable. Further, given the “intimate” and ambiguous nature of Lincoln and Keckley’s relationship, the book may also 3. Sorisio, “Unmasking the Genteel Performer,” 19. 4. The text’s infamy is in part attributable to its anomalous structure, which rendered it distinct from many of the era’s other book-length slave narratives ; whereas monographs such as Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl centered on the author’s experience of and eventual escape from slavery, Keckley’s work deals only briefly with these matters, primarily concerning itself with the intimate affairs of the author’s (white) employer. 5. Sorisio, “Unmasking the Genteel Performer,” 19. Candice... (shrink)

A pesar de que en los estudios sobre el Imperio Mameluco (1250-1517) se ha prestado gran atención a los esclavos blancos del ejército y a los libertos, se ha pasado por alto a los esclavos negros (¿abid). En Egipto la sociedad mameluce, especialmente la sociedad militar, se caracterizaba por un discurso profundamente racial que privilegiaba lo blanco sobre lo negro. Ésta no era la única clasificación étnica/racial de gentes y grupos, ni el único mecanismo de establecer privilegios. Sin embargo, la (...) definición de los esclavos negros como subalternos, tuvo consecuencias sociales, económicas y políticas que no pueden ser ignoradas. Estas definiciones son especialmente evidentes en los relatos sobre esclavos negros que se considera que han violado los límites existentes. Mi propósito en este artículo es explorar los modos con que seis historiadores mamelucos construyen las narraciones, a menudo contradictorias, de los esclavos negros transgresores. (shrink)

Diodorus Siculus has not enjoyed a positive reputation among historians of antiquity. Since the nineteenth century hisBibliothēkēhas been dismissed as a derivative work produced by an incompetent compiler, useful often only in so far as one can mine his text for lost and, evidently, far superior works of history. Diodorus’ own input into theBibliothēkēhas been dismissed as the clumsy intervention of ‘a small man with pretensions’. In one of the sharpest expressions of the traditional view, Diodorus is not a historian (...) but ‘a mere epitomizer and an incompetent one at that’. In recent years voices of dissent have spoken up, determined to investigate Diodorus’ own contribution to ancient historiography. Their contributions have been notable for their desire to study and understand Diodorus on his own terms or to problematize his derivative use of his sources. Sacks, in particular, has argued that Diodorus’ voice can be heard in nearly every proem, a feature that occurs regularly in the text, and that Diodorus’ own views structure his analysis of historical events copied from other authors. (shrink)

In ____Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities__ which includes the first extended philosophical discussion of the works of Frederick Douglass, Cynthia Willett puts forward a novel theory of ethical subjectivity that is aimed to counter prevailing pathologies of sexist, racist Eurocentric culture. Weaving together accounts of the self drawn from African-American and European philosophies, psychoanalysis, slave narratives and sociology, Willett interrogates what Hegel locates as the core of the self: the desire for.

This chapter examines how slavery was imprinted on material culture and settlement at Gorée Island. It evaluates the changing patterns of settlement, access to materials, and emerging novel tastes to gain insights into everyday life and cultural interactions on the island. By the eighteenth century, Gorée grew rapidly as an urban settlement with a heterogeneous population including free and enslaved Africans as well as different European identities. Interaction between these different identities was punctuated with intense negotiations resulting in the emergence (...) of a truly transnational community. While these significant changes were noted in the settlement pattern and material culture recovered, the issue of slavery — critical to most oral and documentary narratives about the island — remains relatively opaque in the archaeological record. Despite this, the chapter attempts to tease out from available documentary and archaeological evidence some illumination on interaction between the different communities on the island, including indigenous slaves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave TradeStephen Auerbach (bio)Christopher L. Miller. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. xvi + 571 pp.Over the last decade scholars have shown a new interest in reconstructing the history of the French slave trade and slaveholding Atlantic. A scholarly consensus is slowly emerging around the notion (...) that the history of French slavery and colonialism is central to any understanding of the larger themes in French and Francophone history from the seventeenth century to the present. Christopher Miller’s The French Atlantic Triangle is a welcome contribution to this important subject. Miller rightly argues that France, Africa, and the Caribbean are tied together in a shared history of colonialism, slavery, and the slave trade. His goal in The French Atlantic Triangle is to reconstruct this history and illuminate its impact on modern French and Francophone cultural life.The French Atlantic Triangle is a fascinating example of research that combines methods employed in history and Francophone literary studies in order to discuss the triangular slave trade that condemned 2 million Africans to slavery on France’s Caribbean sugar islands and an untold number to their deaths during the Middle Passage. Miller’s central interest here is exploring the ways in which the slave trade and its afterlife were represented in literature and in film from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in France, Africa, and the Caribbean. In the absence of any extant Francophone slave narratives, Miller persuasively argues that fiction and later film allowed writers and filmmakers to pour their “speculations and reflections” (92) into that void. French and Francophone writers separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years were united by the desire to construct slave narratives and stories that played on the reader’s sense of pity and shame, or desire for adventure, or to convey a powerful longing for home. The result is an ambitious and substantive work. Miller clearly succeeds in demonstrating a legacy of slavery and the slave trade in France and Francophone literature, yet the picture that emerges is a muddled one; the reader is left to make sense of competing, diverse, and sometimes divergent claims. In the end, The French Atlantic Triangle is more suggestive than persuasive.The book is organized into fourteen chapters, divided into four sections, arranged chronologically and geographically. Part 1 (chaps. 1–4) is largely synthesis. Drawing heavily on the work of historians of slavery and the slave trade, Miller outlines the details of the triangular trade from its inception in the mid-seventeenth century to its first abolition in 1794, and final suppression in 1848. Chapters 1 and 2 will be a review for anyone familiar with the history of this period. Chapter 3 focuses on the Enlightenment and the slave trade. Miller rightly notes that the Enlightenment coincided with the height of French slaving activity. Examining works by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and [End Page 59] Voltaire, Miller argues that the philosophes were never much interested in the plight of African slaves, and when they did speak out on the issue it was with heavy irony or wit that only diluted their message. Miller’s analysis is convincing, though he seems unjustified in suggesting that Voltaire remained mostly quiet on the issue because he was heavily invested in the slave trade. There is no evidence for that assertion.Part 2 (chaps. 5–8) covers the period from the French Revolution to the Bourbon Restoration during which time France experienced complete upheaval from the slave rebellions in Martinique in 1789 and Saint Domingue in 1791, to the abolition of slavery in 1794 and its reimposition under Napoleon. Focusing on the writings of Olympe de Gouges, Germaine de Staël, and Claire de Duras, Miller labels the three as abolitionists because in their works they created sympathetic black characters, critiqued racial prejudice, and instilled pity in their readers. Miller brings a fresh analytical eye to well-known texts like Duras’ Ourika, and shines new light on little-known (or unknown) works like Gouge’s play Zamore et Mirza.Miller’s task here is not only to demonstrate the... (shrink)

