Journal articles on the topic 'Historical novel (Slavery)'
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1
Thomas, Sue. "CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE OF SLAVERY IN JANE EYRE." Victorian Literature and Culture 35, no. 1 (January 22, 2007): 57–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150307051418.
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POSTCOLONIAL READINGS OFJane Eyre have often highlighted the historical occlusion of West Indian slavery in the novel. Carl Plasa, for instance, argues thatPenny Boumelha points out that by her reckoning there are “ten explicit references to slavery in Jane Eyre. They allude to slavery in Ancient Rome and in the seraglio, to the slaveries of paid work as a governess and of dependence as a mistress. None of them refers to the slave trade upon which the fortunes of all in the novel are based” (62). While Jane Eyre's allusion to slavery in the seraglio is indeed the most precise historical allusion in the novel, critics working with general schemes of slave and imperial history have not been able to identify or unpack its topical reference to an anomalous moment in the history of British abolition of slavery. Like all of Jane's references to slavery, however, this allusion gains considerably in importance when read against that history, as I will demonstrate in this essay. I will also elaborate the generic and more broadly historical intertextuality of Jane's Gothic narratives of identification with the slave. By doing so, I disclose further meanings of slavery and empire in Jane Eyre, as well as the ways in which Gothic and heroic modes become a means, for Brontë and her characters alike, of articulating fraught racialized identifications and disavowals. Jane's growth of religious feeling, which Barbara Hardy has influentially suggested is taken “for granted” rather than demonstrated (66), is, I argue, grounded in her consciousness of the tensions between slavery and Christianity as they are played out in domestic and imperial spheres at a particular historical moment. That historical moment may be established through Brontë's allusions to slave rebellions and charters, and to a particular edition of Sir Walter Scott's poem Marmion.
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Stulov, Yuri V. "Contemporary African American Historical Novel." Literature of the Americas, no. 14 (2023): 75–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2023-14-75-99.
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The paper discusses the works of African American writers of the end of the 1960s — the end of the 2010s that address the historical past of African Americans and explores the traumatic experience of slavery and its consequences. The tragedy of people subjected to slavery as well as their masters who challenged the moral and ethical norms has remained the topical issue of contemporary African American historical novel. Pivotal for the development of the genre of African American historical novel were Jubilee by the outstanding writer and poet Margaret Walker and the non-fiction novel Roots by Alex Haley. African American authors reconsider the past from today’s perspective making use of both the newly discovered documents and the peculiarities of contemporary literary techniques and showing a versatility of genre experiments, paying attention to the ambiguity of American consciousness in relation to the past. Toni Morrison combines the sacred and the profane, reality and magic while Ishmael Reed conjugates thematic topicality and a bright literary experiment connecting history with the problems of contemporary consumer society; Charles Johnson problematizes history in a philosophic tragicomedy. Edward P. Jones reconsiders the history of slavery in a broad context as his novel’s setting is across the whole country on a broad span of time. The younger generation of African American writers represented by C. Baker, A. Randall, C. Whitehead, J. Ward and other authors touches on the issues of African American history in order to understand whether the tragic past has finally been done with. Contemporary African American historical novel relies on documents, new facts, elements of fictional biography, traditions of slave narratives and in its range makes use of peculiarities of family saga, bildungsroman, political novel, popular novel enriching it with various elements of magic realism, parodying existing canons and sharp satire.
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Lee, Julia Sun-Joo. "THE (SLAVE) NARRATIVE OF JANE EYRE." Victorian Literature and Culture 36, no. 2 (September 2008): 317–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150308080194.
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InImperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.
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Vlassopoulos, Kostas. "Does Slavery Have a History?" Journal of Global Slavery 1, no. 1 (2016): 5–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2405836x-00101002.
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In the last decade the landscape of slavery studies has changed radically. Novel developments raise major new challenges for the global study of slavery. This article is an attempt to take stock of these significant developments for rethinking the history of slavery from a global viewpoint. I will be arguing that we need to set aside the essentialist understanding of slavery and the ahistorical typology of slave societies and societies with slaves in favor of an understanding of slavery as a temporally—and spatially—changing outcome of the entanglement of various processes. If slavery has no essence, but an open-ended global history, we need a new framework for conceptualizing how such a history can be written. I hope to offer an outline of such a framework, as well as a discussion of the kinds of historical change that such a narrative should include.
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Dhakal, Lekha Nath. "Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Study on History, Slavery and Love." Pursuits: A Journal of English Studies 6, no. 1 (July 21, 2022): 39–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/pursuits.v6i1.46849.
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This article makes an effort to describe Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved as a fusion of History, slavery and love. It also reveals that history of Afro-Americans, slave narrative; love and fantasy are the main assets of the novel. In the novel, she focuses on the horror of the past so that Afro-Americans and the Americans all those who involved with slavery would come face to face with grim reality of the past and rise above it. The novel articulates and embodies a history of slavery of African-Americans and their experiences, which has been apparently, accurately and carefully recovered but is actually uncooked. Beloved directly confronts racism which combines lyrical beauty with an assault on the readers’ emotions and conscience. It emphasizes the legacy of slavery using forms resulting from traditional Back Folk aesthetic. It deals with the life and history of Black American women immediately after the emancipation of slaves in the North. Beloved also presents a tragedy involving mother’s moment of choice, and a love story exploring what it means to be beloved. Thus the novel holds the key to the narrative’s unity. The subject matter is stressful to read and it is also confrontational and painful. The form combines historical realism with magic, slavery and love.
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Martin Demers, Stephane. "Contemplating the Afterlife of Slavery." Caribbean Quilt 6, no. 2 (February 4, 2022): 32–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.33137/cq.v6i2.36939.
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Évelyne Trouillot’s novel The Infamous Rosalie makes it abundantly clear that slavery was deeply ingrained in all aspects of an enslaved person’s life. Enslaved expectant mothers in late-eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue contemplated the afterlife of slavery through acts of gynecological resis- tance such as abortion and infanticide as well as marronage both in the novel and as a historical actuality. These acts of resistance laid the groundwork for the development of a collective liberation mentality among slaves necessary for the emergence of an independent Haiti and the creation of the first Black Repub- lic. Black counter-historical narratives, such as Trouillot’s novel, can provide historians with a vantage point from which to understand how historical actors who are often silenced were some of the greatest agents of change and justice in the modern era. Enslaved women should occupy a space in scholarly literature and historical discourse that honors their actions as active agents in search of collective liberation and independence.
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Levecq, Christine, and Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. "Texts and Contexts: The Historical Novel about Slavery." Contemporary Literature 42, no. 1 (2001): 160. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1209089.
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Dubey, Madhu. "Museumizing Slavery: Living History in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad." American Literary History 32, no. 1 (December 27, 2019): 111–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz056.
