Rereading the Antebellum Slave Narrative
North East Modern Languages Association (NEMLA) Annual Conference in
Hartford, Connecticut, March 30-31, 2001
Often considered the foundation of African American cultural expression
despite its notorious reputation for being historically "miscegenated" or too
carefully controlled by white sponsors, the narratives of Olaudah Equiano,
Linda Brent, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson, Henry
Bibb, JWC Pennington, Ellen and William Craft and countless others offer
researchers and critics from a broad range of disciplines a fecund territory
of discursive cultural production that has yet to be thoroughly examined, let
alone mapped. Moving beyond existing criticism, this panel seeks to map out
some of these spaces of possibility within the nineteenth-century slave
narrative. The panel places particular emphasis on the complex web of
material and social relations surrounding the genre, its historical milieu
and its various twentieth century critical receptions. As a historical
product implicated in a matrix of cultural forces, the slave narrative puts
traditional binarisms into productive crisis, blurring boundaries between
history and fiction, white and black, slave and master, North and South,
African and American, and self and other, while providing the forum through
which the slave enters the public sphere as a speaking subject.
Possible topics may include:
negotiations of national and/or racial identities
Afrodiasporic themes, textuality and middle passage
the fetishization of black masculinity, femininity,
spectacle and black bodies, violence
narrative structures of identification, reader response, the imagined audience
construction of narratorial, historical, or vernacular authenticities
unveiling subjectivities or unmasking multiple authors
archival slave narratives, newspapers and narratives, narratives and history
generic intersections, such as with sentimentalism, travel literature,
memoir, the confession
the problem of authenticity, ventriloquizing
Please email a 500 word abstract on any aspect of the slave narrative by
September 15 to miachane@indiana.edu with NEMLA as the subject line. The
panel is open to all interested scholars and graduate students are always
strongly encouraged to participate.
Michael A. Chaney
Indiana University, Bloomington
miachane@indiana.edu
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