I will look at and discuss the ideological-subject position of the ‘sympathetic’ slave-owner by employing Žižek ’s specific conception of ideology across two varying slave-narratives. I attempt to uncover how this ideology operates within the social-material reality in the texts Our Nig and Minnie's Sacrifice and the ways that the authors employed tropes in depicting this particular archetypal figure in slave-narratives. These charachter's exhibit an ideology remarkably aligned with Žižek ’s: that a certain non-knowledge of the proper (...) logic of an ideological reality is what sustains it. This suggests not only that such an archetypal figure exists across slave-narratives, but also that they deploy a communal ideology that attempts to conflate unwillingness with inability. They enable the perpetuation of the institution by their unwillingness to reject the economic benefits of slavery, which they conceive of as an inability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 96-119 [Access article in PDF] Re-Marking Slave Bodies: Rhetoric as Production and Reception Steven Mailloux There is much talk nowadays about the double nature of rhetoric: rhetoric as a practical guide for composing and rhetoric as a theoretical stance for interpreting. The two uses can be viewed as complementary, as flip sides of the same holistic approach to rhetorical studies. But they can (...) also appear in conflict: production models of writing and speaking versus reception models of reading and listening; models for inventing rhetoric versus models for analyzing it. Indeed, though the two models can be mutually supportive, they have often developed in tension within the evolution of academic disciplines over the last 125 years. Different emphases on one or the other model have resulted in different departmentalized disciplines and varied divisions within those departments, as we are all so well aware. One might even claim that advocating one or the other model has contributed significantly to the fragmentation of rhetoric as an interdiscipline during the last century and to the distribution of its parts into various academic units. In many English departments, for example, the continuing divisions between literature and composition faculty arise from contrasting professional interests in reception models focused on interpreting literary works versus production models focused on composing student texts. A similar reception/production antagonism appears in the history of speech departments separating from English departments. In 1915, when seventeen teachers of public address broke off from the National Council of Teachers of English, the production (oratory or debate) model they favored was at odds with the reception (philological or hermeneutic) model of most literature faculty. 1I don't mean to suggest that different choices between models of production and reception fully account for the academic fragmentation of rhetorical study. Nevertheless, practical antitheses do constitute disciplinary [End Page 96] identities. Antitheses between production and reception—between writing/speaking, on the one hand, and reading/listening, on the other—have variously combined with other distinctions between written texts versus oral performances as objects of study and between scientific research versus humanistic scholarship as intellectual traditions, and these assorted configurations of interpretive practices and institutional formations did help shape disciplinary identities throughout the past century. We are now faced with a situation in which rhetoric is distributed across several departments and programs, not in an integrated interdiscipline but as disciplinary fragments, where rhetorical critics in literary and cultural studies, for example, don't read deeply either in the work of rhetoric/ composition faculty in their own departments or the rhetorical scholarship produced in other departments such as communications or classics.Historically, I believe, the separation of written rhetoric (literature and composition) from oral rhetoric (public address and debate) within the academic humanities, this separation of English and speech departments, has been just as debilitating for rhetorical study as the literature/composition split within English departments alone. One might speculate about how these divisions encouraged the eventual exclusion of oratory from British and U. S. literary canons. More important, these divisions have resulted in a fragmented disciplinary approach to everything having to do with tropes, arguments, and narratives in culture, including most recently the study of local and global communication networks, old and new literacies, and past and present media revolutions.In the present essay I suggest an alternative to this disciplinary fragmentation of rhetoric. This alternative, call it rhetorical hermeneutics, learns from the more holistic approach to language arts found at the elementary and secondary levels of our U. S. educational system, where writing, speaking, reading, and listening (and sometimes viewing) are practices often taught in relation to one another. 2 Here production and reception models form parts of the same integrated framework for understanding and participating in the cultural conversations of diverse public spheres. In the following sections, I address these issues of model selection first by considering the objection that rhetorical hermeneutics is exclusively a method of reading and not a heuristic for writing. Then I move to an example of rhetorical hermeneutics in practice: a reception study of rhetorical productions... (shrink)

This paper begins with a brief examination of the contemporary American political landscape. I describe three recent events that illustrate how attempts to control the narrative about events that transpired threaten to undermine our shared reality. I then turn to Book I of Plato’s Republic to explore the potentially tyrannizing effect of Socrates’s narrative voice. I focus on his descriptions of Glaucon, Polemarchus and his slave, and Thrasymachus to show how Plato presents Socrates’s narrative activity as (...) a process that controls how the auditor understands the events that follow. I then turn to an alternate understanding of Socratic narrative which extols its philosophically and politically liberatory possibilities. I use my own previous work on Socratic narrative, Jill Frank’s Poetic Justice, and Rebecca’s LeMoine’s Plato’s Cave as three examples that emphasize the more positive dimensions of Socratic narrative. Finally, I end with a brief exploration of Cornel West’s Democracy Matters, and bell hooks’ works on pedagogy to argue for the possibility a Socratically-informed public space for political discourse. (shrink)

This article investigates Madison Smartt Bell’s Haitian trilogy as a neocaptivity narrative that combines in new ways the conventions of the slave narrative and the Barbary captivity narrative. Furthermore, it examines the culture-crossing of the character of Doctor Hébert in the course of the successful slave uprising of Saint Domingue. Captivity, I argue, constitutes the central theme and structuring device and also triggers Hébert’s culture-crossing in a reversed Hegelian master-slave dialectic that needs to be (...) read together with Riau’s enslavement. Lacking the social recognition of a free subject, Riau attains his independent self-consciousness through physical resistance and Saint-Domingue’s distinct black culture. Whereas Hébert learns to actively resist slavery as he crosses over into the Haitian society. In their struggles, both undergo the three phases of rites of passage. (shrink)