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Abstract This essay examines Colson Whitehead’s novel in relation to the museumizing of slavery that has gained momentum since the 1990s, focusing in particular on the Living History exhibition practice in which the Underground Railroad has played a vital part. Taking as my point of departure Whitehead’s signature move of building narrative worlds based on the logic of literalizing metaphor, I argue that his literal rendering of the Underground Railroad casts the novel as a grotesque tour of the US racial history. Structured as a train ride that transports readers to different historical sites, the novel at once stages and travesties the Living History practice of materializing the past in all its concrete particularity. I argue that Whitehead’s literalizing move also deviates from earlier literary efforts to stage a visceral, affective confrontation with the history of slavery. Responding to the heightened visibility rather than the absence of slavery from public memory, the novel casts into bold relief the historical frameworks (of American freedom stories and up-from-slavery narratives of racial advancement), pedagogical aims (of racial reconciliation and pluralist inclusion), and aesthetic strategies (of affective identification and cathartic confrontation) at play in current commemorations and exhibitions of slavery.
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Osorio, Betty. "La Marquesa de Yolombó. La independencia vivida en el ámbito de la lengua." Estudios de Literatura Colombiana, no. 23 (August 16, 2013): 201–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.17533/udea.elc.16267.
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Resumen: El propósito de este ensayo es explorar la perspectiva lingüística, el denso panorama cultural de La Marquesa de Yolombó, considerada por la crítica como la única novela histórica del narrador antioqueño. Los referentes históricos de esta novela son el proceso de emancipación de los esclavos y la lucha independentista, pero localizadas en el territorio de Antioquia. Descriptores: Colonia; Independencia; Democracia; Lengua; Oralidad; Esclavitud. Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to explore the linguistic perspective, the dense cultural panorama of La Marquesa de Yolombó, considered by the critics as the only historical novel written by Carrasquilla. The historical referents of this novel are the process of abolition of slavery and the period of the independence war both located in the Antioquia region. Key words: Spanish Colonial period; Independence war; Language; Orality; Slavery.
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Apriola, Pipin, Agustine Mamentu, and Tirza Kumayas. "CRUELTY OF SLAVERY IN AMERICA AS SEEN IN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S UNCLE TOM’S CABIN." KOMPETENSI 2, no. 01 (December 15, 2022): 1039–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.53682/kompetensi.v2i01.4733.
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The purpose of this research is to examine the cruelty of slavery in America as shown inHarriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is done to show the many sorts ofenslavement cruelty present in the novel, as well as the causes of the brutality in thestory. The writers have decided to undertake this research using qualitative methods.The writers employ a socio-historical method to data analysis. In the discussion isdivided into several indicators, such as cruelty of slavery which is divided into slavetreat as thing or properties and object of physical violence. The other indicator is slavessuffer as the effect cruelty of slavery which divided into racism, discrimination, slaves’life is restricted and rebellion. Based on the results of the discussion, it can be concludedthat slavery has happened to black people who are very cruel in America and evenlegalized. South Americans treat black people as slaves inhumanely and treat them likeanimals.
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Laabdi, Mourad. "Slavery, the State, and Islam." American Journal of Islam and Society 32, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 104–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v32i1.956.
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Slavery, the State, and Islam is Fagan’s English rendering of Mohammed Ennaji’s2007 work Le Sujet et le Mamelouk: Esclavage, Pouvoir et Religion dansle Monde Arab, a historical study of the economics of power in the relationshipamong slavery, Islam, and monarchy. Ennaji investigates the structure and natureof the “bond of authority” as it manifests itself in servitude between theking and subject, master and slave, God and believers. The bulk of his primaryhistorical material belongs to the first few centuries of Islam. However his intention,as he notes in the introduction, is to also make sense of contemporarymodes of power that govern the scene of authority in the individuals’ proximityto the state and, in some instances, to one another.The opening chapter tells an anecdote of a nineteenth-century Moroccanofficial who was stripped of his title as Local Governor (in Arabic, Qaid), declareddead to the public, and kept as a slave in the sultan’s palace. Ennajichallenges the official narrative and weaves novel threads of the story to showthe degree to which the bond of authority between the sultan and his servantsdepends upon uninterrupted flat obedience.The second chapter questions the issue of slavery during Islam’s earlyyears. The author claims that the new religion made little practical changes tothis institution and, in certain cases, made slaves even more abjectly submissiveto their masters. Ennaji particularly details Islam’s termination of the statusesof sa’b (a sā’ib is a slave who has attained full unconditional freedom) andṭalq (repudiation) and its admission of mawlā (freed slaves must remain loyalto their ex-master). He also elaborates on the non-provision of part of the publicfunds to free more slaves, as well as the practice of depriving freed slaves ofthe spoils of war and discouraging people from marrying them.In the third chapter, Ennaji undertakes the king-subject relation in lightof the notion of servitude. He probes the sociolinguistic roots of several conceptualizations,including ‘ibādah, ra’īyah, and ṭā‘ah (translated successivelyas adoration, people, and obedience). He also examines the semiotics of variousexpressions of servitude and presents a prolonged discussion of the differentuses of the hand in this context. Ennaji contends that the transition toIslam barely changed anything in the structure of authority and the masterslaverelationship. As he puts it, with the advent of Islam there was “a reorganizationof the authoritarian space that reshuffled the division of powerbetween the king and the divine authority” (p. 82). This redistribution of poweris elaborated in the fourth chapter, where the author draws on concepts used ...
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Kuzmanović, Denis. "FEAR OF THE PAST IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED – A NEW HISTORICISM PERSPECTIVE." Mostariensia 26, no. 2 (February 3, 2023): 63–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.47960/2831-0322.2022.2.26.63.
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Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is one of the most prominent recent depictions of the still unhealed wound of slavery which is deeply imbedded into the fabric of American society. Through the literary critical theory of New Historicism, this novel, a fictional piece of literature, can be considered a historical document in its own right, in which the author, although dealing with the 19th century Reconstruction period of the antebellum Civil War, presents, both consciously and subconsciously, her own contemporary notions of this period of America’s past. In other words, this novel has inner voices which desire to express a certain political, historical and social stance, both in accordance with the author’s wishes, but also “independently” so, as the author cannot help but be influenced, in various ways, by the contemporary views on this topic. Thus, Beloved becomes a document of its time, namely the 1980s United States, and represents sometimes conflicting voices regarding the factual and fictional past of the slavery period in question, but also of the present in which it was created. Keywords: Morrison; Beloved; Slavery; Civil War; Reconstruction; New Historicism
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Quan, Zhou. "Cultural Memory and Ethnic Identity Construction in Toni Morrison’sA Mercy." Journal of Black Studies 50, no. 6 (July 4, 2019): 555–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021934719861268.
