Performing Narratives: Slave Narratives on the World Stage

Abstract

Slave narratives emerged on the world literary stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to the human rights violations of the transatlantic slave trade. Tracing the trajectory of slave narrative scholarship from questions of authorship, authenticity, and literacy acquisition to the prioritization of transatlantic and hemispheric studies in the wake of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993) to the rise of comparative media studies, this chapter offers an introduction to major avenues for reframing slave narratives as world literature. Innovative readings of the narratives of Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Sojourner Truth, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry Box Brown offer case studies of transatlantic book tours, rhetorical self‐fashioning, and “performing narratives,” or the way that slave narrators paired their autobiographical texts with visual and aural performances of race, gender, and freedom.