Slavery:
Slave Narratives
AM103
David Lambert
16 November 2015
‘Humanist’ vs ‘quantification’
‘[A]cademic scholarship on transatlantic slavery can
schematically be divided between two opposed theoretical
camps: first, what may be called the “humanist and
narrative historians” who emphasize the human experience
of slavery and the trade slave and whose focus is frequently
the gradual abolition of slavery; and, second, the
“quantification historians” who take a statistical and
macrohistorical approach and avoid the human aspect,
which they associate with a lack of critical distance’.
Raphael Hörmann and Gesa Mackenthun (eds), Human
Bondage in the Cultural Contact Zone (2010), p. 11.
Quantitative vs qualitative research
'Quantitative research is, as the term suggests, concerned with
the collection and analysis of data in numeric form. It tends to
emphasize relatively large-scale and representative sets of data,
and is often, falsely in our view, presented or perceived as being
about the gathering of "facts". Qualitative research, on the other
hand, is concerned with collecting and analysing information in
as many forms, chiefly non-numeric, as possible. It tends to focus
on exploring, in as much detail as possible, smaller numbers of
instances or examples which are seen as being interesting or
illuminating, and aims to achieve "depth" rather than "breadth".'
L. Blaxter, C. Hughes and M. Tight,
How to Research, 1996 , p. 61.
Enslaved Africans disembarked in the
Americas, 1501-1866
Destination
Number
British Caribbean
French Caribbean
Spanish Caribbean
Dutch Caribbean
Danish Caribbean
Caribbean sub-total
Brazil
Spanish Mainland
North America
The Americas - total
2,318,252
1,120,216
805,424
444,728
108,998
4,797,618
4,864,374
487,488
388,747
10,538,227
% of Caribbean subtotal
% of total for the
Americas
48.32%
23.35%
16.79%
9.27%
2.27%
100.00%
22.00%
10.63%
7.64%
4.22%
1.03%
45.53%
46.16%
4.63%
3.69%
100.00%
Olaudah Equiano, or,
Gustavus Vassa, the African
Lecture structure
• The slave narrative: Influences
– The rise of anti-slavery sentiment
• Types of slave narratives
• Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
• Later forms:
– WPA slave narratives
– Neo-slave narratives
Influences on the slave narrative:
captivity narratives
Influences on the slave narrative:
petitionary appeals
Influences on the slave narrative:
religious tracts
Olaudah Equiano, or,
Gustavus Vassa, the African
Influences on the slave narrative:
anti-slavery politics
Rise of anti-slavery sentiment
• The British abolitionist movement emerged
from the 1770s because of…
1. The evangelical revival, within and beyond the
Anglican Church
2. The Enlightenment (a belief in progress)
3. The development of Romanticism (ideas of the
‘noble savage’)
4. The growth of free-tradism
Influences on the slave narrative:
anti-slavery politics
Early slave narratives (1770s-1820s):
Tales of religious redemption
Early slave narratives (1770s-1820s):
Tales of religious redemption
Later slave narratives (from 1820s):
Antislavery propaganda
Later slave narratives (from 1820s):
Antislavery propaganda
Later slave narratives (from 1820s):
Antislavery propaganda
Non-anglophone slave narratives
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano (1789)
‘The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably
loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and
some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air;
but now that the whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became
absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the
climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that
each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This
produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for
respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a
sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to
the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This
wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains,
now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into
which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks
of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a
scene of horror almost inconceivable’.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus
Vassa…, pp 51-52 (1794; 9th edition).
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano (1789)
• Themes:
–
–
–
–
–
Appeals to the audience
Details the violence of slavery, including sexual abuse
Separation of enslaved families and marriages
Challenges contemporary racist stereotypes
Details impact of slavery on enslaved people and
owners
– Journey from slavery to freedom parallels that from
heathenism to Christianity
• 13 editions in first five years after publication.
Republished New York in 1791, and translated
WPA slave narratives
• The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was
part of the New Deal
• Its Federal Writers’ Project interviewed
surviving ex-slaves during 1936-38 across
seventeen states
• Slave Narrative Collection consists of 2300+
interviews with former slaves
• Most are first-person accounts of slave life and
the respondents’ reactions to bondage from
early 1860s and before
Interview with George Johnson, Mound
Bayou, Mississippi, September 1941
Interviewer: I want you to tell me how you got your name?
Mr George Johnson: I got my name from President Jeff Davis. He
was president of the Southern Confederacy. He owned my
grandfather and my father. Brought them from Richmond,
Virginia. My grandfather was a blacksmith. My father was a
young kid, wasn't grown. And my father had learned how to
write a little bit in Richmond, Virginia, before they brought him
down here. Grandpa used to keep chalk in his shop to mark ???
things; and my father take a piece put in his pocket and pass in
front master Jeff's house he write on the sidewalk. And so one
morning master Jeff come by and saw that writing on the walk,
he go back and ask the cook, [old lady named (?)] Meli, Meliza:
“There's writing on the sidewalk, who writing out there?”
Neo-slave narratives
‘[T]hese texts illustrate the centrality of the history and the
memory of slavery to our individual, racial, gender, cultural,
and national identities. Further, they provide a perspective
on a host of issues…trauma and traumatic memories; the
legacy of slavery (and other atrocities) for subsequent
generations; the interconnectedness of constructions of
race and gender; the relationship of the body to memory;
the agency of the enslaved’.
Valerie Smith, 'Neo-slave narratives' in The Cambridge
Companion to the African American Slave Narrative (2007),
pp 168-9.
Neo-slave narratives
Neo-slave narratives
(Neo-)slave narratives on film