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Through the lens of cultural memory, this article explores the relationships between the representation of cultural memory and the construction of ethnic cultural identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. I argue that in the novel, Morrison highlights and manipulates three media of cultural memory: the architecture, the inscription, and the body, to interrogate and challenge the validity of numerous historical monuments and museums in America that are eviscerated of their complicity and function as tools in the atrocity of instituting slavery. To externalize his values, White colonizer Jacob builds a superfluous mansion, which, with the slave trade involved, actually serves as a profane monument to the slavery culture. To highlight the invalidity of the White cultural memory, Morrison crafts Florens who inscribes in the mansion the collective traumatic memory of the African female slaves, deforming the secular memorial from within. In the same fashion, culturally traumatized, Native American Lina adulterates the White culture by insinuating into it the Indigenous Indian cultural fragments and by performing the remolded Indigenous Indian culture, she sediments it into her body. By historicizing the issue of cultural memory in A Mercy, Morrison invites the reader to reconsider what makes a true American cultural memory.
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Wahad Kalil Hashem. "THE SELF-ALIENATION AND DESTRUCTION OF IDENTITY: A POSTCOLONIAL STUDY OF TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED." European Journal of Learning on History and Social Sciences 1, no. 6 (June 10, 2024): 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.61796/ejlhss.v1i6.582.
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This article analyzes Toni Morrison's novel Beloved from the viewpoints. postcolonial perspective of Edward Said. By deconstructing the archetype of slavery, Morrison challenges white stereotypes of enslaved individuals and explores their feelings of self-alienation and identity deconstruction. This postcolonial analysis also situates the novel within the historical and political realities of African Americans in the United States. Sethe's character reveals the double oppression black women suffer and their contradictory experiences. In addition, the narrative structure and fragmented language of "Beloved" reflect the fractured experiences of enslaved African people, challenging traditional historical narratives dominated by white perspectives Morrison highlighted the intergenerational trauma caused by slavery and the ongoing systemic oppression and racism faced by African Americans. Analyzing the novel through Said's postcolonial lens also illuminates the intersectional constructions of power, culture, and identity and reveals the continuing impact of colonialism.
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B., Mary Stella Ran, and Poli Reddy R. "OJEBETA “THE SELF AWAKENED” IN BUCHI EMECHETA’S THE SLAVE GIRL." International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH 6, no. 10 (October 31, 2018): 95–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.29121/granthaalayah.v6.i10.2018.1166.
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The novel “The Slave Girl” by Buchi Emecheta exposes the plights of African women and portrayal of their struggle as slaves and ultimately how they come up the problem and becomes a self-awakened. In this paper, one can see Ojebeta starting her life as a slave and finally becomes an owner of a house by passing so many phases of life as a slave. In the beginning, she is sold into domestic slavery by her own brother. She has become the victim to her brother’s traits. She has become a scapegoat to the plans of African patriarchy. The intention of Buchi Emecheta is to recreate the image of women through feminism. Emecheta’s fiction is blended with reality representing socio historical elements of the prevailing society and its environment besides questioning the pathetic conditions of the people in general and women in particular. One can observe the narration of innocence of childhood grown into adulthood by attaining certain amount of freedom with the Christian education which she has received with which she has attained a small degree of self-awareness.
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Hamilton, Cynthia S. "Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative." Journal of American Studies 30, no. 3 (December 1996): 429–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875800024890.
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Beloved is a self-conscious examination of the possibilities and limitations of the story-making process, both for the individual and for the community. Because slavery is a highly emotive subject and because historical narratives of slavery are so controversial, the exercise is a particularly potent one. The basic problem of the novel concerns the need to transform facts of unspeakable horror into a life-giving story, for the individual, for the black community, and for the nation. It is a problem which encourages compulsive repetition and avoidance; hence the stories of slavery proliferate. On the individual level the stories are shaped by the points of view of a variety of characters; on a wider level, by the demands of different types of utterance and by the structuring power of different kinds of historical perspectives and linguistic formulations, including, most significantly, generic forms. This profusion of storytelling makes the statement at the end of the novel, that “this is not a story to pass on” exceedingly problematic, for there is no single referent for the pronoun “this”, and the article “ a ” seems singularly inappropriate in view of this profusion.
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Hand, Felicity. "The Fight for Land, Water and Dignity in Lindsey Collen’s The Malaria Man and Her Neighbour." Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, no. 82 (2021): 63–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.25145/j.recaesin.2021.82.05.
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The novels of South-African born Mauritian writer and activist Lindsey Collen expose a historical continuum of class exploitation, ranging from the slave past of the country including both pre-abolition African slavery together with indentured labour from the Indian subcontinent to post-independence sweat-shop toil, ill-paid domestic labour and exploited agricultural workers. Her latest novel to date, The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours (2010) probes this continuing class conflict and queries mainstream notions of heteronormativity. Access to water and land will be seen to lie behind the murder of the four main characters and the subsequent popular reaction. Collen insists that the underprivileged can become empowered through union, that participation and joint, communal effort can still make a difference.
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Uściński, Przemysław. "The “Noble Savage”: Aristocracy, Slavery, Restoration Culture and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave." Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies, no. 26/1 (September 11, 2017): 43–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.7311/0860-5734.26.1.03.
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Evoking as historical and intertextual context the Restoration of English monarchy and the attendant political and cultural projects, chiefly royalist, legitimizing and advocating the stability of power in the period, the paper discusses Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave by looking at its literary representation of the African prince as a “noble savage” – a trope that may be found also in John Dryden’s and Jonathan Swift’s work. The paper pays due attention to the politics of Behn’s novel in terms of its ambiguous treatment of race, slavery and colonialism, and evokes the concepts of “iterability” and “Third Space” in order to engage in a deconstructive reading of the novel’s royalist project of cultural investment in such notions as nobility, hierarchy and order.
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González Groba, Constante. "Riding the Rails to (Un)Freedom: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad." Polish Journal for American Studies, no. 13 (Autumn 2019) (October 15, 2019): 255–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.7311/pjas.13/2/2019.07.
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This novel about US black slavery departs from realism, moving around in time and space as a means of dealing with different racial terrors in different historical periods. One of the author’s intentions is to make us think about slavery not just in the past but with reverberations for the present. Published in 2016, the novel resonates with a contemporary America characterized by acrimonious racial division. After escaping from a Georgia plantation through a literalized Underground Railroad, the adolescent female protagonist soon learns that freedom remains elusive in states further north, even those where slavery has been abolished. The novel fuses the odyssey of Cora with the history and mythology of America, and asserts the inseparability of slavery from American capitalism and the building of empire. Cora explores both the Declaration of Independence and the Bible, two foundational texts of the nation, in a novel that addresses some of the foundational sins of America. Hers is the all-American story of escape to freedom, but her journey takes her through ever darker varieties of depredation and oppression. She becomes an American dreamer in the sense that she never accepts her place in a system that she persists in defying, and through this process becomes a fictional representation of black people who, with their relentless pursuit of freedom, contributed so greatly to the building of American democracy.
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Pon, Dharani, and M. Saritha. "Unveiling Trauma: A Journey Through Suffering, Identity and Healing with Reference to the Novel Beloved." Shanlax International Journal of Arts, Science and Humanities 11, S2-March (March 30, 2024): 91–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.34293/sijash.v11is2-march.7520.
