Spectacular Sufferingfocuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property ...on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves.
The book's first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders.
Spectacular Sufferingthen turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves' petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves' embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion-African slaves-negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery.
Throughout, Mallipeddi's keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights.Spectacular Sufferingis an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.
By 1849, theNarrative of William W. Brownwas in its fourth edition, having sold over 8,000 copies in less than eighteen months and making it one of the fastest-selling antislavery tracts of its time. ...The book's popularity can be attributed both to the strong voice of its author and Brown's notoriety as an abolitionist speaker. The son of a slave and a white man, Brown recounts his years in servitude, his cruel masters, and the brutal whippings he and those around him received. He provides a detailed description of his failed attempt to escape with his mother; after their capture, they were sold to new masters. A subsequent escape attempt succeeds. He is taken in by a kind Quaker, Wells Brown, whose name he adopts in gratitude. Shortly thereafter, Brown crosses the Canadian border. Brown'sNarrativeincludes stories of fighting devious slave traders and bounty hunters, various antislavery poems, articles and stories (written by him and others), newspaper clippings, reward posters, and slave sale announcements.A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings selected classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available as downloadable e-books or print-on-demand publications. DocSouth Books are unaltered from the original publication, providing affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.
Speaking Power Fulton Minor, DoVeanna S
2012, 2006
eBook
In Speaking Power, DoVeanna S. Fulton explores and analyzes the use of oral traditions in African American women's autobiographical and fictional narratives of slavery. African American women have ...consistently employed oral traditions not only to relate the pain and degradation of slavery, but also to celebrate the subversions, struggles, and triumphs of Black experience. Fulton examines orality as a rhetorical strategy, its role in passing on family and personal history, and its ability to empower, subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations for the past. In addition to taking an insightful look at obscure or little-studied slave narratives like Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon and the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Fulton also brings a fresh perspective to more familiar works, such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and highlights Black feminist orality in such works as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
InThe Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, escaped slave John Andrew Jackson seeks to educate his readers on the horrors of slavery. He spares no details in relating the murder of his sister, the ...separation of his family, and his own frequent whippings at the hands of a "Christian" master and mistress. He offers a scathing review of white religious hypocrisy, criticizing those who could not see the contradiction between worshiping a merciful God on Sundays and holding slaves under inhumane conditions. Jackson details his escape from slavery into Massachusetts as a ship stowaway after he is separated by sale from his first wife and child. He also describes his interactions with Harriet Beecher Stowe; his failed attempts to purchase the freedom of his family members; and his eventual escape into Canada following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. His work also includes a variety of carefully recorded hymns and antislavery songs. Jackson would eventually flee to England with his second wife before returning to South Carolina after the War.A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings selected classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available as downloadable e-books or print-on-demand publications. DocSouth Books are unaltered from the original publication, providing affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.
Born into slavery in North Carolina around 1786, Moses Grandy was bequeathed to his young playmate, his original owner's son, when they were both eight years old. Hired out until he was twenty-one, ...Grandy describes each of his temporary masters--some cruel and some kind. His first wife is sold shortly after they marry, and he never sees her again. After saving his money whenever possible and buying his freedom for $600, Grandy is betrayed by his childhood friend, who sells him. Grandy marries again and purchases his freedom a second time, only to be once again betrayed. With the assistance of white friends, Grandy buys his freedom a third time and moves north. He is also able to purchase the freedom of his second wife, but their children remain in slavery. Grandy wrote thisNarrativeto raise funds for the freedom of his children.A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings selected classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available as downloadable e-books or print-on-demand publications. DocSouth Books are unaltered from the original publication, providing affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.
Originally published in order to raise money to purchase his son's freedom, Thomas Jones's autobiography first appeared in the 1850s. This version, published in 1885, includes not only Jones's ...account of his childhood and young adult life as a slave in North Carolina, but also a long additional section in which Jones describes his experiences as a minister in North Carolina, while still enslaved, and then on the abolitionist lecture circuit in Massachusetts and the Maritime Provinces of Canada after he stowed away on a ship bound for New York in 1849.
Across more than two centuries Afro-America has created a huge and dazzling variety of literary self-expression. Designs of Blackness provides less a narrative literary history than, precisely, a ...series of mappings—each literary-critical and comparative while at the same time offering cultural and historical context. This carefully re-edited version of the 1998 publication opens with an estimation of earliest African American voice in the names of Phillis Wheatley and her contemporaries. It then takes up the huge span of autobiography from Frederick Douglass through to Maya Angelou. "Harlem on My Mind," which follows, sets out the literary contours of America’s premier black city. Womanism, Alice Walker’s presiding term, is given full due in an analysis of fiction from Harriet E. Wilson to Toni Morrison. Richard Wright is approached not as some regulation "realist" but as a more inward, at times near-surreal, author. Decadology has its risks but the 1940s has rarely been approached as a unique era of war and peace and especially in African American texts. Beat Generation work usually adheres to Ginsberg and Kerouac, but black Beat writing invites its own chapter in the names of Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. The 1960s has long become a mythic change-decade, and in few greater respects than as a black theatre both of the stage and politics. In Leon Forrest African America had a figure of the postmodern turn: his work is explored in its own right and for how it takes its place in the context of other reflexive black fiction. "African American Fictions of Passing" unpacks the whole deceptive trope of "race" in writing from Williams Wells Brown through to Charles Johnson. The two newly added chapters pursue African American literary achievement into the Obama-Trump century, fiction from Octavia Butler to Darryl Pinkney, poetry from Rita Dove to Kevin Young.
Fugitive Borders explores a new archive of 19th-century autobiographical writing by black authors in North America. For that purpose, Nele Sawallisch examines four different texts written by formerly ...enslaved men in the 1850s that emerged in or around the historical region of Canada West (now known as Ontario) and that defy the genre conventions of the classic slave narrative. Instead, these texts demonstrate originality in expressing complex, often ambivalent attitudes towards the so-called Canadian Promised Land and contribute to a form of textual community-building across national borders. In the context of emerging national discourses before Canada's Confederation in 1867, they offer alternatives to the hegemonic narrative of the white settler nation.
It was Solomon's fortune, during his captivity, to be owned by several masters. The treatment he received while at the "Pine Woods" shows that among slaveholders there are men of humanity as well as ...of cruelty. Some of them are spoken of with emotions of gratitude -- others in a spirit of bitterness. It is believed that the following account of his experience on Bayou Båuf presents a correct picture of Slavery, in all its lights and shadows, as it now exists in that locality. Unbiased, as he conceives, by any prepossessions or prejudices, the only object of the editor has been to give a faithful history of Solomon Northup's life, as he received it from his lips.
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