Introductory description

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 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.
Principal module aims

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1

Week 1: Introduction; The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789)

Selected secondary reading: Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New light on an eighteenth‐century question of identity” (1999), Equiano the African (2005); 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)

Selected 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)

Selected 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)

Selected 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)

Selected 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) and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Selected 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); 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 8: Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, a Native of Zoogoo, in the Interior of Africa (1854)

Selected 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 9: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

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

Selected 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: Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

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

Week 2: Works Projects Administration, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (1941) [selections]

Selected secondary reading: Lynda M. Hill, “Ex-Slave Narratives: The WPA Federal Writers’ Project Reappraised.” (1998); Stephanie J. Shaw, “Using the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives to Study the Impact of the Great Depression.” (2003); Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources” (2014); Ellen Hampton, “‘Lawdy! I was sho’ happy when I was a slave!’: Manipulative editing in the WPA former-slave narratives from Mississippi” (2013); Owen Whooley, “The political work of narratives: A dialogic analysis of two slave narratives” (2006).

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

Selected 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)

Selected 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)

Selected 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)

Selected 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)

Selected 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)

Selected 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)

Selected 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)

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Understand and demonstrate coherent and detailed subject knowledge and professional competencies in the literary foundations of the field of Black Studies, including knowledge of the most recent scholarship in the field
• Deploy accurately standard techniques of literary analysis and enquiry within the discipline. In particular, the student should be able to intervene in critical debates over the biographical genre of the ‘slave narrative’, its literary afterlives, and to the philosophical narratives into which these are contextualized.
• Demonstrate a conceptual understanding of, and develop sustained arguments regarding the ‘slave narrative’, the ‘neo-slave narrative’, and philosophical narratives of slavery, and how ideas of the meaning of blackness and unfreedom have developed in conversation with these genres.
• Support detailed arguments on the specific ways writers in particular geo-historical contexts have mobilized this genre to respond to social and political crises in the mobilization of history, memory and race.
• Appreciate the uncertainty, ambiguity and limitations of knowledge in the discipline: the student should be able to both position themselves and intervene critically in the field; they should be able to critically assess the tropic role slavery (as history and myth) plays across different works, and to engage the limits of what such mobilization fosters.
• Make appropriate use of scholarly reviews and primary sources, including literary texts from the multiple locations covered on the course.
• Apply their knowledge and understanding in order to initiate and carry out an extended written project.

Indicative reading list

William L. Andrews, To tell a free story: The first century of Afro-American autobiography, 1760-1865, University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Frederick Cooper, ”The problem of slavery in African studies”, The Journal of African History, 20 no. 1, 1979.
Frederick Cooper, Thomas Cleveland Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond slavery: Explorations of race, labor, and citizenship in postemancipation societies, The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
James Currey, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series & the Launch of African Literature, Ohio University Press, 2008.

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988
James Olney, "" I was born": slave narratives, their status as autobiography and as literature." Callaloo, no. 20, 1984.
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Harvard University Press, 1982.
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, Duke University Press, 2010.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, Sternberg Press, 2022.
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, Harvard University Press, 2008.
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, Cambridge University Press, 1998
Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation, Duke University Press, 2021

Subject specific skills

This module is designed to offer students a foundation to the literary foundations of the field of Black Studies. It will introduce students to the biographical genre of the ‘slave narrative’, its literary afterlives, and to the philosophical narratives into which these are contextualized. The module will enable students to develop an understanding of how ideas of the meaning of blackness and unfreedom develop in conversation with these genres. It will allow them to track similarities and shifts in the literary use and presentation of history, memory and politics .

Transferable skills

Students will learn to make appropriate use of scholarly reviews and primary sources, including literary and biographical texts from the multiple locations and periods covered on the course. They will further enhance techniques of research. They will be able to apply their knowledge and understanding in order to initiate and carry out an extended written project.