In "Amazing Grace," the best-loved of all hymns, John Newton's allusions to the drama of his life tell the story of a youth who was a virtual slave in Sierra Leone before ironically becoming a slave trader himself. Liverpool, his home port, was the center of the most colossal, lucrative, and inhumane slave trade the world has ever known. A gradual spiritual awakening transformed Newton into an ardent evangelist and anti-slavery activist. Influenced by Methodists George Whitefield and (...) John Wesley, Newton became prominent among those favoring a Methodist-style revival in the Church of England. This movement stressed personal conversion, simple worship, emotional enthusiasm, and social justice. While pastoring a poor flock in Olney, he and poet William Cowper produced a hymnal containing such perennial favorites as "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken" and "God Moves in a Mysterious Way." Later, while serving a church in London, Newton raised British consciousness on the immorality of the slave trade. The account he gave to Parliament on the atrocities he had witnessed helped William Wilberforce obtain legislation to abolish the slave trade in England. Newton's life story convinced many who are "found" after being "lost" to sing Gospel hymns as they lobbied for civil rights legislation. His close involvement with both capitalism and evangelicalism, the main economic and religious forces of his era, provide a fascinating case study of the relationship of Christians to their social environment. In an afterword on Newtonian Christianity, Phipps explains Newton's critique of Karl Marx's thesis that religious ideals are always the effect of what produces the most profit. Phipps relies on accounts Newton gives in his ship journal, diary, letters, and sermons for this most readable scholarly narrative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 102-117 [Access article in PDF] Gossip and Literary Narrative Blakey Vermeule Northwestern University Since its murky origins in Grub Street, a specter has haunted the novel—the specter of gossip. In its higher-minded mood, literary narratives have been very snobbish about gossip and the snobbishness is unfair. Even the most casual reader of social fiction will recognize that gossiping is what characters do most (...) passionately. However, they can neither admit nor be aware of it. Only minor or morally compromised characters are allowed to indulge in its pleasures. Matronly middle-aged women, chatty maids, little girls, and effeminate fops are the ones who gossip; their more reflective counterparts—the men and women designated as heroes and heroines—only briefly tolerate such idle chatter. Gossip is derided, decried, condemned, and maligned. It is womanish, low, slavish, servantish, silly, pert, loose, wanton, jiggetty, mean. It is the "tittle-tattle of Highbury" in Austen's Emma, an activity for the old maid Miss Bates and her even older, blind, and senile mother. In Middlemarch, although the world is "apparently a huge whispering-gallery," the greatest gossip of all is Mrs. Cadwallader, a matron with a mind like "phosphorous, biting at everything" (Spacks, p. 194). In Richardson's Clarissa, Lovelace—a man not known for his indifference to social information—airily dismisses gossip as "the female go-round." (In novels, the male equivalents of the "female go-round" tend to be such despised modes of exchange as business letters, gambling, chess, and games of chance.) Gossip has always been a part of charivari with the power to turn the world upside down. It also has the power to destroy lives (Les Liasons Dangereuses) and to derail love (when it becomes the "prejudice" of Pride and Prejudice). If it ever innocent, it is only because it is meaningless.Gossip is all of these things even—especially—when it powers the [End Page 102] whole narrative. This paradox is evident almost anywhere we choose to look. Social novelists view the stuff of direct, unmediated social information as so intense that it requires special handling—even disavowal. I will briefly survey examples from French, English, and Russian fiction. The first is a lurid and overheated speech by Henri de Marsay, the peculiar hero of Balzac's short novel, The Girl with the Golden Eyes (1815). De Marsay is a dissipated aristocrat in love with a mysterious young girl who, he finds out much later, is the sexual slave of de Marsay's long-lost sister. But first, after a night of passion that "had begun with a slow trickle of pleasures and ended in overflowing torrents," de Marsay realizes, when his lover accidentally lets slip the name of his rival, that the person he is competing with is female. The next day he becomes consumed with a bitter plan to kill his faithless lover. He reflects to his friend Paul "Upon my honor, man is a clown dancing on the edge of a cliff. We're told about the immorality of Les Liaisons dangereuses, and some book with the name of a chambermaid. But there is one ghastly, dirty, dreadful, corrupting book that is always open and never closed, the great book of the world—not to mention another book, a thousand times more dangerous, that consists of everything passed on by word of mouth between men or women behind their fans at the ball."1 Even though de Marsay is a corrupt aristocrat, his sentiments are little different from those the narrator expresses in the book's opening chapter, a panoptic survey of Parisian life as a glorious mosaic of infection, rot, and moral disease.In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's new tenant Lockwood breaks his self-imposed exile from social life by pressing the housekeeper Nellie Dean to do what housekeepers do best and launch into an aggrieved saga about her master's family. He wants her to serve up the gossip hot. "I ate..., hoping sincerely she would prove a regular gossip, and either rouse me to animation, or lull me to sleep... (shrink)

