Paper 05, Module 03; E Text

1 Paper 05, Module 03; E Text UGC MHRD e-PG Pathshala Subject: English Principal Investigator: Prof. Tutun Mukherjee, University of Hyderabad Paper: 05: “American Literature” Paper Coordinator: Prof. Niladri Chatterjee, University of Kalyani Module No 03: Slave Narratives Content Writer: Dr. Md. Monirul Islam, Assistant Professor, Asannagar Madan Mohan Tarkalankar College Content Reviewer: Prof. Niladri Chatterjee, University of Kalyani Language Editor: Dr. Sharmila Majumdar, University of Kalyani Slave Narratives Units 1. Introduction 2. Historical Perspective on Slave Trade 3. Abolitionism 4. Abolitionist Literature 5. Development of Slave Narratives 5.1. Slave Narratives in the Eighteenth Century 5.2. Antebellum Slave Narratives 5.3. Postbellum Slave Narratives 6. Slave Narratives: Themes and Conventions 2 7. Neo-slave Narratives 8. Summary of the Module 1. Introduction Slave narratives are autobiographical accounts of fugitive slaves or former slaves. Slave narratives form an important part of African American literature and culture. It emerged as a form of abolitionist literature in the eighteenth century and became a popular genre in pre- Civil War America and it continues to exercise considerable influence on reading public even today. The narratives opened up the world of slavery for wider readers and helped spreading massage against the institution of slavery. As firsthand account of slavery, slave narratives are considered important historical sources on slavery and slave life. The purpose of this module is to familiarise the students with slave narratives as a literary genre. The students will be introduced to the historical context of slavery and emancipation, and the development of the slave narrative as a genre, its themes and conventions. 2. Historical Perspective on Slave Trade Slavery in some form did exist in African, Asian or European societies during the ancient and the medieval ages, but the enterprise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and modern form of chattel slavery originated only in the fifteenth century when the European navigators and merchants started capturing Africans and sold them to the planters in the New World. The systematic form of slave trade was set in motion in the sixteenth century when fifty African slaves were transported by the Spanish merchants to Santo Dominigo with the authorization of the King Ferdinand of Spain in 1510. Within a century slave trade became one of the most profiteering business enterprises and every European navigational nation participated in the trade. According to the estimate provided in Cassell’s Companion to Eighteenth Century 3 Britain the British merchants alone shipped three and a half million slaves between 1660 and 1807 (352) and a total of twenty million Africans are estimated to have transported as slaves to the Americas. Nearly nineteen percent of the millions of Africans forced into slavery died in the Middle Passage due to rough conditions on slave ships. Slaves who reached alive were auctioned in open platforms to plantation owners, merchants, farmers, tradesmen, and other slave traders. It has been the most sustained and systematic form of human trafficking ever. Slave trade was often referred to as Triangular Trade that involved three continents and a three way passage: from Europe to Africa, from Africa to the Americas and to Europe from America. The basic premise that was used to justify the trade and enslavement was the inferiority and bestiality of the Africans. The Africans were not considered humans. The notorious slave owner Edward Long in his History of Jamaica (1774) and Charles White in his Account of the Regular Gradation of Man (1799), for example, argued that the whites and blacks were two distinct species. This theory of polygenesis, however, went against the Christian concept of creation; the pro-slavery lobby, therefore, replaced the concept of racial polygenesis with the theory of racial hierarchy. The argument was: though all are created by God, certain people have degenerated since. Following the Biblical traditions, Africans were argued to be the cursed descendants of Ham. Various scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses were used to support this argument. Blumenbach’s argument in The Anthropological Treatises that the white was the primitive colour of mankind and it was very easy for white to degenerate into brown but much more difficult for dark to become white was used by the pro-slavery group to justify their claim to superiority. Blumenbach’s division of races according to the colour was not meant for defining the white as superior or the black as inferior. Charles White’s An Account of the Regular Gradation of Man, 4 published in 1799, arranged the African and European in polar opposites. He placed Africans nearer to the brute creation. The hot and humid climate of Africa was argued to be the reason behind the degeneration of the Africans. Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle, (44 volumes, translated into English from 1780 onwards) tried to establish a relationship between climate change and human condition and proffered the argument that in hot and humid climate the Africans degenerated into their present condition of bestiality. Similar perspective was also offered by John Reinhold Forster by in Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (1778). Slavery: Some Facts 1510: Systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World starts. King Ferdinand of Spain authorises a shipment of 50 African slaves to be sent to Santo Domingo (Saint Dominigo). 1619: The first Africans arrive in Virginia as indentured servants, but the institution of hereditary lifetime service for blacks develops very soon. In the 1660s the practice of slavery becomes a legally recognized institution in British America. 1660: King Charles II of England charters state sponsored slave trading company, the 'Royal Adventurers into Africa.' 3. Abolitionism The term ‘abolitionism’ refers to the eighteenth and nineteenth century campaign by both, whites and blacks for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and North America. Beginning from the middle of the seventeenth century certain Christian religious groups started voicing their opinion against the slave business. Quakers, Methodists, Puritans went on to criticise the institution of slavery as anti-Christian in spirit. The Puritan Richard Baxter urged to the conscience of the fellow Christians to oppose this inhuman practice in A Christian directory, or, a summ of practical theologie, and cases of conscience (1673). 5 George Fox, a Quaker, published his Gospel Family-Order, being a short discourse concerning the Ordering of Families, both of Whites, Blacks and Indians (1676), which appealed to the Quakers in America to treat their slaves humanely. In 1684, Thomas Tryon published two tracts on slavery: “The Negro's Complaint of Their Hard Servitude, and the Cruelties Practised upon Them” and “A Discourse in Way of Dialogue, between an Ethiopean or Negro-Slave and a Christian, That Was His Master in America”. Anti-slavery discourse saw a gradual rise and a strong anti-slavery current surfaced in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1758, The Society of Friends in London and Philadelphia condemned the institution of slavery at their annual meetings. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society was established in 1775. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (or The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade), was formed in 1787. 1787 also saw William Wilberforce introducing twelve resolutions against the slave trade in the British Parliament, but his move in the House of Commons was defeated. The same year saw former slaves Olaudah Equiano, Cugoano, and others campaign as “Sons of Africa” against slavery by sending letters to prominent people and periodicals. American States like Delaware and Virginia prohibited importation of African slaves during the American War of Independence. The Maryland Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes and Others Unlawfully Held in Bondage was founded in 1789. 4. Abolitionist Literature The abolitionist fervour on either side of the Atlantic fuelled the growth of a large body of abolitionist literature that comprised of miscellaneous writings and documents, poetry, novels, songs, pamphlets, speeches, court rulings, anti-slavery periodicals, and slave narratives. Aphra Behn’s Oronooko can be considered as one of the first abolitionist novels. The greatest work in this novelistic tradition, though, is Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In poetry Chatterton voiced his disgust at the evil practice of slavery in his 6 African Eclogues (1770). He was followed by Hannah More and other Bristol abolitionist poets. Writing on race, slavery and the desire for liberty, the first African American poet, Phillis Wheatley employed the rhetoric of salvation in her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (published in London in 1773). In 1767 Anthony Benezet published his prose tract A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and the Colonies and in 1769 Granville Sharp published A Representation of the Justice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in England expressing their discontent with slavery. Benezet condemned the exploitative tendency of the Europeans who destroyed the idyllic life of the inhabitants of Guinea in Some historical account of Guinea: its situation, produce, and the general disposition of its inhabitants, with an inquiry into the rise and progress of the slave trade, its nature and lamentable effects (1771). Thomas Clarkson in his An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1788) opposed the idea of the Africans as subhuman and degenerate and made some effort to show the resourcefulness of the Africans. In 1787 an African abolitionist, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano made a strong pitch against slavery in Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Emancipation: Some Facts 1776: The Declaration of Independence proposes:"All men are created equal," but slavery remains a legal institution in most of the American states.

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