#slavenarrative

[artshoppingtoday]

Cimarrones on Kindle Vella

Cimarrones on Kindle Vella @KindleVella https://authorbeekelsartorigins.wordpress.com/2023/04/08/cimarrones-on-kindle-vella/

[trascapades]

✊🏿🎨 #ArtIsAWeapon #NewExhibit "Subversion & The Art of Slavery Abolition" at the @schomburgcenter "...examines how American and British abolitionists used art and literature to push for freedom for those who were enslaved." RSVP to get a first look on Jan. 8, 2020, 6:00PM-8:00PM, link in @schomburgcenter's IG BIO / and via @eventbrite: www.schomburgcenter.eventbrite.com. "Join us for the opening of our latest exhibition Subversion & The Art of Slavery Abolition curated by Dr. Michelle D. Commander, Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery. This exhibition highlights how slavery abolitionists and enslaved people artfully countered malevolent inclinations to control Black bodies via rebellion and everyday kinds of resistance. About the Exhibition Art denotes strategy, ingenuity, and imagination. While slaveholders and vigilantes threatened and attempted to control Black bodily autonomy in various ways across the Atlantic world, enslaved people and their allies artfully countered this malevolence via everyday and more formally coordinated kinds of resistance. With a principal focus on American and British efforts, this exhibition highlights how slavery abolitionists used a diversity of #art, including #rebellion, #speeches and #pamphlets, #novels, #slavenarratives, newspapers, #poetry, #music, and the #visualarts, to agitate for enslaved peoples’ right to liberty and equality." #SchomburgCenter #ArtofAbolition #LapidusCenter #NewExhibition #TraScapades #ArtIsAWeapon https://www.instagram.com/p/B7Bq5k0A_4c/?igshid=es9xhfc3o3mo

[thebookshelfmonster]

“But we must tell our stories, and not be ensnared by them.” Ta-Nehisi Coates's historical fantasy novel The Water Dancer is a slowly and painstakingly woven narrative of resilience and persistence in the face of one of human history's most horrific episodes. Set against the backdrop of the rumblings of the American Civil War, the novel’s young black protagonist Hiram learns that he has the power of "conduction", a power shared by Harriet Tubman herself, which enables them to “fold the earth like fabric” and transport or "conduct" themselves and other people over great distances. However, to be able to access his power, he needs to access a powerful emotional memory, that of his mother, the one person he has no memory of, despite his otherwise superhuman mnemonic abilities. Memory, storytelling and the strength of a found family are important running themes in the novel, and become powerful tools in the hands of the “Tasked” in their path to freedom from the Task or enslavement. The magic of the world that Coates has constructed is also dependent on these very powerful emotions. As part of the theme of memory and community, the novel pushes for the idea that there is strength in the collective in overcoming memory as a burden and turning it into a tool of emancipation. The insistence on the value of found family, a family you choose for yourself, regardless of blood ties (and often, as in the case of Hiram, despite blood ties) becomes an act of resistance in the face of the fear and mistrust of love and attachment that the conditions of slavery would try to enforce on its victims. Another important theme in the novel is that of the relationship between water, memory and community. This speaks to broader themes relating to water and Atlantic slavery that I will explore in a future post. 5/5 🌟& full review on #goodreads (link in bio) Cover art: Calida Garcia Rawles #tanehisicoates #thewaterdancer #historicalfiction #slavenarratives #historyofslavery #atlanticslavetrade #middlepassage #harriettubman #blackhistory #blackliterature #bookstagramusa #bookrecommendations #bookstagram #foundfamily #fantasygenre #magicrealism #fivestarread #bestbooksof2019 https://www.instagram.com/p/CRSISJKrFY0/?utm_medium=tumblr

[greeniezona]

This book is BLOWING MY MIND. It’s the latest book for my Less Stupid Civil War Reading Group, and it’s probably my favorite. Centering Southern black and white women, it skewers Lost Cause myths like “slaves stayed loyal to the South,” and “slaveholders were overwhelmingly benevolent” while also demonstrating just how people fooled themselves into such beliefs. I could go on and on about this book. I can’t wait for our discussion! . . #outofthehouseofbondage #thavoliaglymph #civilwarhistory #blackhistory #cambridgeuniversitypress #lostcausemythology #slavenarratives #slavenarrativesmatter #lessstupidcivilwarreadinggroup #americanhistory