The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that underpin pathologization. In this article, I engage with recent insights from Neurodiversity Studies to explore the connections between narrative neuronormativity and other discourses of oppression, especially those that have generated racialized, gendered, (...) and colonial narratives of desubjectification. Focusing on the neuroqueer movement—an emergent practice of disidentification that refuses the interpellations of neuronormativity, ableism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity—I discuss the concept of allism, arguing that this satirical critique of pathologization harbors a deconstructive force that denaturalizes the dialectic of recognition. Pursuing the discursive context and theoretical implications of this critique, I provide a short genealogy of narrative neuronormativity, connecting the operation of the dialectic in the early novel to the clinical texts of child psychology. To demonstrate the neuroqueer subversion of this tradition, I then read An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon, a text that stages a disidentification with storytelling. Protagonist Aster’s neuroqueer refusal indexes the concomitance of the construction of Blackness as an ontological foil for whiteness and the construction of autism as a standard of disordered sociality that neuronorms can be measured against. My reading of Unkindness suggests that the extant techniques of literary narratorship are political instruments that will, unless repurposed, continue to disseminate these dispossessive dialectics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Material Life of Roman Slaves by Sandra R. Joshel, Lauren Hackworth PetersenJuan P. LewisSandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen. The Material Life of Roman Slaves. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xv + 286 pp. 16 color plates. Hardback, £65.00.This is an original book, even though it is does not contain new research or new findings. The title may be somewhat misleading. Rather than (...) a general study of Roman slaves’ material culture, the reader will find here an anthropology of the architecture of the spaces and built environments in which slaves dwelt and toiled (5). Thus, the focus is not so much on the material conditions in which slaves lived or the artifacts they worked with, but on the layout of a small set of first century c.e. houses, streets and economic units, mostly found in the Bay of Naples, Ostia, and the ager Cosanus. The study of space serves Joshel and Hackworth Petersen as an attempt to reconstruct slaves’ responses, through adaptation and challenge, to the choreography of movements imposed on them by their masters.Methodologically, this investigation operates on the distinction developed by Michel De Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life [1988]) between the strategies of the powerful to delimit a space in which power relations can be managed to their own advantage and the tactics of the weak to seize the opportunities to use an imposed spatial order for their own ends (8). The authors see their work as “an act of remembrance” (222). Their aim is to make invisible slaves visible again. Slaves, they contend, have not only been silenced in classical texts written by and from the point of view of slave owners. In the process of collecting and analyzing ancient material, and in the crafting of their historic narratives, modern archaeologists, art historians, and even tourism authorities have “actively, if unwittingly made [slaves] disappear” (3). To redress the imbalance, Joshel and Hackworth Petersen walk away from mere static descriptions of archaeological sites and concentrate on the dynamic of slaves’ movements within those spaces.Although the authors rely on other archaeologists and historians’ fieldwork and interpretation of the material remains, they themselves visited most of the sites and buildings they describe. The book is profusely illustrated with sixteen plates and 170 figures, among which we find the authors’ own photographs of some of the structures they discuss, such as doorways, storage rooms, stairs, porticos, kitchens, street benches, and fountains. Other illustrations consist of maps of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Ostia (19–21), street plans of Pompeii (plates VI, VII, and XI), and building plans of the houses, workshops and villae dealt with in the body of the text. Constant cross-reference to these images and drawings helps the reader to see and understand space in three dimensions, something [End Page 709] that it is not always easy to elicit from illustrations and archaeological reports in which findings are presented in a two-dimensional plane.The book is divided into six chapters. The Introduction (chap. 1) lays out the aims of the book and the methodological approach chosen by the authors. In the next four chapters, the discussion of built environments moves from the inside to the outside and from an urban set-up to the rural world. Chapter 2 focuses on the architectural layout of houses from Campania and Rome’s port-town, Ostia: namely, the houses of the Menander, Julius Polybius, Sutoria Primigenia, the Smith, Lucretius Fronto, the Ceii, the Vetii, and the Gilded Cupids in Pompeii; the houses of the Corinthian Atrium, the Mosaic Atrium, the Alcove, the Beautiful Courtyard, the Samnite, and the Grand Portal in Herculaneum; and the Ostian house of the Muses.The analysis of the Roman domestic landscape uses Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s two axes of differentiation between the grand and the humble and the public and the private (Houses and Societies in Pompeii and Herculaneum [1994]:38), but the emphasis is on the slaves’ perspective within this framework, rather than the owners’—even though the latter is not absent. Particular attention is given to doorways and how they helped to choreograph movements through their diverse heights and hierarchical positions... (shrink)

There are some verses in the Qur'an that can be understood at first glance to mean that Allah Almighty knew certain things afterwards. Based on such verses, it has been claimed that Allah Almighty knew the voluntary acts of the slaves afterwards. This view, whose historical origin goes back to Cehmiyya, is defended by Abdülaziz Bayındır today. Adopting an approach that understands and explains the verses he refers to as the main reference on the subject, Abdülaziz Bayındır argues that the (...) thirty-first verse of the chapter of Muhammad and other verses with a similar notion indicate that Allah does not know beforehand the optional actions of His servants. In this study, the rational and narrative evidences that Bayındır presented as a justification for his views were examined within the framework of the basic procedural principles of the science of tafsir. In our study, the method of analysis and criticism has been adopted. While interpreting the verses that Bayındır examined as a basis for his thesis, the method he put forward was verified through different verses, and it was seen that this method did not offer an accurate and authentic methodology of understanding and interpretation. It has been seen that the verses that Bayındır put forward as a basis for his thesis do not indicate that Allah knows the voluntary actions of the servants afterwards, but that he reveals what he knows in his pre-eternal knowledge. (shrink)

Contemporary work in Black Studies reflects the urgency of integrating lived experience into scholarly work. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe employ autobiographical frames and anecdotes in their writing in order to legitimate historically undervalued forms of knowledge production, and, as Hartman writes, to “counter the violence of abstraction.” Despite the efficacy of this methodology, however, the move itself remains under-theorized, even as scholars advocate for the necessity of taking seriously the intellectual labor and output of Black female (...) academics. “The Actual Scale of Breathing” examines the genealogy of Black feminist writers from slave narratives to the contemporary who find themselves in the impossible position of wanting to speak from experience but find the work of self-disclosure harmful. I argue that these writers innovate form to both refuse unearned access to interiority – specifically to white readers – while at the same time cultivating community through the incorporation of a polyphonic authority. (shrink)

