Ghosts Of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Womens Lives
Contents:
To include a comma in your tag, surround the tag with double quotes.
Wench: A Haunting Chapter in Women’s History
Skip to content Skip to search. University of Minnesota Press, Language English View all editions Prev Next edition 3 of 4. Check copyright status Cite this Title Ghosts of slavery: Subjects Joanna, active 18th century -- In literature. Nanny -- In literature. Prince, Mary -- In literature.
History of Mary Prince, a West Indian slave. Stedman, John Gabriel, Narrative of a five years' expeditiion against the revolted Negroes of Surinam. Women, Black -- West Indies -- Intellectual life. Women slaves -- West Indies -- Intellectual life.
West Indian literature English -- History and criticism. Women slaves -- West Indies -- Biography -- History and criticism.
Slave insurrections -- West Indies -- Historiography. Slaves' writings -- History and criticism.
Ghosts Of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives
Yes, resistance happens, but as Sharpe shows, due to the pressures of circumstance, the forms resistance takes often are not the most obvious or overt ones. Ghosts of Slavery focuses on three very different Caribbean women, the best known of whom is the Maroon resistance leader and Jamaican national heroine Nanny, a figure whose memory has been preserved almost exclusively via oral tradition and whose history, therefore, has been mediated by celebratory powers of imagination.
Sharpe also looks at a woman named Joanna, known to us only through the narrative of a Scottish soldier who fought against the Maroons in Surinam and who took this slave woman as a concubine. In both of these instances, the women are subjects who do not speak for themselves, but it is significant that when Sharpe considers the narrative of fugitive slave Mary Prince, she notes that although "Prince is a speaking subject in her testimony, she does not speak freely," since her "history" is not solely her own "product" but also that of the abolitionists who recorded it and whose notions of reliability and respectability placed certain constraints on the text xiii.
- Developing Healthy Sleep Habits in Early Childhood (Parenting Pointers Book 22).
- Me n Mckee n Mama.
- “In the Free”: The Work of Emancipation in the Anglo-Caribbean Historical Novel.
- Culture and Identity in Global Politics (World Politics Review Features);
- Football Kicking and Punting!
- Basic Vocal Workout (The Basic Series);
- Sun, Earth and Sky!
Copyright , Gale Group. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.
Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women's Lives
African American Review Date: Dec 22, Words: The term, the author explains, was often used in reward posters to refer to fugitive female slaves. Implicitly, the label also perpetuated the antebellum stereotype of black women as hyper-sexualized seductresses. The novel takes place in Ohio, at the site of Wilberforce University, the first college to admit African Americans.
However, during the decade before the Civil War, a different structure stood on these grounds—Tawawa House—an infamous resort where vacationing white Southern men were known to bring their enslaved black mistresses. Intrigued by her research on Tawawa, Perkins-Valdez imagines the lives of four black women brought to this estate in the s.
Risking escape might mean abandoning the children they conceived with their masters.
Freely available
What other ties might hold them back? By examining the complexity of sexual relations within the imbalanced power structure of slavery, and by confronting seduction, rape, torture and miscegenation head on, Wench explores aspects of slavery largely omitted from surviving historical records. Well-intended abolitionists, as well as pro-slavery advocates, both tended to paint simplistic pictures of enslaved women to fulfill their respective agendas: Abolitionists often desexualized the women they wrote about to render them more sympathetic to their white religious minded readers; proslavery advocates frequently depicted them as irredeemably promiscuous to justify their subjugation.
Wench , however—written in lucid and unflinching prose—presents a counter-memory to historical misrepresentation that is at once nuanced, harrowing and hard to turn away from. Wench reveals how the institution of slavery ultimately degrades the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
A Literary Archaeology of Black Women's Lives Ghosts of Slavery is an innovative and exciting discussion of slave subjectivity and the attendant questions. While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrative-from slavery to freedom and literacy-.
You show how alienating their marriage has become because of this arrangement. The most difficult thing about writing a novel like this was writing about the complexity of the people of that era.
No one was all good and no one was all bad. I felt their pull—you know, let me do more with Drayle, let me do more with Fran, let me do more with Mawu, but I tried to stick with Lizzie, who is my main character and whose personality I wanted to explore from the very beginning.
I wondered if it was it possible for a slave to be in love with her slave owner, and she was the character through which I could explore that question.