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This paper explores the novel “Beloved” by Toni Morrison through the lens of trauma and psychoanalytical theory. Set in post-Civil War Ohio, the narrative delves into the psychological aftermath of slavery on the characters, particularly Sethe, who grapples with the trauma of her past. Drawing upon Freudian and Jungian concepts, this analysis examines how repressed memories, unresolved conflicts, and collective unconscious elements shape the characters’ experiences. Through the character of Beloved, who embodies the collective trauma of slavery, Morrison illustrates the complexities of memory, identity, and healing. The novel’s intricate narrative structure and use of symbolism further underscore the psychological depth of the characters’ struggles. Ultimately, Beloved serves as a profound exploration of the enduring impact of historical trauma and the human capacity for resilience and transformation.
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Wyatt, Jean. "Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108, no. 3 (May 1993): 474–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/462616.
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In Beloved, Toni Morrison expresses the dislocations and violence of slavery through disruptions in language. The novel tells the “unspeakable” story of Sethe, a slave mother whose act of infanticide leaves a gap in family narrative; bars her surviving daughter, Denver, from language use; and hinders her own ability to speak. Morrison's inclusion of voices previously left out of historical and literary narratives disturbs the language of the novel itself. The Africans piled on the slave ships, the preverbal child who comes back in the shape of the ghost Beloved, and a nursing mother who insists on the primacy of bodily connection: the expression of these subjects' heretofore unspoken experiences and desires distorts discursive structures, especially the demarcations that support normative language. Morrison's textual practice challenges Lacan's assumptions about language and language users, and her depiction of a social order that performs some of the functions of mothering challenges his vision of a paternal symbolic order based on a repudiation of maternal connection. (JW)
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De Paiva, Rita de Cássia Marinho, and Sonia Torres. "Mal de Arquivo em Linden Hills." Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies 72, no. 1 (February 1, 2019): 125–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2019v72n1p125.
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In this article we examine Gloria Naylor’s novel Linden Hills, articulating the concepts of the neoarchive and the neo-slave narrative with the notion of archive as proposed by Derrida (2001) and developed by other authors (Osborne,1999; Bradley,1999; Johnson, 2014) with whom we seek to dialogue in this space. Linden Hills’s counterdiscursive narrative revisits the past by excavating the palimpsest of forgotten memories, once unidentified or not compiled, thus establishing its relationship to the neo-slave narrative. We argue that the link between the neo-slave narrative and the archive is both concrete and productive, given that it foregrounds non-sanctioned archives as counternarratives to the historical archive (mainly, but not exclusively, that of slavery), through the articulation of history and both personal and collective memory – calling to question, in this way, colonizing documented history and its official guardians.
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Collins, Holly. "Reconstructed and neo-slave narratives in French: Filling the gap through literature and archives." International Journal of Francophone Studies 24, no. 1 (September 1, 2021): 29–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ijfs_00028_1.
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This article examines Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard’s Freedom Papers and Marie-Célie Agnant’s novel Le livre d’Emma as two important contributions geared towards filling the lacunae that exist in the historical record given the lack of slave narratives in French. This study argues that these narratives are important because they approach slavery in the French empire from a fresh angle. Freedom Papers reconstructs the existence of a woman named Rosalie from her entry into the slave trade through her life in Haiti. Such a biographical approach allows researchers to put an individual face on what has mostly been studied as an abstract institution. Similarly, Agnant traces the family history of Emma back to her first ancestor to make the transatlantic journey. Although Agnant’s contribution is fictional, Emma’s story captures a perspective similar to the experience of many whose ancestors were enslaved. Both stories stress the importance of writing ‐ veritable ink on paper. It was through writing that biased historical narrative was created by former empires. It is therefore through writing that Rosalie succeeded in injecting herself into the historical record, and through writing that Emma ensures her ancestors’ story is never forgotten.
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Ferreira Junior, Roberto. "Memory and the neo-slave novel in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer." Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada 24, no. 46 (April 2022): 41–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/2596-304x20222446rfj.
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ABSTRACT: This analysis investigates two recent African-American novels, namely, The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead and The Water Dancer (2019) by Ta-nehisi Coates from the configurations proposed by the literary genre known as neo-slave narratives. These narratives are postmodern fictional reinterpretations of 19th century slave narratives which had a fundamental role in the American process of abolition. First, I will provide a brief overview of neo-slave narratives, particularly with regards to the North American literary context, and proceed to investigate how the two novels can be classified as belonging to this genre. Second, I will focus on the role of memory in both novels as forgotten historical events and religious myths are revisited by the writers. As theoretical support, I will turn to authors such as Bernard Bell, Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, Toni Morrison, Valerie Smith, among others, who investigated not only the reasons for the emergence of neo-slave narratives, but also reflected on the implications that these postmodern narratives have for the memory of slavery.
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Van Kempen, Michiel. "Post-colonial Literary Texts as Reading Texts within Today’s Schools." Werkwinkel 13, no. 1-2 (December 1, 2018): 27–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/werk-2018-0002.
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Abstract In the making of an edition of the first modern Dutch slavery novel, De stille plantage (1931) by Surinamese author Albert Helman, all kinds of questions arise. There are issues of postcolonial contextualization, historical commentary and the way a text gets its actual significance in high schools. All these issues have their own sensibility in the light of recent fierce debates on slavery and its impact on western societies. The editors do have to take into account more than ever before their own position and questions of ideological responsibility, apart from issues of didactical and pedagogical nature. The question is raised whether such a modern edition does not touch more upon ideological language critique than postcolonial contextualization.
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Lema, Emmanuel P. "Fictional reconstruction of history of Kilwa in M.G Vassanji’s The Magic of Saida." Tanzania Zamani: A Journal of Historical Research and Writing 11, no. 2 (September 1, 2019): 30–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.56279/tza20211123.
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This paper explores M.G Vassanji’s novel, The Magic of Saida (2012). It draws on the idea of reconstruction of history used in anthropology[1] and utilizes it as an approach in carrying out textual analysis of the novel and exploring how the novel reconstructs the history of Kilwa. Additionally, it employs Stephen Greeblatt idea of New Historicism, whereby appreciation of the text history and textuality of history is done on the assumption that the novel is a closely-knit fabric composed of both historical and literary threads. The paper argues that Kamal Punja’s story about his return to Kilwa to look for his childhood lover, Saida is well intertwined with accounts and varying versions of stories of old Kilwa, slavery and slave trade in Kilwa, German intervention in Kilwa and African resistances. It is further argued that Vassanji is not only writing Kamal’s story but also allowing Kamal to revisit his past and reconstruct the history and in that way through the novel fiction and history have been used by Vassanji to propose a view that there are differences between actual historical events, varying perceptions of the events and the histories about the events, thus Vassanji has provided readers with a room to question the process by which we represent ourselves and our world and to become aware of the means by which we make sense of and construct our history.
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Son, Wel, and Robby Satria. "RACE, MILIEU, AND MOMENT IN GONE WITH THE WIND BY MARGARET MITCHELL." JURNAL BASIS 11, no. 1 (April 30, 2024): 23–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.33884/basisupb.v11i1.8180.
