Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative

Résumé du document

Frederick Douglass autobiography has a points of departure of numerous critical studies of Afro-American literature, and origin of black fictional and non-fictional prose. There are scenes where the character learns to read, if often echoed in later black narratives. Tension between his desire to read and the objection of his master to his education, captures the distance between the interests of black subordinates and white superordinates. Process of literacy linked to that of liberation. Slave narrators affirm their psychological autonomy by telling the stories of their own lives. By fictionalizing one's life, one bestows a quality of authenticity on it. The processes of plot construction, characterization, and designation of beginnings and endings, the process of authorship provide the narrators with a measure of authority unknown to them in either real or fictional life. The narrators grant themselves significance and figurative power over their superordinates, and in their manipulation of received literary convention, they also engage with and challenge the dominant ideology.

Extraits

[...] Dialect was thus transcribed by these intermediaries, and often exaggerated. Those literary productions served the anti-slavery crusade. Double status: popular art and propaganda ( similarities of structure tone and content. (They raise questions of interpretation then). Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself Relatively mild vision of slavery: descriptions of the structure and practices of slavery. With the rise of the abolitionist movement, narratives began to stress the brutality of the system. [...]

[...] Douglass and his contemporaries had more space to express their contempt in front of slavery. Recounts as well his personal story of an individual who remains unbroken by his experience as a slave: he recalls somehow the myth of American achievement, an affirmation of its definitions of manhood and power. Participates to the dispute over the question of Negro humanity and equality. After the rise of the abolitionist campaign, the apologists of slavery developed a systematic theory of racial inferiority that justified the institution of slavery ( for a slave to write his life was thus an assault on this argument. [...]

[...] Act of physical resistance precipitates his second and lasting period of liberation. Exposes the fundamental contradictions of the slaveholding system that make a mockery of American principles and Christian mores. Calls for a more radical cultural transformation than Equiano (who in fact sort of “praises” slavery as the means to Christianity): his tone is more acerbic. The plot of the narrative offers a profound endorsement of the fundamental American plot, the myth of the self-made man: his story is that of one man's rise from slavery to the station of esteemed orator, writer and statesman. [...]

[...] Introducing the voice of his youth and naiveté gives credibility to his African origins. Representation of Benin as an Edenic place and civilisation ( his abduction into slavery seems to be his introduction into temporality and human fallibility. Like the other spiritual autobiographers, Equiano is quite willing to count as nothing his early life of self-righteousness. But his preserving of the voice of his personal innocence and insightfulness and the image of an African paradise suggests his unwillingness to yield himself entirely to the religion and practices of his adopted country. [...]

[...] Form and Ideology in Three Slave Narratives Slave narratives: resemble autobiographies. Yet there is always, at least at the beginning of the genre, the presence of an intermediary. It renders the majority of narratives not artistic constructions of personal experience but illustrations of someone else's view of slavery. Earliest example: the relationship between narrator and text was triangulated through the ordering intelligence of a white amanuensis or editor. These texts were thus in fact the product of benevolent institutions and served the cause and requirements of the humanitarian movement. [...]