Each narration or text, as it informs about an event, situation or person in history, has a history that sheds light on both its formation and how it arrived to us. The illumination of this history is at least as important as the content analysis of the information. For this reason, it is necessary both to examine whether the source in which the information is given has survived to the present day as it was created by the author without being (...) exposed to any external intervention, and to analyze the narration in terms of reliability and indication within the integrity of the isnād-text. In that case, when the word “text criticism” is mentioned, an understanding of a specific criticism should come to mind, which includes both critical edition (scholarly editing) of the first source and the critique of the narration by making sound research in terms of isnād and literary criticism (naqd al-isnād wa-l-matn). Due to reasons such as the inability to follow a standard method, the limited number of the copies and/or the distance of the copies from the author in terms of history and commercial concerns, many classical works published with relative verification contain such errors require a re-examination. One of these works is Ibn Hibbān’s (d. 354/965) book al-Majrūhīn. In his work al-Majrūhīn, Ibn Hibbān divided the narrators into two groups according to their reliability and collected the ones that he determined as weak according to his opinion. In this work, he placed Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767) at the top of the list. First, he denounced Abū Ḥanīfa with the following expressions: Sahib al-ra’y, child of slaves, bicker, hypocrite, had little knowledge of hadith, a Murji’ī propagandist, a narrator who was blamed by imams. Then he tried to justify these claims by about thirty narrations from various salaf scholars. These narratives are completely different from the largely intellecutal discussions and criticisms of scholars such as al-Awza'i (d. 157/774), Ibn Abī Laylā (d. 148/765) and Ibn Abī Shayba (d. 235/849) on Abu Ḥanīfa and his school. The narrations compiled by Ibn Hibbān are display insulting and polemical narrations against Abu Ḥanīfa’s personality and reliability. In terms of being a source for later periods, it is important to examine and criticize these narratives in terms of the narration techniques. The al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl is important part of the hadith science. al-Mejrūhīn, one of the leading works of this science is remarkable in many respects. According to this narration Abū Ḥanīfa Nuʿmān b. S̱ābit b. Zūtā b. Māh’ın (öl. 150/767) said, "If a man worships this mule to get closer to Allah, I see no harm in it." According to our analysis, there are the following determinations about the narrators in the chain of this narrative. Ibn Abī Mushir is unknown (majhūl), the narrator who is written as “Mahfūz b. Abī Savba” but his correct name is “Tawba” is matrūk. Ahmad b. al-Walīd al-Mahramī al-Karkhī is weak, and Yahyā b. Hamza, source person, is qadari who narrates from people with munkar al-hadith; but is also considered as a thiḳa narrator. As for Sa‘īd b. Abd al-Azīz, he has nothing to do with the reception and transmission of the narrative. In addition, there is also a break in the chain. First of all, what is expected from a basic work such as al-Majrūhīn, whose subject and purpose is purely a narrator analysis, is that the report in it should be acceptable, at least in terms of isnād. When the narrative in question, which is also included in earlier sources such as al-Fesewī (d. 277/890), is evaluated in terms of both the isnād and the text, one realizes the transformation of an expression circulating in the form of gossip against Abu Ḥanīfa in Damascus around the subject of ʾirjāʾ. ʾIrjāʾ was at the forefront of the heated debates in the second half of the second century into semā form in terms of isnād and text, besides, the word النعل/clog is transformed into البغل/mule. Apart from the weak points of the chain, Sa‘īd b. Abd al-Azīz, who has nothing to do with the reception and transmission of the narrative, has also been turned into the narrator/source of the report with the samā expression. Regardless of the purpose and the criteria of the narration technically, during the conversation with Sa‘īd, Yahyā b. Hamza’s sincere friend and teacher, a special speech in which a common report attributed to Abu Ḥanīfa was expressed, was transformed into Yahyâ’s samā‘ in the form of jazm. As a result, the word “shoe” or “clog” has evolved into mule. It would be a reductionist and over optimistic approach to assume that all this may have resulted from tashīf and tahrīf of the copyists. The narration we discussed is a typical example in terms of showing the effect of the conflict of ideas between Ahl al-Hadīth and Ahl ar-Ra’y on the narrations. Of course, this shoud be not regarded as the only example. (shrink)

This essay examines Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in light of new archival findings on the medical practices of Dr. James Norcom (Dr. Flint in the narrative). While critics have sharply defined the feminist politics of Jacobs’s sexual victimization and resistance, they have overlooked her medical experience in slavery and her participation in reform after escape. I argue that Jacobs uses the rhetoric of a woman-led health reform movement underway during the 1850s (...) to persuade her readers to end slavery. This essay reconstructs both contexts, revealing that Jacobs links enslaved women’s physical and sexual vulnerability with her female readers’ fears of male doctors’ threats to modesty and of their standard bleed-and-purge treatments. Jacobs illustrates that slavery damages women’s health as much as heroic medicine, and thus merits the political activism of her readers. Specifically, Jacobs dramatizes her conflicts with the rapacious physician-master at moments that are crucial to women’s health: marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Ultimately, this essay advances a new understanding of the role of health reform in social change: it galvanized other movements such as women’s rights and abolition, particularly around issues of bodily autonomy for women and African Americans. (shrink)

This book examines slavery and gender through a feminist reading of narratives including female slaves in the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and early Christian texts. Through the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, the voices of three enslaved female characters—the female slave who questions Peter in Luke 22, Rhoda in Acts 12, and the prophesying slave of Acts 16—are placed into dialogue with female slaves found in the Apocryphal Acts, ancient novels, classical texts, and images (...) of enslaved women on funerary monuments. Although ancients typically distrusted the words of slaves, Christy Cobb argues that female slaves in Luke-Acts speak truth to power, even though their gender and status suggest that they cannot. In this Bakhtinian reading, female slaves become truth-tellers and their words confirm aspects of Lukan theology. This exegetical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary book is a substantial contribution to conversations about women and slaves in Luke-Acts and early Christian literature. (shrink)

This article sketches the broad outlines of Matthew's ironic portrayal of children, examining first the 'lower level' of the narrative and then the 'upper level' of the narrative. When viewed from the 'lower level' of Matthew's narrative, the everyday circumstances of children reflect the nurture of their parents as well as significant challenges: debilitating physical conditions, serious illnesses, military violence and premature childhood death. In addition, children occupy the lowest rung on the 1st-century Mediterranean social ladder, a (...) status they share with slaves. But on the 'upper level' of his narrative, from the 'God's-eye' perspective, Matthew turns everyday reality for children on its head in ironic fashion. Emmanuel, the 'God who is with us', appears as a 'child' who has just 'been born' and who exhibits all the powerlessness and vulnerability of such a 'child'. In a violent showdown between 'King Herod' and the one 'who has been born king of the Jews', it is Herod, the powerful ruler, who dies, while the vulnerable 'child' ends up safely in Nazareth. Throughout his ministry, Jesus heals children along with adults. To the apparent chagrin of his disciples, Jesus lays hands on children in an act of blessing. He commends the messianic praises of children, in contrast to the outrage of the Jewish leadership. Moreover, Jesus proclaims that it is 'to such as these [children] that the kingdom of heaven belongs'. (shrink)

Frederick Douglass’s socio-political narrative is explored through an existential lens, arguing that Douglass is contesting the proposition that essence precedes existence. Douglass, through his fight with Covey, a white ‘slave breaker’, and his escape to freedom, affirms his existence (etymologically, ‘standing out’) as being for it-self ( pour-soi) over and against the reduction of his existence to that of being in-itself ( an-soi). Drawing from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who was greatly influenced by the phenomenological and (...) politico-praxic work of Black novelist Richard Wright, it is argued that Douglass disrupts the power/knowledge regime of white American slavery, exercising his existential capacity for transcendence. Examining whiteness as a species of what Beauvoir calls ‘the serious man’, it is argued that whites within Douglass’s text are in a state of flight, performing their whiteness as ‘the serious man’, that is, where whiteness is accepted as an unconditioned state of being. Douglass’s narrative depicts whiteness as a flight from freedom (bad faith); for his very act of protestation against whiteness demonstrates that whiteness is not an objective, hypostatized thing, but a performative choice that sustains white hegemony. (shrink)