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Abstract The purpose of creating this research is to reveal race, milieu, and moment in the novel “Gone with the Wind” written by Margaret Mitchell. In this research, researchers focused on applying historical approach by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine in Guerin et al. (2005) that consists race, milieu and moment to analyze “Gone with the Wind” novel as the data source. Besides applying the theory, descriptive qualitative research by Sugiyono (2012) was also applied by researchers due to the phenomena that were found in written form. To collect the data, researchers applied library research method by George (2008) by following four steps, they are: took “Gone with the Wind” novel as the data source, read the novel carefully, find the race, milieu, and moment, and collect and divide the data found. In analyzing the data, researchers focused on analyzing the extrinsic element explained by Wellek & Warren (1949) by applying race, milieu, and moment theory and presented them descriptively. For the findings, researcher found the race or racial differences on the skin color and their nationality in United States of America on North Georgia, in the Old South region. The milieu was discovered in the character’s occupation where they worked as businessman, plantation owner, breeding farm owner, student, farmer, soldier, maid, horse coachman, doctor, and prostitute. In addition, researchers also found the moment in the incident of Civil War and the slavery. Keywords: Historical approach, Racial Differences, Slavery.
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Rasiah, Rasiah, Isnawati Lydia Wantasen, Golda Juliet Tulung, Ramis Rauf, La Bilu, and Nur Israfyan Sofian. "‘I Have Been Faithful to Thee, Cynara’: Parodying Canonical Pro-Slavery Novel in The Wind Done Gone." World Journal of English Language 14, no. 3 (February 23, 2024): 62. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v14n3p62.
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Parody, as a specific case of adaptation and intertextuality, is not only burlesquing background text but also creating a critical distance through superimposition strategies. This paper sought to show the parodic means performed in the novel The Wind Done Gone (TWDG) written by Alice Randall. It was meant to be a parody of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (GWTW) and has intertextuality with other literary works. The interconnection of the novel's narrative strategies and its effort to attach historical reassessment suggested a trustworthy reality of the black slave experience. Randall effectively deconstructed and reconstructed the black experience and identity, as well as dismantled the racist representation in the canonical novel GWTW. Enslaved black people are transformed into dominants as active agents and intelligent, creating a beautiful mulatto, tagging black intellectuals in American history and the new Negroes, naming ties, and providing verbatim quotes to revisit the stereotype and cultural misconstruction against black Americans. Randall seemed not to alter the meta-history of slavery but rather to show the irony of the racist discourse in the canonical saga and other popular media.
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Ren, Ryan. "Racial Discrimination in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the "Black Lives Matter" Movement." Pacific International Journal 6, no. 3 (September 28, 2023): 15–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.55014/pij.v6i3.384.
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Uncle Tom's Cabin and the "Black Lives Matter" movement are two different themes, but both are related to racial discrimination. For the novel, it depicts the story of a slave named Tom, and describes the pain and inequality brought about by the slavery through the experience of Tom and other characters. This novel caused great repercussions around the American Civil War, helped to promote the struggle against the slavery, and became one of the classics of world literature. While the "Black Lives Matter" movement advocates for equality, justice, and the elimination of violence and discrimination against the black people. The focus of this movement is to protest against violent or arbitrary actions against African Americans, such as illegal arrests, excessive use of force, or intentional killings. Although these two themes emerged in different historical and cultural periods, they share a common goal of opposing racial discrimination and pursuing equality and justice. Moreover, in the current era, the "Black Lives Matter" movement is more diverse and inclusive compared to past movements. By publishing anti-racial discrimination information on media and social media, and organizing, more people are involved in the fight against discrimination. They are all aimed at opposing and eliminating racial discrimination, and promoting the construction of a more equal, diverse, and just society. Due to different historical backgrounds and cultural characteristics, there are certainly differences in practice and ideology. This article explores the connection between the "Black Lives Matter" movement and Uncle Tom's Cabin, which both reflect the long-standing issues of racial discrimination and social injustice in American society. As a chronic disease of American society, although racial discrimination and social inequality are difficult to solve, it is necessary for us to conduct some detailed analysis on them. The connection between the novel and the movement indicates that the ongoing struggle for equality and justice is meaningful, that is, the liberation of black people can only be achieved through their own struggles.
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Civantos, Christina. "The Pliable Page: Turn-of-the-21st-Century Reworkings of Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés." Latin American Literary Review 49, no. 99 (September 9, 2022): 2–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.26824/lalr.334.
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This essay examines turn-of-the-21st-century responses to the foundational 19th-century novel by Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés, pointing to the ambivalence toward textual authority and migration as key elements in Cubans’ relationship to historical memory. The analysis of two plays, a puppet show, a novel, and works of visual and performance art, all of which have a textual element and were produced between 1994 and 2006, demonstrates the ongoing use of the Cecilia story to question key elements of Cuban historical memory. While contesting the legacy of the colonial and nation-building era, these contemporary works open a dialogue regarding narratives about Cuban migration, from the 19th century into the present. They unpack the established narratives about Cuba’s colonial period—slavery, race, socioeconomic class, and sexuality, and also contribute to new narratives about migration. The relationship between movement, authority, and textuality in these responses to Villaverde’s novel points to how 19th-century historical memory, and intertwined with that migration, are central to the ongoing renegotiation of Cuban identity. By re-working Villaverde’s novel—figuratively or literally manipulating the pages of Cecilia Valdés—Cuban writers and artists participate in a ritual of resignification that redefines lo cubano.
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Tabone, Mark A. "Multidirectional Rememory: Slavery and the Holocaust in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues." Twentieth-Century Literature 65, no. 3 (September 1, 2019): 191–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-7852053.
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This article focuses on the representation of history in African American author John A. Williams’s 1999 novel, Clifford’s Blues, a fictional account of a Black, queer American expatriate’s internment and enslavement in a Nazi concentration camp. Through a critical perspective that incorporates the imaginative recovery of (often silenced) history that Toni Morrison (1987) called “rememory,” along with what Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg (2009) calls “multidirectional memory,” this article details Williams’s daring exploration of spaces of overlap between the histories of American slavery, Jim Crow, and the Nazi Holocaust. The article demonstrates how the novel’s unconventional and controversial emplotment allows Williams to create a distinctive historical critique not only of slavery and the Holocaust but, more broadly, of otherization, racialized violence, and modernity itself, while making a number of historiographic interventions. These include inscribing a largely absent history of the experience of Black people affected by the Holocaust and the mapping of theretofore underacknowledged resonances between American and German ideologies and practices. Through its transnational, transcultural “multidirectionality,” the novel opens up a broad, structural critique of apartheid everywhere; however, this article also argues that the novel also offers models for liberatory communities of resistance. The article demonstrates how Williams accomplishes this through his novel’s allegorical and literal use of the blues.
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Triana, Ike Alit, and Henrikus Joko Yulianto. "Myth as a Revelation of Spiritual Values for Today’s Human Life Reflected on Sarah H. Bradford’s "Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People"." Rainbow: Journal of Literature, Linguistics and Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (November 30, 2019): 69–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.15294/rainbow.v8i2.33844.