[superman-2050]

#WhiteGold #GilesMilton #WhiteSlaveMarket #WhiteSlaveAuction #SlaveMarkets #SlaveAuctions #WhiteSlaves #WhiteCaptives #Reparations #SlaveNarrativesMatter #SlavePens #SlaveNarratives #ReparationsForWhiteSlavery #ReparationsForWhites #ReparationsWorldwide #OppressionOlympics #SlaveMentality #RacistMentality #VictimMentality #WhiteCard #BlackCard #WhitePrivilege #BlackPrivilege https://www.instagram.com/p/CCRT5DEJp3v/?igshid=s7xz5udb7hnl

[hemanchong]

#Kindred is a novel by American writer #OctaviaButler that incorporates #timetravel and is modeled on #slavenarratives. First published in #1979, it is still widely popular. It has been frequently chosen as a text for community-wide reading programs and book organizations, as well as being a common choice for high school and college courses. The book is the first-person account of a young #AfricanAmerican woman #writer, Dana, who finds herself being shunted in time between her #LosAngeles, California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a proud black freewoman and a white planter who has forced her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana's stays in the past become longer, the young woman becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community. She makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time. Kindred explores the dynamics and dilemmas of #antebellum #slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary #American society. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of #power, #gender, and #raceissues, and speculates on the prospects of future #egalitarianism. While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, Kindred is considered to cross genre boundaries. It has been classified also as literature or African-American literature. Butler has categorized the work as "a kind of grim fantasy." #BlackLivesMatter #BlackArtistsMatter (at U.S. Embassy Singapore) https://www.instagram.com/p/CB19jPtFPBb/?igshid=ojwl8nn2r2uz

[hanseihere]

WORDS & ACTION is #theBESTeva for #ptsd because my body does NOT ACCEPT ❤️🍎 This is STEP ONE of the exercise because we transitioned from DAY ONE 🌅 to 🌚 DAY TWO & let’s enter #PAGEN & #WORLDRELIGIONS even the weird ones BUT never the cults. That’s #brainwashing & removes #CHOICEs# so not allowed #. That is THE WILL OF #GOD from #GENESIS because there was choice with the Apple 🍎 🤷🏻‍♀️🙄✌️ so do you want the #KNOWLEDGE??? How easy #PEOPLE fall & why some have to have lots of pain. Just how it works 🤷🏻‍♀️🌈😢🎭☑️ #captivitynarratives #slavenarratives & WHO SURVIVES PAST ONE GENERATION.... think about it & there’s that fkg #ROCK again. I get it... I’m just going at my speed. #webdubois https://www.instagram.com/p/BzRqeqMBtxL/?igshid=1l255i9n72kvs

[drmnola]

An excerpt from #christinasharpe in my remarks I was too exhausted to deliver to close out last night’s @visit_thnoc Purchased Lives exhibit dialogue on the slave narratives at @xula1925 Language speaks us and the word spoken into the world is act of co-creation. The slave narratives, for sure are auto-ethnographic works, but even more they are artifacts of subversive resistance that allowed the enslaved and the formerly enslaved to express their humanity—a humanness that was never in question for themselves, but for their enslavers—after suffering the unspeakable. What we read today, is limited by the enclosing of the colonizers language; we read the words of the formerly enslaved, but the suffering they experienced and courage they exhibited in the face of such inhuman we treatment for centuries is inexpressible through the limits of language. We read, but do we feel. We understand, but do we know. The legacy of this most horrible institution and of the resistance of the enslaved is still yet unfolding. #DRMPhD #drmnola #nola #blackhistorymonth #slavenarratives (at Xavier University of Louisiana) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtihrW8Avrm/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1bdm2pkpjo263

[johncroc-blog]

Instruments of Subjugation and Escape: Blues Trains and the Neo-Slave Narrative in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

When describing the music and dancing that accompanies Jockey’s birthday parties on the Randall plantation in Georgia, the narrator of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, states, "There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum makes instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude of the song” (28). This passage is particularly important when looking at the relationship between subjects and objects. While the “human players” are typically seen as actors, or subjects, the “instruments” are usually viewed as objects to be acted upon. However, this passage presents a reversal of the subject / object binary, in that the “human players” become instruments through their interactions with musical instruments. In a sense, players become objects by playing, or acting upon, their instruments.

