The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (Oxford Handbooks)

The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative approaches the history of slave testimony in three ways: by prioritizing the broad tradition over individual authors; by representing interdisciplinary approaches to slave narratives; and by highlighting emerging scholarship on slave narratives, concerning both established debates over concerns of authorship and agency, for example, and developing concerns like ecocritical readings of slave narratives. Ultimately, the aim of the Handbook is not to highlight the singularity of any particular account, nor to comfortably locate slave narratives in traditional literary or cultural history, but rather to faithfully represent a body of writing and testimony that was designed to speak for the many, to represent the unspeakable, and to account for the experience of enslaved and nominally free communities. The Handbook is organized into six sections: “Historical Fractures,” “Layered Testimonies,” “Textual Bindings,” “Experience and Authority,” “Environments and Migrations,” and “Echoes and Traces.” The Handbook ’s contributing scholars address testimony from a broad range of sources, including traditional archives, Works Progress Administration (WPA), newspapers, diaries or memoirs, pension records, and even the testimony suggested by traces in the landscape and architecture of slave plantations. The reach of sources covered in the Handbook is not exhaustive, but instead is intended to indicate the broad range of sources from which testimony can be recovered. Other chapters address matters of gender, sexuality, and community, environmental concerns, legal contexts and implications, and manifestations of slave testimony in visual and aural cultures. Many essays work to locate African American slave narratives both historically and geographically, through considerations of literary history, through considerations of the geography covered by slave narratives, and through hemispheric and transatlantic connections central to understanding U.S. testimony. There are no chapters devoted to major writers, since various resources already exist for that purpose and since those writers emerge as central figures in many of the essays. The purpose of all chapters in the Handbook is to account for the conventional wisdom on the subject in the process of exploring critical new directions for approaching these concerns. The Handbook ’s goal is to encourage research on a great number of understudied narratives while demonstrating the rich complexity of this field of study for those just entering it This Volume Approaches The History Of Slave Testimony In Three Ways: By Prioritising The Broad Tradition Over Individual Authors; By Representing Inter-disciplinary Approaches To Slave Narratives; And By Highlighting Emerging Scholarship On Slave Narratives, Concerning Both Established Debates Over Concerns Of Authorship And Agency, For Example, And Developing Concerns Like Eco-critical Readings Of Slave Narratives. Slave Narratives And Historical Memory / Mitch Kachun -- Slave Narratives And Archival Research / Eric Gardner -- Slave Narratives And Historical Understanding / Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. -- Slave Narratives And Us Legal History / Jeannine Marie Delombard -- The Wpa Narratives As Historical Sources / Marie Jenkins Schwartz -- The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews / Sharon Ann Musher -- The Witness Of African American Folkways: The Landscape Of Slave Narratives / John Michael Vlach -- The Slave Narrative As Material Text / Teresa A. Goddu -- Reading Communities: Slave Narratives And The Discursive Reader / Dwight A. Mcbride And Justin A. Joyce -- A Reflection On The Slave Narrative And American Literature / Kenneth W. Warren -- Slave Narratives And Visual Culture / Marcus Wood -- Slave Narratives, 1865-1900 / William L. Andrews -- This Horrible Exhibition: Sexuality In Slave Narratives / Aliyyah I. Abdur Rahman -- There Is Might In Each: Slave Narratives And Black Feminism / Doveanna S. Fulton -- I Rose A Freeman: Power, Property, And The Performance Of Manhood In Slave Narratives / Maurice O. Wallace -- Family And Community In Slave Narratives / Brenda E. Stevenson -- Collaborative American Slave Narratives / Barbara Mccaskill -- Environmental Criticism And The Slave Narratives / Kimberly K. Smith -- Locating Slave Narratives / Rhondda Robinson Thomas -- Slave Narratives And Hemispheric Studies / Winfried Siemerling -- Caribbean Slave Narratives / Nicole N. Aljoe -- Slave Narratives, The Romantic Imagination, And Transatlantic Literature / Helen Thomas -- Puzzling The Intervals: Blind Tom And The Poetics Of The Sonic Slave Narrative / Daphne A. Brooks -- The Truth Of Slave Narratives: Slavery's Traces In Postmemory Narratives In Postemancipation Life / Joycelyn K. Moody. Edited By John Ernest. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. "Given the rise of new interdisciplinary and methodological approaches to African American and Black Atlantic studies, The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative will offer a fresh, wide-ranging assessment of this major American literary genre. The volume will begin with articles that consider the fundamental concerns of gender, sexuality, community, and the Christian ethos of suffering and redemption that are central to any understanding of slave narratives. The chapters that follow will interrogate the various agendas behind the production of both pre- and post-Emancipation narratives and take up the various interpretive problems they pose. Strategic omissions and veiled gestures were often necessary in these life accounts as they revealed disturbing, too-painful truths, far beyond what white audiences were prepared to hear. While touching upon the familiar canonical autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the Handbook will pay more attention to the under-studied narratives of Josiah Henson, Sojourner Truth, William Grimes, Henry Box Brown, and other often-overlooked accounts. In addition to the literary autobiographies of bondage, the volume will anatomize the powerful WPA recordings of interviews with former slaves during the late 1930s. With essays on the genre's imaginative afterlife, its final essays will chart the emergence and development of neoslave narratives, most notably in Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Toni Morrisons's Beloved and Octavia Butler's provocative science fiction novel, Kindred. In short, the Handbook will provide a long-overdue assessment of the state of the genre and the vital scholarship that continues to grow around it, work that is offering some of the most provocative analysis emerging out of the literary studies discipline as a whole."--Publisher's description