In 1677, France took the slave trading island of Gorée located off the coast of Senegal from the Dutch and, less than a decade later, drafted Le Code Noir to formally provide regulations for slave owning practices. This document—created in response to the rapid expansion of the slave economy in French Caribbean possessions made possible by France's position in West Africa—marked the beginning of French involvement in the slave trade. The comparison of French travel narratives written (...) before and after Le Code Noir, shows that, although the descriptions of Sub-Saharan Africa tended to be universally derogatory and Eurocentric, it was not until France became deeply involved in the slave trade that the specific characterization of Africans as lazy emerged. By correlating published descriptions of African laziness with France's growing participation in the slave trade, this paper argues that these portrayals were used to justify slavery to a French public far removed from Africa, Africans, and the ugly realities of the slave trade. (shrink)

This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work contains crucial lessons for sociology in general. Patterson has coined striking concepts such as social death and human parasitism and made original historical interpretations such as the origins of freedom in the experiences of female slaves. Patterson has contributed to historical knowledge, social theory, and an alternative epistemology of interpretive social science. And through his (...) fiction, he exemplifies an alternative understanding of the métier of the social scientist, in which literary-aesthetic sensuousness and lyrical pleasure are combined with analytic rigor. The first part of the article suggests that Patterson’s work represents an overlooked foundation for postcolonial sociology. Demonstrating this involves reconstructing Patterson’s early intellectual context and then tracing the interplay between fiction and social analysis in his work. The article then analyses Patterson’s fictional writing, arguing that it is a crucial part of his overall production of social knowledge. The article’s final section argues that Patterson’s work lays out a non-positivist foundation for historical sociology and sociology as a whole. (shrink)

Abstract:According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the conjoining of “teaching” and “about” suggests a modality of orientation never not regulated by an imposed telos. To teach about suggests a place of unknowability that can be resolved with the successful illustration of beginnings and possible ends, a way of getting from there to here.Beginnings and ends themselves are upset by accounts of racialized and sexualized subjection. As students consider Harriet Jacobs' nineteenth century slave narrative alongside contemporary accounts of anti-black (...) violence, for example, the silliness of a syllabus unravels in the violence of palimpsestic life, texts becoming other texts, scenes collapsing into each other. In that way, the temporality of a classroom must reorient itself in the face of the terrible reach and collapsings engendered by violence and to acknowledge the complex contingencies shaping our philosophical engagements. (shrink)

What political problem can autobiography solve? This article examines the politics of Frederick Douglass’s antebellum personal narratives: his 1845 slave narrative, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, written at the opposite ends of Douglass’s transition from the abolitionist politics of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to Douglass’s defense of political action and the Constitution as anti-slavery. Placing the two texts alongside Douglass’s (...) distinction “to narrate wrongs” and “denouncing them,” I argue that Douglass writes My Bondage and My Freedom as a mode of denunciation: an autobiographical critique of injustice that balances analysis of collective oppression with advocacy for communal emancipation. Whereas to narrate wrongs encouraged readers to judge Douglass’s story alongside popular criteria of justice, to denounce wrongs is to implicate readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation, by revealing the coercions and conditionings of society that make not simply slaves but slaveowners, sympathizers, and abolitionists. This article claims that autobiography is a distinct genre of political theory, one that challenges present relations between the individual and the collective by representing not simply its author but an expanded view of “the people.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Restless Affects and Democratic DoubtsA Response to Rachel Jones and Moira FradingerTina ChanterI would like to thank both Rachel Jones and Moira Fradinger for their generous, rigorous, careful, and typically thoughtful and thought-provoking responses to my work. Both are scholars for whom I have enormous respect.Jones follows a certain trajectory through my work, and I think she is absolutely right to articulate it as a dominant motif. Yet as (...) she also points out, in keeping with this very motif, to which I will return, in identifying this as a thematic strand she is at risk of suppressing other tracks that might have been mapped out. Let me begin, then, by taking up the invitation she thereby offers, by briefly indicating another path through my work as I see it, articulated less through theoretical inflection, less schematically, a path that maps itself by way of affective sites of investiture. So much of our theoretical enquiry is undergirded by affective attachments, created by the accidents of history—where, when, and in what circumstances we were born—through the contingent experiences we happen to have had and the pedagogical influences to which we happened to have been exposed, to the particular wounds life inflicts upon us, and to the particular happiness or solace it grants us, to our friendships, to those we have loved and to those we come to love.I embrace Fradinger’s suggestion that I am something of a radical democrat. So too the quasi-Levinasian sense of the necessity to be open to relationality and answerable to the interlocutor resonates with me, the difficult work of being called to account for what I would call the imaginary (rather than the representations) to which one finds oneself perhaps unconsciously beholden. [End Page 158] Indeed it is this difficult work to which Jones and Fradinger call me, with their challenging and apposite questions, not all of which admit of ready answers.My own affective genealogies are intimately bound up with the good old British class system as well as with the familial. No matter how adept I might be at deconstructing texts and ideas, no matter how well versed I might be in theory, when it comes to myself, so often, it seems, I find myself stuck, endlessly playing out the same story. I think this can be parsed out in terms of affective attachments; I do not think I am the only one to have discovered so many times that I have been profoundly wrong about profoundly important things.It is as if before we know it, we discover that we have played out a script—whether it is psychic, familial, or cultural—that has effectively locked us into a Hegelian master-slave narrative. Sometimes it is as if all any of us can ever do is robotically repeat such scenarios, as if we can never achieve anything beyond flipping the narrative, as if we cannot manage to intervene in the narrative itself, no matter how many theories we are armed with. It is as if, time and time again, we trundle along the same grooves that have been etched out for us by some narrative over which we cannot seem to achieve control. There is something automatic, perhaps unconscious, about these scripts to which we discover ourselves to have adhered, despite our best intentions, despite the fact that we know better, despite all our theoretical insights.It is as if your vision is habituated to a particular scenario, and no matter what you do, it simply keeps repeating itself, taking you by surprise each time. Then something happens, and the details start to compile themselves into another narrative, one that was there all the time, but that you didn’t, you couldn’t, wouldn’t allow yourself to see, to imagine. Only in retrospect do you begin to piece together the signs, to accord significance to the details you somehow managed to dismiss as insignificant, as failing to contribute any coherence or salience. You saw the individual details, but they didn’t add up to a compelling narrative. Or maybe you just didn’t want to be compelled by it... (shrink)