These fiddles, drums, and banjos that assist in the creation of musical sound at Jockey’s birthday parties, these objects that are being both acted upon and acting on human players in this passage, are things. Bill Brown, in his 2003 book, A Sense of Things, examines “how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies” (4). Brown is interested in how subjects create meaning through the use of objects. Like Brown points out, there is meaning created when human players use / play the musical instruments, a meaning that ultimately separates itself from both the instruments and the human players. This separation of sound, when looking at it from the hierarchy inherent in the plantation slave system, becomes the plantation head, the master, while the human players and instruments are in servitude to this sound, this song. 

Cora, a slave on the Randall plantation, is wary of this oppressive sound. The narrator states, “She was wary of how sometimes when the music tugged, you might suddenly be next to a man and you didn’t know what he might do. All the bodies in motion, given license. To pull on you, take both of your hands, even if they were doing it with a nice thought” (28). Cora is wary of the physical reaction that musical sound invokes in her and the other slaves, a tug and pull of not only a body in motion, but also a subjugated body, a body not in control of itself. In this novel, then, music, which is typically seen as a mode of escape or transcendence for antebellum slaves, becomes a metaphor for the slave system under which they live, a metaphor that allows us to see the futility of escape for Whitehead’s slaves.

Much like the musical instruments that fail to provide a symbolic escape for slaves in this novel, trains are also unable to be an instrument of escape for Cora. In Whitehead’s re-imagining of the historical underground railroad, it is more than a network of stations and people, but is instead an actual train that runs underground. When Cora and her partner, Caesar, who has arranged for Cora to escape with him, first see a train of the underground railroad, the narrator states, “They hushed, and the rumbling became a sound. Lumbly led them to the edge of the platform [...] The main body consisted of a large black box topped by the engineer’s cabin. Below that, pistons and large cylinders engaged in a relentless dance with the ten wheels, two sets of small ones in front of three behind. The locomotive pulled one single car, a dilapidated boxcar missing numerous planks in its walls” (69). In this passage, the train is described in terms of the sounds it creates, but also its ability to create a dance of the wheels, pistons, and cylinders. Therefore, we get a dancing train, a train reminiscent of the blues train in Houston Baker’s 1984 book, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, in which he states,

the dominant blues syntagm in America is an instrumental imitation of train-  wheels-over-track-junctures. This sound is the “sign,” as it were, of the blues, and it combines an intriguing melange of phonics: rattling gondolas, clattering flatbeds, quilling whistles, clanging bells, rumbling boxcars, and other railroad sounds. A blues text may thus announce itself by the onomatopoeia of the train’s whistle sounded on the indrawn breath of a harmonica or a train’s bell tinkled on the high keys of an upright piano. The blues stanzas may then roll through an extended meditative repertoire with a steady train-wheels-over-track-junctures guitar back beat as a traditional, syntagmatic complement. If desire and absence are driving conditions of blues performance, the amelioration of such conditions is implied by the onomatopoeic training of blues voice and instrument. Only a trained voice can sing the blues. (8)

As Baker points out, a blues performance is driven not only by the themes of desire and absence, but also in the imitation of the train sounds that imply an escape that either takes you to or away from somewhere and/or someone. This imitation of the railroad’s “train-wheels-over-track” is at the heart of the blues, according to Baker.

Cora, after being re-captured in North Carolina by the slave-catcher, Ridgeway, ends up in Tennessee. After a confrontation with local, free African Americans, Cora attacks Ridgeway. The narrator states, “Cora jumped on Ridgeway’s back and strangled him with her chains, twisting them tight against his flesh. Her scream came from deep inside her, a train whistle echoing in a tunnel” (226). In this passage, we see Cora not only imitating the sound of a train whistle, but also see her embodying the train sound from “deep inside her,” becoming, symbolically, the instrument of escape. Caesar wanted Cora to join him in escaping not because she was a “rabbit’s foot to carry with you on the voyage but the locomotive itself. He couldn’t do it without her” (234). 

