Overview:

This module introduces students to the biographical genre of the ‘slave narrative’, its literary afterlives, and its philosophical context. Specifically, it examines together the autobiographies and ammanuensis-written biographies of those liberated from slavery, the so-called ‘neo-slave narrative’ novelistic depictions of slavery, and key philosophical arguments and metanarratives regarding slavery and its role in social and political life.

Readings have been selected for geographic breadth, spanning the earliest known slave narrative to the very recent past. The module is arranged largely chronologically with respect to the time periods under narrative attention, encouraging students to engage how questions of history and memory arise across the readings. This module also provides students with a foundational overview of key referential texts for the field of critical Black Studies as presently constituted, while directing their attention to the long and global arc of the relationship between blackness, unfreedom, and unfreedom’s legacies.

Guidelines

Attendance: Attendance at each seminar is mandatory. If for some reason you need to miss a seminar, please email me with your reason prior to the seminar.

Seminar Participation: The goal of a successful seminar is an engaged guided discussion. As such they rely on active and prepared group participation. You must read the required readings with attention and thoroughness, completing them in advance of the seminar, and should take notes for your later reference. You are encouraged to read from the secondary materials as well, as they will inform the direction of the discussion, though you may also return to them when considering your essays. Seminars will open with a brief presentation on the materials, followed by responses and open discussion. Consider what specific parts of the reading and presentation raise questions and interest for you, and what the readings suggest when read against each other (within and across weeks of the module).

Syllabus, 2024/25

Term 1

Week 1: Introduction

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789)

Suggested secondary reading:

Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New light on an eighteenth‐century question of identity” (1999)
Paul Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African” (2006)
George E. Boulukos, ”Olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Africa” (2007)

Week 2: Leonora Miano, Season of the Shadow (2013)

Suggested secondary reading:

G.W.F. Hegel, “The Nature of the State”, in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), “Independent and Dependent Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage” (1807)
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1942)
Aristotle, Politics Book 1

Week 3: Maryse Condé, I, Tituba (1992)

Suggested secondary reading:

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (1997);
Krista Thompson, “On the Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies” (2011)
Lillian Manzor-Coats, ”Of Witches and Other Things: Maryse Conde's Challenges to Feminist Discourse” (1993)

Week 4: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

Suggested secondary reading:

Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010)
Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (2002)
Bibi Bakare Yusuf, The Economy of Violence: Black Bodies and the Unspeakable Terror (1999)
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (1985)

Week 5: Fred D’Aguiar, The Longest Memory (1994)

Suggested secondary reading:

David Marriott, On Black Men (2000)
Bénédicte Ledent, “Remembering slavery: history as roots in the fiction of Caryl Phillips and Fred D'Aguiar” (2007)
Maria Frias. "The Erotics of Slavery." (2002)
Tiffany Lethabo King. The Black shoals: Offshore formations of Black and Native studies (2019).

Week 7: The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849)

Suggested secondary reading:

Mary Ellen Doyle, "Josiah Henson's Narrative: Before and After" (1974)
H.A. Tanser, “Josiah Henson, the Moses of His People” (1943)
Jean Fagan Yellin, The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863 (1972)

Week 8: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Suggested secondary reading:

Francis A. Shoup, “Uncle Tom's Cabin Forty Years After” (1893)
Claire Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852–2002 (2016)
Eric J. Sundquist (ed.) New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1986)

Week 9: Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, a Native of Zoogoo, in the Interior of Africa (1854)

Suggested secondary reading:

João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes & Marcus J. M. Carvalho, The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic (2019)
Robin Law, “Individualising the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Biography Of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua Of Djougou (1854)” (2002)
Patrick E. Horn, "Coercions, Conversions, Subversions: The Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives of Omar ibn Said, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, and Nicholas Said” (2012)
Paul E. Lovejoy, “Identity and the mirage of ethnicity" (2016).

Week 10: Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)

Suggested secondary reading:

Sora Han, “Slavery as Contract: Betty's Case and the Question of Freedom” (2015)
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Don E. Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law, & Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective (1981)
Frederick Cooper, Thomas Cleveland Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond slavery: Explorations of race, labor, and citizenship in postemancipation societies (2014)
Elizabeth Allen, "Medieval sanctuary, gothic entrapment, and the fugitive self in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad” (2023).

Term 2

Week 1: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

Suggested secondary reading:

Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds (2006); Loophole of Retreat, Special Issue of e-flux Journal (2019)
Winifred Morgan, "Gender-Related Difference in the Slave Narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass" (1994)
Michelle Burnham, “Loopholes of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative and the Critique of Agency in Foucault” (1993)

Week 2: Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Suggested secondary reading:

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997)
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction In America (1935)
Linda Krumholz, "The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved" (1992)

Week 3: Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" (2018)

Suggested secondary reading:

Zora Neale Hurston, “How it Feels to be Colored Me” (1928)
Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (2007)
Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation (2021)

Week 4: Yvette Christiansë, Unconfessed (2006)

Suggested secondary reading:

Pumla Dineo Gqola, What is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in post-apartheid South Africa (2010)
Robert Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (1983)
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995)

Week 5: Esteban Montejo, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1966)

Suggested secondary reading:
fahima ife, Maroon Choreography (2021)
Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, Fugitive Justice (2005)
Dale Tomich, The wealth of empire: Francisco Arango y Parreño, political economy, and the second slavery in Cuba (2003)

Week 7: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise (1994)

Suggested secondary reading:

Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925 (1980)
Jonathon Glassman, The Bondsman's New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast (1991)
Stephen J. Rockel, "Slavery and freedom in nineteenth century East Africa: the Case of Waungwana caravan porters." (2009)

Week 8: Francis Bok & Edward Tivnan, Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America (2003)

Suggested secondary reading:

Katherine Brewer Ball, The Only Way Out: The Racial and Sexual Performance of Escape (2024)
Ahmad Alawad Sikainga. Slaves into workers: emancipation and labor in Colonial Sudan (1996)
Jok Madut Jok, War and Slavery in Sudan (2001)

Week 9: Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016)

Suggested secondary reading:

Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (2008)
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2006)
Sofia Samatar, Keguro Macharia & Aaron Bady, “What Even Is African Literature Anyway” (2015)
Keguro Macharia, Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (2019)

Week 10: David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975)

Suggested secondary reading:

G.W.F. Hegel, “Independent and Dependent Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage” (1807)
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1888)
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (1982)
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (2022)