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African American literature

Antebellum literature > Slave narratives

In the wake of the bloody Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton county, Virginia, in 1831, an increasingly fervent antislavery movement in the United States sponsored firsthand autobiographical accounts of slavery by fugitives from the South in order to make abolitionists of a largely indifferent white Northern readership. From 1830 to the end of the slavery era, the fugitive slave narrative dominated the literary landscape of antebellum black America. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) gained the most attention, establishing Frederick Douglass as the leading African American man of letters of his time. By predicating his struggle for freedom on his solitary pursuit of literacy, education, and independence, Douglass portrayed himself as a self-made man, which appealed strongly to middle-class white Americans. In his second, revised autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass depicted himself as a product of a slave community in Maryland's Eastern Shore and explained how his struggles for independence and liberty did not end when he reached the so-called “free states” of the North. Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, candidly describes her experience of the sexual exploitation that made slavery especially oppressive for black women. Chronicling what she called “the war” of her life, which ultimately won both her own freedom and that of her two children, Jacobs proved the inadequacy of the image of victim that had been applied pervasively to female slaves. Her work and the antislavery and feminist oratory of the New York ex-slave who renamed herself Sojourner Truth enriched early African American literature with unprecedented models of female eloquence and heroism.

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