Although many iterations of the mammy in the last two centuries have received analytical attention, the construction of this figure as asexual or undesiring and undesirable remains to be interrogated. This essay attends to this under-theorised dimension of her image. Resisting a reading of the mammy as fixed in silence, I assert that she might instead ‘say nothing’, and bring into focus a black asexual agency that I call a declarative silence. This strategy of ‘saying nothing’ is then explored in (...) a reading of the withholdings of the character of Mama in Gayl Jones's neo-slave narrative, Corregidora (1975). (shrink)

How does one give voice to the unspeakable, inhuman violence that shapes the present, and what remains of humanity in its wake? Adriana Cavarero offers an answer that roots human speech in embodied vulnerability, in contrast to philosophical emphases on disembodied rationality. In the face of what she calls horrorism, which puts humans in proximity to animality, she calls for resuscitating vocality, and therefore humanity, from loss. This article reads Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” – which structurally (...) resembles a slave narrative and concerns a kidnapped ape who learns to speak – to extend Cavarero’s emphasis on vulnerability while challenging her humanism. In Kafka, modern horror’s locus is not animality but the abstract human, and it projects the unstable distinction between voice and noise onto blackened humans and nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Historically, for Black writers, literary fiction has been a site for transforming the discursive disciplinary spaces of political oppression. From 19th century “slave narratives” to the 20th century, Black novelists have created an impressive literary counter-canon in advancing liberatory struggles. W.E.B. Du Bois argued that “all art is political.” Many Black writers have used fiction to create spaces for political and social freedom—from the early work of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (...) (1859)—to the enduring works of the Harlem Renaissance (Toomer, Hurston, and Schuyler)—to the great revolutionary Black literature after WWII (Wright, Baldwin, Williams)—to contemporary Black writers (Toni Morrison, Edward Jones, Samuel Delany)—Black fictive space continues to be a necessary site for resistance. Black literary fiction is a vast counter-canon to mainstream literature which unquestioningly reinforces global white supremacy, capitalistic political oppressions, and the dominance/subordinance relations upon which they depend. (shrink)

Abstract. Drawing on Black radical thought, some political theorists have elaborated a notion of ‘fugitive freedom’ that challenges us to understand freedom beyond the canonical concepts of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ liberty. The idea of fugitive freedom concerns the vast liminal space between being enslaved and enjoying complete political (or ethical) liberty. Whereas for traditional political theory, there are two ‘conditions’ or ‘statuses’ assigned to subjects (‘free’ or ‘slave’), reflection on slave narratives and the history of maroon communities points (...) to freedom expressed in escape, flight, and movement away from domination. Fugitive freedom is enabled and sustained through quotidian, clandestine practices of communication, concealment, care, and refuge. Inspired by these exhortations to reimagine the forms that freedom can take, this paper finds in Spinoza a notion of fugitivity, understood as a counter-power, animated by the desire to escape domination, generate solidarity, and forge mental community. (shrink)

The content of a work of literature, Walter Benjamin reminds us in “The Author as Producer,” is inextricably bound up with its form. Hence, it is hardly astounding that much critical attention has been focused on the proper generic classification of Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig . This task, though, has not been easy. Henry Louis Gates, rediscoverer and earliest critic of Our Nig, for example, goes to great length discussing parallels between Wilson’s work and Nina Baym’s ‘overplot’ of the (...) ‘women’s novel,’ before settling on reading it as a new form of distinctly African-American lit- erature that combines “conventions of the sentimental novel with certain key conventions of the slave narratives” . Elizabeth Ammons, by contrast, places Our Nig squarely in the feminist tradition of the sentimental novel and argues that “the ideal of mother love explicit in Uncle Tom’s Cabin operates implicitly in Our Nig.” 4 2 3 Contesting Ammons’ claim, Eric Gardner asserts that Our Nig is not a ‘novel of abolition’ but “a novel about Northern racial issues, a young black woman’s bildungsroman, and, as such, is far from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” 5 Echoing some of Gardner’s points, Elizabeth Breau contends that Our Nig “is actually satiric” and therefore gives an overly “bleak picture of northern antebellum society.” Foregrounding neither Bildung nor “ironic inversions” but the “politics of rage at work in Wilson’s tale,” Julia Stern argues that Our Nig “used the sentimental form to mask a gothic message.” 7 Rejecting Gates’ attempt to posit Our Nig as “a significant beginning of an African-American literary mode, a distinctive first in a century of firsts,” John Ernest wants to read Wilson’s work as a traditional “blend of autobiography and fiction,” hoping to ‘re-place’ it “within the racial, gender, and economic matrix of secular history.” R.J. Ellis, while accepting Gates’ assessment that Our Nig “draw[s] on the genres of sentimental fiction and abolitionist slave narrative,” stresses the ways in which the ‘hybrid’ work “fractures generic boundaries” in order to provide a “full retrieval of Frado’s pain, her experience of body politics.” Lastly, offering a reading that links Our Nig to the Puritan tradition, Elizabeth West argues that Our Nig “manipulates well-known trappings of the conversion narrative” by telling “the story of the heroine’s failed initiation into the community of earthly saints.”. (shrink)

Based upon Ajit Maan's groundbreaking theory of Internarrative Identity, this collection focuses upon redefining self, slave narrative, the black Caribbean diaspora, and cyberspace to explore the interconnection between identity and life experience as expressed through personal narrative.