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America is a country with Christianity as the major religion. It is the fact that Moses in Christian myth has an important role to the religion of this country. The United States President Harry Truman wrote in 1950 that the fundamental basis of the laws of the United States was the Ten Commandments that were given to Moses. America is also known for the country of freedom. Besides, American freedom has a unique historical story which is about slavery. Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People novel depicts the journey and struggle of Harriet in liberating African American slaves. This study aims to identify the incorporation of Moses in Christian myth to the story in the novel and its relation to the spiritual values of human’s life in the present time. The method of this study is qualitative study analysis using structuralism method of Claude Levi Strauss and the Study of Myth by Joseph Campbell. Then, the method of data analysis is based on the story in Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People novel and Moses in Christian myth. Bradford’s novel tells about the main character named Harriet who became the leader of African American slaves to the Northern America and Canada for freedom. While in Christian myth, Moses was chosen by God to be the leader of Israelites to go from the land of Egypt bondage for freedom. The final finding of this study shows the conflict of the novel, the incorporation of Moses in Christian myth to the story in the novel and shows the Ten Commandments of Christianity influenced the spiritual values by Americans which is also still relevant today. For instance, most Americans are Christian as the values of the First Commandment; Americans commonly regard their society as the freest and best in the world as the value of the Eight Commandment; the right of American constitutional democracy to attempt to “pursue” happiness in their own way as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others is a result of the Tenth Commandment; Although there are still some transgressions of one or more of the Commandments, there are somehow many other Americans who are still devoted to the Ten Commandments as moral principles in their daily life.
Keywords: African-American, Christian myth, Moses, Slavery, Structuralism
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Zhang, Zeyi. "Reading in the Haitian Revolution: Toussaint L'Ouverture and Classical Education in Harriet Martineau's The Hour and the Man." Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 143, no. 1 (June 2023): 22–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vct.2023.a903690.
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ABSTRACT: Harriet Martineau's historical novel, The Hour and the Man (1841), presents the intellectual development of Toussaint L'Ouverture through his reading of Western classical texts during the Haitian Revolution. By dramatizing Toussaint's reading and rereading, discussing and teaching of European classical and Christian texts at major turning points of the revolution, the novel highlights their liberating power in the contexts of slavery and emancipation. While the hero's close engagement with European textual culture has been criticized by both Victorian and post-colonial readers, this analysis argues that, far from repressing or betraying his people, Martineau's Toussaint interprets these texts with a free and independent mind that incorporates their original liberating power into the emancipation endeavor.
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Laski, Gregory. "Reconstructing Revenge: Race and Justice after the Civil War." American Literature 91, no. 4 (December 1, 2019): 751–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7917296.
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Abstract This essay reconsiders the politics of African American literature after the Civil War by focusing on revenge as a response to the wrong of slavery. Though forgiveness dominates literary and historical scholarship, I assemble an archive of real and imagined instances of vengeance in black-authored texts from the period following formal emancipation to the dawn of the twentieth century: the petitions of the freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolina; the minutes of the 1865 Virginia State Convention of Colored People; the narrative of the ex-slave Samuel Hall; and the Colored American Magazine’s coverage of the lynching of Louis Wright. Reading these works alongside Pauline E. Hopkins’s Winona (1902), I show how her novel develops a philosophy of righteous revenge that reclaims the true meaning of justice in a democracy. Ultimately, this archive can help us not only to examine anew a neglected literary period but also to reimagine racial justice, then and now.
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Lassner, Phyllis. "“The Dark Path Back”: Investigating Holocaust Memory in Sara Paretsky’s Novel Total Recall." Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) 41, no. 2 (September 1, 2022): 144–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/studamerijewilite.41.2.0144.
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Abstract Women writers challenge the popular and critical entrenchment of male-authored literary detective fiction. A close reading of Sara Paretsky’s 2001 novel Total Recall demonstrates that the ongoing quest for social justice by her woman detective, V. I. Warshawski, is addressed through assertive women’s voices that have also transformed critical approaches to women’s crime fiction. In Paretsky’s novels, V.I. finds herself in a double bind reserved for women in both social and literary terms: having to prove her stability and effectiveness as a professional detective and as a reliable first-person narrator. Total Recall ’s investigations of contemporary corporate crime trace their origins to American slavery and the Holocaust: the novel transforms the generic mean streets of crime fiction into a transnational crimescape with a two-way trajectory between contemporary Chicago and Central Europe’s sites of mass murder. But instead of plotting a conclusion that declares triumph over such evil, the novel joins forces with historical accounts to investigate the staying power of legitimized oppression and the memory of its victims. Reading the Holocaust narratives embedded in Total Recall reveals a story of inhumanity so far reaching that it transforms Paretsky’s local Chicago crimescape into a global epic.
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Troy, Maria Holmgren. "Body Horror in Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark." Humanities 12, no. 5 (October 16, 2023): 120. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h12050120.
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African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns.
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Sudiro, Suryo, Sayit Abdul Karim, and Juhansar Juhansar. "US CIVIL WAR MENURUT FORREST CARTER." Adabiyyāt: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra 4, no. 1 (June 7, 2020): 116. http://dx.doi.org/10.14421/ajbs.2020.04106.
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A novel may reflect the political interests and actions of the author. The author can make a story that is purposed to alter common consciousness. This article uses historicism as an interpretation theory. Historicism is used to avoid careless interpretation. With historicism, the story written in the novel is matched with historical events written in some history books. Forrest Carter writes a lot about US Civil War. He, in purpose, does not write about slavery that is commonly read as the cause of the US Civil War. He writes a lot about the murder of women and children by the northern US army soldiers in southern districts. He also writes a lot about the cooperation of his white character with a Cherokee. Above all written by Forrest Carter, the influence of his life and his political interests are seen.
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Abidin, Zulmardi. "The Fate of Mulatto after Slavery Abolishment as seen in Black Boy by Richard Wright." LINGUA LITERA : journal of english linguistics and literature 2, no. 1 (June 29, 2016): 86–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.55345/stba1.v2i1.29.
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Black Boy is a story written by Richard Wright telling about a Mulatto kid, Richard Wright, who struggled for his identity. This story beganfrom his poor parents who lived in Mississippi. Wright had a big problem since he was a kid. He made the final decision to change his life and fateto be better up north. This study analyzed the main character, Richard Wright, his parents and relatives, and his neighbor. This study usesmimetic theory. To analyze this novel, the writer uses qualitative method. The words give big results to the writer to make a descriptive report. Tosupport his study, he used a historical approach to find out what really happened. Fate, Mulatto, slavery abolishment is all about Wright’s life toget his American dream.
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O'Connell, Catharine. "Resecting Those Extraordinary Twins: Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Costs of "Killing Half"." Nineteenth-Century Literature 57, no. 1 (June 1, 2002): 100–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2002.57.1.100.
