Caitlin's Praxis Journal

Praxis Journal Entry 6 -- 10/9/16

The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, edited by Audrey Fisch, is not a user-friendly book. The essays in the Companion aren’t very long, but they’re very dense and can be hard to follow (especially if you’re unfamiliar with words like amanuensis and monogenist). The three essays I read for this week all focused on slave narratives as they relate to the political and social climates they were written in. Chapter one gave a brief overview of the history and development of the slave narrative and its components, and explained how the abolition movement influenced the slave narrative and vice versa. Chapter two discussed how the slave narrative was instrumental in expressing the broad political goals of the abolition movement. Chapter four explored the slave narrative’s relationship to other abolitionist literature (as, by the 1830s, slave narratives very much had become a form of abolitionist literature).

What I found most interesting was how early slave narratives often incorporated aspects of multiple genres such as the spiritual autobiography, conversion narrative, sea adventure story, and even criminal confession (the slave narrative’s genre fluidity was discussed in chapters one and four). Of these different genres, the spiritual autobiography and conversion narrative were the most common, and early slave narratives often read more like spiritual autobiographies than, well, slave narratives. Christian themes and imagery were so prevalent because Christianity was an important part of 18th and 19th century Westerners’ (this theme prevailed in American and European slave narratives) lives, religious institutions influenced Western publishing, and because a slave discussing their (Protestant) religious experiences made them palatable to white audiences. Sharing in the Christian experience made the African slave--who was very different from white Westerners and very much an “other”—relatable and human. Religious motifs featured heavily in slave narratives until around the 1830s, when they were largely replaced by accounts of slaves’ actual daily lives, with a strong emphasis on the brutality of slavery:

“Many of the narrative and thematic conventions, which were apparent yet not fully developed in eighteenth-century works, take shape in this period [the antebellum period]—the depravity of Southern planters and the irrepressible fact of sexual miscegenation, the hypocrisy of Southern Christianity, scenes of brutal whipping and torture, rebellious slaves who are murdered…all became standard fare”. (“The Rise of the Slave Narrative”, in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, p. 19)

Spiritual themes still played an important role to the antebellum slave narrative (which we’ve been reading and watching so far in this class), but they eventually took a backseat to the terrible reality of slavery. This was due to the resurgence and reorganization of the abolition movement in reaction to imperialism, colonialism, and increased American participation in the political process. 

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