Literary Representations of Slavery

Abstract

Literary representations of modern racialized slavery in the Americas date back to the era of slavery itself. Formerly enslaved persons, most often with sponsorship from white abolitionists, wrote and published first-person narratives detailing the horrors of life in bondage and their strenuous path to freedom, though the journeys were far from linear. Within the historical antebellum slave narratives, those written in English, and specifically those produced in the United States, have come to represent the genre, though there are examples in multiple languages and geographies across the African diaspora. These first-person testimonies are always a function of memory, modified through editing, and frequently written to garner support for the antislavery audience. As such, the slave narratives operate with established literary conventions that persist across the genre. Although the editing and narrative silences call into question their authentic voice, the writing, publishing, and circulation of the historical slave narratives, which center, to varying degrees, the subjectivities of their Black writers/narrators, marks a foundational moment in African American literary history, and literature of the African diaspora writ large. If the slave narratives of the antebellum and the early postbellum period trouble the distinctions between history and literature, then the neo-slave narratives or contemporary narratives of slavery obliterate generic divisions. Diasporic authors writing fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and more gather from the “scraps” and fragments of slavery’s archive and perform visionary acts of imagination to create a vast and varied landscape of literary representations of slavery in the mid- to late-20th century and into the 21st century. These authors and artists have reconfigured and reimagined the first-person slave narratives and shaped them into stunning cultural products that foreground Black subjectivity, African identity in the diaspora, and the possibilities for freedom.