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This essay argues against the historical and persistent willingness to read Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1893) as fully or successfully separated texts, insisting instead that the apparent division of the text reiterates and mirrors the thematic concern with division, doubleness, and duplicity that runs through both parts of the composite novel. The paper examines the textual elements that frequently lead critics to read the texts as separate and argues that narrative assertions of separability are extremely unreliable. In addition, it demonstrates that the novel's treatment of race slavery and segregation is more effective if Pudd'nhead and Twins are read as parts of an essential whole. It further asserts that the perception of textual flaws in Pudd'nhead stems largely from critics reading it apart from Twins, and that many of the problems with the text disappear when the two parts of the novel are reconnected.
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Gervasio, Nicole Marie. "The Memory of Words." English Language Notes 57, no. 2 (October 1, 2019): 151–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00138282-7716240.
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Abstract This essay identifies a major blind spot in comparative memory studies despite the field’s recent “transcultural” turn: the danger of earmarking select globally recognized atrocities—specifically, the Holocaust, transatlantic slavery, and the Rwandan genocide—as emblematic analogies for renewed racial violence against marginalized groups. The essay points to a tendency to refer to these three events as limit cases for state-sanctioned violence in both public and academic commentary on rising authoritarianism. These events risk being reduced to monoliths, and the enormity of the crime eclipses the specific historical and cultural implications at stake in our contemporary moment. The essay calls on memory theorists to more aggressively scrutinize less ubiquitous, even previously peripheral histories tied to the interconnected legacies of colonialism, state terror, and slavery. As an example, this essay contrasts common comparisons between monolithic events and Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric with the 1937 Parsley Massacre, a lesser-known genocide motivated by populist discontent in the Dominican Republic, depicted in Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones. Seeking more nuanced comparisons not only challenges us to better understand the details of contemporary fascism but also reinforces the remembrance of less-known atrocities at risk for erasure in world history.
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Dwor, Richa. "Two Diasporas, One Exodus: Jewish Freedom and Jamaican Slavery in Grace Aguilar’s Sephardic Histories." Victorian Popular Fictions Journal 5, no. 2 (December 20, 2023): 104–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.46911/pmuk7383.
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The Anglo-Jewish writer Grace Aguilar (1816–47) took the Spanish Inquisition as a major topic, returning to its settings, events, and themes across three novellas, a novel, and several poems. Despite her assertions of historical accuracy and her knowledge of her family history in Jamaica, none of these Inquisition works describe transatlantic Jewish migration. Instead, her characters perish or else migrate directly to an idealized Britain. This paper establishes a new framework for Aguilar’s writings on Sephardic history by bringing to light the financial benefits accrued by Aguilar’s family from the ownership of enslaved people in Jamaica. It also emphasizes the influence of the messianic writings of her great-grandfather Benjamin Dias Fernandes. I argue that the intensity of Aguilar’s identification with English literary forms and perspectives does not indicate a tendency toward assimilation. Rather, Britain was for her as a site of redemption. Its status as a haven for persecuted Sephardim – as the end point of their exile and wanderings – is not merely a civic, but also an eschatological one.
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Sen, Arundhati. "Gardening as Activism: Cultivating Human Minds in A Gardener in Wasteland." IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities 10, no. 1 (August 16, 2023): 135–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.22492/ijah.10.1.10.
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Jotiba Phule’s Gulamgiri (1873), which is widely translated as Slavery, equates casteism with slavery. His book carefully deconstructs the Vedic scriptures, which make up the largest chunk of central religious texts in Hinduism, in order to expose the latent hypocrisy and the conspiracy of Brahminical ideology to dominate a section of society. Gulamgiri was the radical manifesto of the social reform society called Satyasodhak Samaj, founded by Phule in 1873 along with his wife Savitribai Phule. Aparajita Ninan and Srividya Natarajan’s graphic novel A Gardener in the Wasteland: Jotiba Phule’s Fight for Liberty (2011), by revisiting Jotiba Phule’s ground-breaking text Gulamgiri, examines the contemporaneity and the continuity of caste issues and thus attempts a conversation between the past and the present historical reality of casteism. The present study focuses on the centrality of the metaphor of the garden in highlighting the gravity of the caste problem and its larger implications in the lives of India’s marginalised Dalit community. By focusing on the physical aspects of gardening, this paper touches upon Dalit eco-literary concerns and brings to the fore the role of labour that defines the relationship between Dalit bodies and nature. It also aims to capture Natarajan and Ninan’s contribution to Phule’s task of metaphorical gardening, thus becoming co-gardeners in distant time and space.
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Frątczak-Dąbrowska, Marta. "Social (in)Justice, or the Condition of Global Capitalism in the Lost Child (2015) by Caryl Phillips." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 54, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 5–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/stap-2019-0001.
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AbstractThe present article is a critical rereading of Caryl Phillips’s latest novel The Lost Child (2015). It looks at the text as both a literary comment on the crisis of today’s global capitalism and as an acute socio-economic analysis of the crisis’ roots and effects. It is being argued that, by placing Wuthering Heights (1847) as an intertext for his contemporary novel and by linking the figure of Heathcliff with African slavery and contemporary poverty, Caryl Phillips aims to emphasise the affinity between the socio-economic conditioning of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, as well as between the contemporary and historical experience of economic marginalisation. Thus, he shows global capitalism as a universal experience of long modernity and asks some vital questions about its shape and its future. The following analysis, in line with recent scholarship in the field of postcolonial studies, combines postcolonial criticism with socioeconomic theories and argues that the novel deserves a place in the ongoing debates on the condition of the global economy, social (in)justice and (in)equality, which nowadays become part of the postcolonial literary scholarship.
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Luo, Li. "A Symbolic Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 8, no. 9 (September 1, 2018): 1221. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0809.17.
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Wide Sargasso Sea is acclaimed as the masterpiece of the British female writer Jean Rhys. In the novel, Rhys reshapes the mad wife of Rochester, Bertha Mason, who is imprisoned in the attic in Jane Eyre. With her own life experience as a white Creole and her experience living in West Indies as a blueprint, setting the abolition of slavery in West Indies in the nineteenth century as the background of the times, Rhys restores Antoinette a real state of survival under colonialism and patriarchy, with a sense of identity loss and confusion. The use of symbolism is one of the most outstanding styles in description. Owing to the use of symbolism, the historical situation of Jamaica under colonialism and patriarchy has been successfully displayed and the abstract moral themes have been vividly conveyed. This paper seeks to set symbolism as a theoretical basis, classify and analyze the symbols in the novel in accordance with their roles in revealing the themes, illustrating a complete interpretation of the complicated racial conflicts and patriarchy oppression in West Indies.
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Hammer, Ricarda, and Alexandre I. R. White. "Toward a Sociology of Colonial Subjectivity: Political Agency in Haiti and Liberia." Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 2 (September 24, 2018): 215–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2332649218799369.
