US Slavery and the literary imagination
5AAEB064
Convenor and teacher:
Office Hours:
Summative assessment:
Formative, unassessed work:
Professor Paul Gilroy VW6.41,
[email protected]
Tuesday 11.30, Thursday 10.30
3000-word essay [85%]
1000 word commentary [15%]
Everyone is expected to undertake a seminar
presentation. Please come to the first session
prepared to say which material you would like to
present on.
This course explores the fluctuating significance of racial slavery for the development
of American and African American literary tradition. It departs from investigation of
the idea that particular approaches to selfhood, writing and freedom arose from the
institution of slavery and in particular grew with the slaves’ forced exclusion from
literacy and their distinctive relationship with Christianity.
Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a central point of reference, we will look at the
development of abolitionist reading publics and the role of imaginative literature in
bringing about the demise of slavery. That controversial text also provides a means to
consider the relationship of sentimentalism to suffering and identification as well as
the problems arising from the simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of racial
categories, as oppression and as emancipation. When formal slavery ended, new
literary habits emerged in response to the memory of it and the need imaginatively to
revisit the slave past as a means to grasp what the emergent world of civic and
political freedoms might mean and involve. Other issues covered include the
disputed place of imaginative writing in the educational bodies that were created for
ex-slaves and their descendants, the issues of genre, gender and polyvocality in
abolitionist texts, the problems of representation that arose in the plantation’s litany
of extremity and suffering and the contemporary significance of slavery in the culture
of African American particularity. Please try, before the course commences to
familiarize yourself with the archive of slave narratives. These texts are heavily
anthologized. Some of the best anthologies are
1. The classic slave narratives / edited and with an introduction by Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.
2. The Civitas anthology of African American slave narratives edited by
William L. Andrews, Henry Louis Gates Jr.
3. William L. Andrews’ collection of Six Women's Slave Narratives (The
Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)
4. The Andrews and Gates anthology in the American Library series: Slave
Narratives.
Some of this material is on closed access in the Maugham Library.
Lecture/Seminar programme. (Primary texts are marked*)
1. *Susan Buck Morss Haiti and Universal History. Half of this book can be
downloaded in the form of this essay from the journal Critical Inquiry.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/programmes/0708/integration/bhambra/2/buck_morss_hegel_haiti.pdf
& *Simon Gikandi Slavery and The Culture of Taste [sections]
2. *Phyllis Wheatley Poems on Subjects Religious and Moral
http://www.poemhunter.com/phillis-wheatley/poems/
& *Olaudah Equiano Interesting Narrative
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15399
Contextual and secondary readings
Vincent Carretta Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage
Vincent Carretta
Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-made Man
Both from the University of Georgia press.
William L. Andrews To Tell A Free Story chaps 1&2.
George Boulukos The Grateful Slave chaps 4, 5&6.
Philip Gould Barbaric Traffic
3. * William Wells Brown Clotel
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2046
Secondary and contextual readings
Julia Sun-Joo Lee The American Slave Narrative and The Victorian Novel
Robert S. Levene Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass and The Politics of
Representative Identity
4. *Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin
http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/SAYLOR-ENGL405-7.3UNCLETOM.pdf
http://www.online-literature.com/stowe/uncletom/
Secondary and contextual readings
Robert B. Stepto “Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass” in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin
Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp.135-153.
Saidiya Hartman Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America.
5. *W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk
http://www.earlwright2.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/DuBois_SoulsBlackFo
lk.247123445.pdf
http://www.bartleby.com/114/
Secondary and contextual readings
Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic chapter 5.
Ross Posnock Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern
Intellectual.
David Levering Lewis W.E.B. DuBois: biography of a race 1868-1919.
Crystal N. Feimster Southern Horrors and the politics of rape and lynching.
Reading week
6. Jean Toomer
7. Gayl Jones
8. Toni Morrison
9. Sherley A. Williams
10. Charles Johnson
*Cane
*Corregidora
*Beloved
*Dessa Rose
*Oxherding Tale
Texts for general background
Joe Lockard
Watching Slavery: Witness Texts and Travel Reports
Eric Sundquist
To Wake The Nations: Race In The Making of American
Literature.
Toni Morrison
Playing In The Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination,
Harvard UP 1992.
Orlando Patterson Slavery and Social Death Harvard,1982.
Robin Blackburn
The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery Verso, 1992.
CLR James
The Black Jacobins Penguin, 1938.
David Armitage
The Ideological Origins of The British Empire Cambridge, 2000.
C. Davis & H.L. Gates The Slaves’ Narrative
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/menu.html
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/menu.html
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/menu.html