... allegorical and literal use of the blues. Copyright © Hofstra University 2019 fictional autobiography globalization modernity neo-slave narrative Paul Gilroy’s critique of modernity, The Black Atlantic (1993), is widely noted for positing a transnational framework for understanding the...

... coast of Africa, and beyond, to the enforced servitude in ancient Greece and Rome. —William Styron, introduction to The Cunning of History The sea journey of the slave ships was a horror comparable only to the German freight cars. —Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History The only mass...

... the meanings of “slavery” and “freedom” to suggest, audaciously, that the Abolition of Slavery was emblematic of a civilizing force the world was better off without. European women as bonded slaves is one of the most pivotal of these metaphors. Protesting not a lack of women’s rights but a...

... contexts include indigenous contestations of national boundary lines and the regional imaginary of key Native writers in the US and Canada (Chapter One), the critical geographies of fugitive slave narratives written in Mexico as well as the US and Canada (Chapter Two), the perspectives on...

... region. East African fiction caravan trade ivory slaves Swahili coastal life Joseph Conrad postcolonial The thirty years between V. S. Naipaul’s first publication in 1957 and Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah’s in 1987 spans at least three major epochs within the field of postcolonial...

... ists whose sympathetic anger regarding their degraded ancestors forces them to reject the language and art of imperialist slave masters. Walcott complains: They cannot separate the rage of Caliban from the beauty of his speech when the speeches of Caliban are equal in their...

... American identity formation are still radically determined by a Hegelian narrative in which “the master strikes the slave, the slave strikes back, and thus a man is created” (4). The representative instance of this dynamic of course is Frederick Douglass’s now-mythic thrashing of the slave breaker...

... the way it taps immediately into the higher cultural stakes of both this novel and humanistic inquiry more generally. Clifford’s Blues toys with a plethora of genres, including the neo-slave narrative, the Holocaust memoir, the epistolary novel, and the blues, to name a few, but this essay is...

... thee, Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee. In time, for though the sun is setting on A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set; Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone, Leaving, to catch thy...

... slavery across temporal and spatial boundaries. In nineteenth-century Brazil, “old man Corregidora, the Portuguese slave breeder and whoremonger” impregnated women, whom he had enslaved, including his own daughter, “and fathered his own breed” ( C 8–9); in twentieth-century Kentucky, his descendant Ursa...

... begins to arrive. The novel is based on the true story of Margaret Gar­ ner, an escaped slave who killed her daughter in a desperate bid to save her from the misery and indignity of slavery when threatened with re­ capture— a story very few people knew before the publication o f Mor­ rison’s...

... Nurhussein on dialect, Howard Rambsy on the Black Arts Enterprise, and Lauri Ramey on slave songs and poetic innovation. 1 Anthony Reed’s Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing is a welcome and much needed addition to both African American poetry and experimental poetry...

... “sentences.” Yet these superficial similarities end as soon as we look at poems that engage law, such as Philip’s Zong!, which ironically reorders the language of a 1783 legal decision concern- ing the slaughter of the “cargo” of a slave ship, or Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison’s “Annie Pengelly,” which...

... at last achieved. Norman proposes the useful critical term “temporal dysphoria to explain the effect of seeing images of Jim Crow today when dominant cultural narratives suggest they should be then” (6). He contrasts the neo-segregation narrative with the “neo-slave narrative,” a concept...

... denying their characters the possibility of positive transformation” (38). And Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl “criticizes the institution of patriarchal marriage without offer- ing any viable alternatives.” As this summary suggests, with the exception of Voigt’s poems, it would be inaccurate to...

... Calvert’s Mary­ land, the fine that later came to divide N orth from South, free states from slave. The novel follows them, in part 1, “Latitudes and Departures,” from their m eeting in 1760, w hen they travel to Cape Town to observe the Transit o f Venus between the earth and the sun...

... to preserve the meaning not merely o f making, but also o f mak­ ing up, o f inventing things not actually real. —James Clifford, “Partial Truths” (6) It ain’t about right or wrong, truth or lies; it’s about a slave woman w ho brought a w...

... “white slave trade” given currency by William T. Stead in his “Maiden Tribute” series of articles. Marshik convincingly argues that Shaw’s confrontations with censor­ ship led him to articulate a “modern” agenda for his work. The chapter offers a useful reminder of the direct aim Shaw took at...

.... Citizens are set free; the work is imposed on slaves, resident aliens, ‘guest workers’—outsiders all” (Spheres 165). If doing hard work signifies someone as a degraded outsider, and to be free from hard work signifies someone as a respected insider,11 Lewis’s novel also reverses that logic: when...

... period pours its inner life into the patient and pliant texts of old” (xi). The vitality of the Tanakh derives from its endless applicability; it is an old flask into which we can pour and repour new wine. Students of African-American history thus commonly note the ways in which en- slaved and...