According to an oft-repeated narrative, while Kant maintained racist views through the 1780s, he changed his mind in the 1790s. Pauline Kleingeld introduced this narrative based on passages from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and “Toward Perpetual Peace”. On her reading, Kant categorically condemned chattel slavery in those texts, which meant that he became more racially egalitarian. But the passages involving slavery, once contextualized, either do not concern modern, race-based chattel slavery or at best suggest that Kant mentioned it (...) as a cautionary tale for labor practices in Europe. Overall, Kant never explicitly considered chattel slavery as a moral problem to be addressed on its own. Rather, he treated it primarily in terms of its function in human history. If he ended up expressing some qualms about its practices, it was likely because they threatened to deepen intra-European conflicts and undermine the prospect of perpetual peace. The humanity of the enslaved “Negroes” was never part of the reasoning. This was not a casual oversight on Kant’s part. It reflects the complexity of his philosophical system: everything he did or did not say about chattel slavery begins to make sense once we connect his philosophy of history and his depiction of “Negroes” as natural slaves. (shrink)

Viewed through the prism of gender, race and generational change, memories of the Holocaust acquire a dynamic and a salience that differ substantially from one group to the next. This article examines the role of gender in sustaining and reconfiguring such memories in Germany; it argues that female victims and perpetrators are moving towards common ground in processing Second World War experiences as they anticipate their own deaths. Ranging from active collaborators to bold resistance fighters, some women proved both deeply (...) reflective, others almost oblivious to the horrors occurring around them, as revealed by (auto)biographical texts. ‘Women under the Nazis’ were not a subordinate, uninformed mass, easily exploited by a megalomaniacal patriarchal establishment; still, their many roles were rated as ‘insignificant’ in configuring the master narrative. The unequal treatment accorded women in the 1940s still shapes the unequal slave-labor compensation accorded women half a century later. This raises new questions about the need to re-establish communication between the generations for the purpose of transmitting lessons of world-historical magnitude linked to the Holocaust. (shrink)

While Appiah and Soyinka criticize racial essentializing in Sartre and the Negritude poets, Sartre in Black Orpheus interprets the Negritudinists as employing a phenomenological, anamnestic retrieval of subjective experience. This retrieval uncovers two ethical attitudes: a less exploitative approach toward nature, and a conversion of slavery’s suffering into a stimulus for universal liberation. These attitudes spring from peasant cultural traditions and ethical responses to others’ race-based cruelty, rather than emanating from mystified ‘blackness’. Alfred Schutz’s because-motive analysis, a process of (...) class='Hi'>narrative self-constitution, renders plausible these linkages the Negritudinists draw between themselves and peasant or slave ancestors. Such narratives, customarily constructed in common sense by European- and African-Americans, regularly involve mythic elements, serve laudable ethical purposes and require continual theoretical critique by anthropology, genetics and ethics. Theory, though, plays only a critical, corrective role for subjective, anamnestic recoveries of racial and ethnic identity, and it can never replace them. (shrink)

This is the review of a book by Paula Byrne on Lord Mansfield's great-niece, Dido, whom he raised as his own daughter. Lord Mansfield was the Lord Chief Justice of England in the Eighteenth Century. The child was brought to him as an infant and grew up to become what we would today term his paralegal clerk in his Library at Kenwood House. His great-niece was the child of a black slave and his sister's son, Sir John Lindsay. This (...) is also a narrative of the British Slave trade including some of Lord Mansfield's judgements at the King's Bench Division, Royal Courts of Justice. (shrink)

As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people-cane cutters and cigar workers, laundresses (...) and labor organizers-forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship. Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences? Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skillfully observes the people, places, legislation, and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation. Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and citizenship in postemancipation societies. (shrink)

Going beyond the creolisation theories of Brathwaite and Glissant, I attempt to develop ideas concerning the gendering of creolisation, and a historicising of affects within it. Addressing affects as ‘physiological things’ contextualised in the history of the Caribbean slave plantation, I seek, importantly, to delineate a trajectory and development of a specific Creole history in relation to affects. Brathwaite's proposition that ‘the most significant (and lasting) inter-cultural creolisation took place’ within the ‘intimate’ space of ‘sexual relations’ is key to (...) my argument. In the light of this, I consider how Creole cultural knowledge about affect—as the primary motivational system inclusive of fear, anger, outrage and so on — might be identified, and what constitutes such Creole knowledge within which affect might be embedded. How might Glissant's relationality and Creole literary texts add to this knowledge? I focus primarily on three texts: Clarke's The Polished Hoe, Collins’ The Colour of Forgetting and Morejón's ‘Amo a mi amo’/‘l Love My Master’. Each text on which I draw is selected for its intersectional representation of gender relations, ‘knowledge about sexual difference’ and its representation of Creole subjectivities within the context problematised here as the ‘demonic ground’. Moreover, as auto-theorising texts, they represent both narrative and meta-narrative of a creolising of affects in and against the economy of the slave plantation. Each represents also a stage or aspect of the development of subjectivities and an affective community that inform this intervention concerned with theorising against consolidated, universalising and Eurocentric conceptualisations of affect. In the process, I attempt to offer a differentiated cartography and literary archaeology of affect. (shrink)

This article challenges scholarly understanding of an 1837 mutiny in the First West India Regiment. In the Anglo-Trinidadian narrative, African-born soldiers acted out of blind rage, failing in their rebellion because they lacked skill with rifles and bayonets and did not understand either the terrain of Trinidad or its location in the Atlantic littoral. This article’s counterargument is that the rebels, led by a former slave-trader, Dâaga, who had been kidnaped by Portuguese traders at either Grand-Popo or Little (...) Popo, was, with other African-born soldiers, well familiar with military weapons and, after time in the Caribbean, the ecosystem, society, and topography of Trinidad. Dâaga aimed at escape from eastern Trinidad for either Tobago or nearby South America, but was thwarted after English officers captured some mutineers, while the soldiers who remained on the run clashed with a mixed-race Spanish-speaking militia on the only road to an east-coast point of escape. (shrink)

This paper begins by taking seriously former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ response in his What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? to systematic violence and oppression. He claims that direct argumentation is not the ideal mode of resistance to oppression: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.” I will focus on a few elements of this playful mode of resistance that conflict with the more straightforward strivings for abstract, universal, objective, (...) convergent, absolute thinking that champions reason over emotion, logic over narrative, and science over lived experience. In contrast, the type of protest employed by people like Douglass can utilize aesthetics and logic, playfulness and seriousness, emotion, even anger, and reason. Douglass provides examples of humorous, sincere parrhesia, oscillating between the lexicon of the dominant sphere and the critical reflection from a trickster on the margins. This will require an analysis of Michel Foucault’s conception of parrhesia: courageous truth-telling in the face of powerful people or institutions. It is a study of humor in the parrhesiastes, an element I think neglected by Foucault. I argue that the humorous parrhesiastes offers a mode of resistance which can subvert oppressive power structures that perpetuate injustice, revealing the fact that humor can be integral in courageous truth-telling. (shrink)