African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
306 p., This dissertation concentrates on the relationship between law, literature, and slavery in the Hispanic Caribbean of the Early Modern Period. The analysis is based on two letters and a treatise, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en estado de paganos y después ya cristianos (1681), that were written by Capuchin friar Francisco José de Jaca, while he was serving as a missionary in the Caribbean region. His writings set the stage for a discussion of how Spanish hegemonic legal thinking is challenged and redefined from an alternative transatlantic narrative.
While 20th-century Caribbean literature in French has generated a substantial body of criticism, earlier writings have largely been neglected. This article begins by contextualizing the Creole novel of the 1830s in cultural and historical terms, then proceeds to analyse two novels published by Martinican authors in 1835: Outre-mer by Louis de Maynard de Queilhe and Les Creoles by Jules Levilloux.
Behn,Aphra (Author), Gallagher,Catherine (Editor), and Stern,Simon (Contributor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Lexington, KY: Simon & BrownI
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
77 p., A short novel written by English female author Aphra Behn, published in 1688. It is the story of an African prince who deeply loves the beautiful Imoinda. Imoinda is eventually sold as a slave and is taken to Suriname which is under British rule. Oroonoko is taken prisoner, is sold, and finds himself and Imoinda enslaved on the same plantation. Contents: 1. To the right honourable the Lord Maitland. 2. The history of the royal slave.
Draws on two Caribbean texts, Anim-Addo's Imoinda: Or She Who will Lose Her Name and Philip's Zong!. Discusses how these two Caribbean texts counterwrite the history of the slave plantation by staging and embodying the work of an affective memory drawn from the history of the black subject as a history of being and community.
203 p., Examines the presence of slave vocality in Black Atlantic literature, placing the North American tradition of slave narrative against works from authors throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Challenges existing approaches to slave narrative by viewing the genre as one based on the fundamental impossibility of expressing black subjectivity under the political, ethical, and psychic conditions of slavery. The slave narrative thus ceases to represent an attempt by former slaves to access freedom and agency through writing, along with its promises of reason and autonomy, but rather signals (or sounds) a process of expression built not upon meaning, but upon signification. In other words, rather than crafting themselves into legible objects for the sake of narration and perception, slave narrators performed their roles as exchangeable units, both discursive and political, in ways that exposed the underlying lacunae of being a slave-narrator, a significative protocol that persists in contemporary black fiction throughout the Atlantic, even in areas in which the slave narrative did not historically emerge.