Cora is captured by Ridgeway again after an ambush on the Valentine farm in Indiana. Ridgeway wants Cora to take him to the tunnel of the underground railroad. As she does this, Cora “hesitated on the top step” (302). The narrator states, “On Randall, on Valentine, Cora never joined the dancing circles. She shrank from the spinning bodies, afraid of another person so close, so uncontrolled. Men had put a fear in her, those years ago. Tonight, she told herself. Tonight I will hold him close, as if in a slow dance. As if it were just the two of them in the lonesome world, bound to each other until the end of the song” (302). There in the tunnel of the underground railroad, Cora takes control of the song, rather than being a servant to the song. She jumps onto a handcar and pumps, discovering “a rhythm, pumping her arms, throwing all of herself into movement. Into northness. Was she traveling through the tunnel or digging it? Each time she brought her arms down on the lever, she drove a pickax into the rock, swung a sledge onto a railroad spike” (303). Cora “decided to go the rest of the way on foot [...] Her fingers danced over valleys, rivers, the peaks of mountains, the contours of a new nation hidden beneath the old [...] She’d find the terminus or die on the tracks” (304). Cora, toward the end of her journey, no longer needs an instrument to ride the rails, instead she has fully transformed into the instrument, the instrument of escape, an instrument that sings and dances like a train, a blues train, as Baker points out, that reaches back to the “hollers, cries, whoops, and moans of black men and women working in fields without recompense” (8). Cora’s blues train is one that represents this desire, this lack, but also a possibility that her labor will be rewarded.        

[gasstationb]

Following the news yesterday of Ernest Gaines’ death, we find ourselves observing the death of another iconic figure of African American literature, William Wells Brown on November 6, 1884. 📚 Best known for his novel “Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States”, about the fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson, Brown holds the distinction of being the first published African American author. 📚 He had escaped slavery in 1834 and was hiding out in London at the time of the book’s publication to evade possible recapture under the Fugitive Slave Act. 📚 #gsbauthorquotes #gsbquoteswilliamwellsbrown . . . . . . . . . . #gasstationburrito #onthisday #literaryhistory #bookstagram #books #bookworm #author #authorquotes #authormemes #writer #writerquotes #november6 #williamwellsbrown #slavery #clotel #thomasjefferson #sallyhemmings #africanamericans #africanamericanhistory #africanamericanliterature #americanliterature #slavenarratives #fugitiveslaveact https://www.instagram.com/p/B4iK48KgD3x/?igshid=1twg5o2hohbhz

[rahmanjohnson]

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A post shared by ℝ𝕒𝕙𝕞𝕒𝕟 𝕁𝕠𝕙𝕟𝕤𝕠𝕟 (@rahmanj)

It's almost time for #TheJourneyofUs! It's an anthological reading of the #SlaveNarratives. (at WEWC Radio) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtvEn9EF2ZM/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=14xbxlrr49tqw

[coralmallow]

RUN FOR IT Stories of Slaves Who Fought for Their Freedom Written and illustrated by Marcelo D'Salete 2017 Fantagraphics Books First off, stunning visual storytelling. Second how amazing to read about non American slave revolts and culture? We can get so North America centric in history. What a precious gift to have this window into Bantu narratives of their struggles. Read. Learn. Fight for change. #corallovesbooks #corallovescomics #activismcomics #resistancecomics #slavenarratives #Brazil #Bantu #MarceloDSalete #diversityincomics (at Beaverton, Oregon) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bn9qYV5nYap/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=191g8g70ewnjr

[superman-2050]

#WhiteGold #Matamores #WhiteSlaves #GilesMilton #BarbarySlaveTrade #BlackSlaveOwners #Reparations #MoulayIsmail #MuhammedHadduOttur #ThomasPellow #SlaveNarratives #SlaveNarrativesMatter #EuropeanSlaveTrade #Morroco #WorldHistory https://www.instagram.com/p/CCRKUxipBDt/?igshid=2rk1m6nilz8d

[hellokyleec]

The Reading & Discussion Guide for Barracoon is now LIVE #ontheblog! #linkinbio • • Here’s one question I asked: Was the experience of reading in dialect difficult for you? Did it make Cudjo feel more or less believable to you? Why? Let me know what you thought in the comments below! We’ll be getting into more questions over the weekend! • • #literaryblackgirl #litblkgrl #blackgirlsread #wellreadblackgirl #blackstories #literacy #reading #barracoon #zoranealehurston #slavenarratives #freedom #cudjolewis

[ourblackgirls]

Happy #WorldBookDay! I haven’t read this one in many, many years so I thought I’d break ‘er out. Definitely a favorite. #olaudahequiano #gustavusvassa #slave #slavenarratives #autobiography #travelnarratives #africanslaves #blackhistory #westafrica #christianity #london #1789 #blackwriters