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The authors seek to connect global historical sociology with racial formation theory to examine how antislavery movements fostered novel forms of self-government and justifications for state formation. The cases of Haiti and Liberia demonstrate how enslaved and formerly enslaved actors rethought modern politics at the time, producing novel political subjects in the process. Prior to the existence of these nations, self-determination by black subjects in colonial spaces was impossible, and each sought to carve out that possibility in the face of a transatlantic structure of slavery. This work demonstrates how Haitian and Liberian American founders responded to colonial structures, though in Liberia reproducing them albeit for their own ends. The authors demonstrate the importance of colonial subjectivities to the discernment of racial structures and counter-racist action. They highlight how anticolonial actors challenged global antiblack oppression and how they legitimated their self-governance and freedom on the world stage. Theorizing from colonized subjectivities allows sociology to begin to understand the politics around global racial formations and starts to incorporate histories of black agency into the sociological canon.
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Mariano, Trinyan. "The Law of Torts and the Logic of Lynching in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 128, no. 3 (May 2013): 559–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.3.559.
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Tort law, which governs civil wrongs, coalesced during the late nineteenth century as courts became increasingly willing to compensate injured people. Its history, however, has been told without reference to issues of race or compensation for slavery and its aftermath. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Charles Chesnutt stretches tort discourse by using its principle of corrective justice to theorize liability for racial injustice and so discovers what law suppresses—the problem of collateral consequences when responsibility is made a function of race. Not only does corrective justice reach an operational limit when the enormity of the wrong exceeds the ability to pay, but using race to assess liability aligns corrective justice with the logic behind the southern practice of lynching. Recovering Chesnutt's use of tort challenges the dominance of contract law as the framework for reading Marrow and revises our historical understanding of the significance of reparations.
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Al-Qubati, Safa'a Tawfik Abdulrashid. "Exploring the Depths of the Afro - American Literary Heritage: Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing as a Case study." مجلة جامعة صنعاء للعلوم الإنسانية 3, no. 2 (June 29, 2024): 526–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.59628/jhs.v3i2.208.
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African American history is the black spot in the history of humanity since it represents mankind as monsters who enjoy hurting others and feel the pleasure of looking at them crying loudly due to pain. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to shed light on the history of Afro-American literature to know why African American history is full of gloomy memories and to highlight the well-known figures in it. This paper is an analytical and descriptive study and the data are taken from relevant books, theses, essays, and journals. The cultural and historical aspects of this data through close reading and by using comparative and critical methods are studied. Since Yaa Gyasi is one of the African American authors who wants to show the real picture of black people suffering during and after slavery. It was decided to analyze her novel Homegoing. This paper ends up proving that the Afro-Americans faced without any mercy all kinds of oppression, horrors, and pains from slavery, segregation, and the white community discrimination due to their color and ethnicity as it was protruded in Homegoing. As a result, literature was seen as a perfect tool to tell the world what happened to black people and many black authors like Yaa Gyasi became famous icons in the world of literature because of their massive contributions in the field of Afro-American Literature.
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Khrisat, Abdulhafeth Ali. "African-American Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)." Journal of US-Africa Studies International Journal of US and African Studies 1, no. 3 (2021): 60–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.21747/21846251/jour3a3.
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This paper aims to examine the African-American identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). The novel emphasizes the painful aspects of slavery such as sexual abuse and violence and explores the effects of the institution of slavery on the African-American character’s identity. The paper also addresses what it means to have a name and be free. The slavery institution does not believe in individuality. Naming is significant since it identifies the character. An analysis of the character’s identity and name will be studied since the characters have written their own stories and they are historically deprived of their humanity and language, a major constituent of the character’s personal and fellow slaves’ history. Therefore, the African-American character looks at the past as he/she longs for the sense of self. Moreover, the African slave is prohibited from being himself/herself or from belonging to a family. In this kind of institution, the African-American doubts the essential aspects of his identity, such as his value as an individual and the source of his manhood. Even after emancipation, the character feels that he has no identity, alienated and has no sense of self. After being freed, the characters try to reclaim their identities. The characters rename themselves in a way that they can now become ‘definer’ not ‘defined’: specific examples and references will be drawn from the narrative. The white founders of the institution of slavery commit acts of raping, an attack on one’s freedom, stealing and stripping the slave’s belongings and possessions, including his name.
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Ratna Hasanthi, Dhavaleswarapu. "Womanism and Women in Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar." Shanlax International Journal of English 7, no. 2 (March 17, 2019): 1–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.34293/english.v7i2.322.
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African-American women have been inappropriately and unduly, stereotyped in various contrasting images as slaves post-slavery, wet nurses, super women, domestic helpers, mammies, matriarchs, jezebels, hoochies, welfare recipients, and hot bodies which discloses their repression in the United States of America. They have been showcased by both black men and white women in different ways quite contrary to their being in America. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Cade Bambara, to name a few writers, have put forth the condition of black women through their works. They have shown the personality of many a black women hidden behind the veils of racism, sexism, classism and systemic oppression of different sorts. Walker coined the term Womanism in her 1984 collection of essays titled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Womanism advocates consensus for black women starting with gender and proceeding over to race, ethnicity and class, with a universal outlook. Womanism offers a positive self-definition of the black woman’s self within gendered, historical, geographical, ethnic, racial and cultural contexts too. Walker’s novel The Temple of My Familiar 1989 is a womanist treatise putting forth the importance of womanist consciousness and womanist spirit. The novel is a tribute to the strength, endurance and vitality of black womanhood. The novel revolves around three pairs of characters and their lives to showcase the lives of African Americans and coloured population in America. The three couples namely Suwelo and Fanny, Arveyda and Carlotta, Lissie and Hal showcased in the novel, belong to different age groups and different, mixed ethnicities. Through them, Walker depicts the lives of marginalized population in America, and the umpteen trials they face for being who they are. Furthermore, this paper showcases how Womanism as a theory can really enliven the life of the black community, especially black women when put into practice.
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Hartner, Marcus. "Pirates, Captives, and Conversions: Rereading British Stories of White Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean." Anglia 135, no. 3 (September 6, 2017): 417–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2017-0044.
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AbstractWhile captivity narratives have long been recognized as an important field of research in American Studies, the substantial body of autobiographical tales portraying captivity in the Muslim world published in England between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth century has only recently begun to attract the attention of literary scholars. Despite a number of important pioneering works, however, British captivity narratives have not only remained at the margins of early modern studies, but even where they have received attention they have mainly been treated as historical source material. In other words, there has hardly been any interest in the genre of captivity narratives as a textual and literary phenomenon in its own right. As a consequence, most of the published stories in question lack thorough narrative analysis, although the genre is situated at the intriguing intersection of travel literature, religious writing (e. g. tales of martyrdom), and prose fiction, and arguably constitutes one of the forerunners of the early novel. This paper proposes that we need to go beyond the limits of current research by rereading British tales of captivity with a stronger interest in their narrative composition, their discursive and generic contexts, and the pragmatics of publishing. Only in this way it will be possible to both do justice and draw more sustained attention to this highly fascinating and yet still understudied genre of literary texts.