Runaway Tongues: Slave Narratives and their Afterlives

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

As competing narratives of "Americanness" split the country, the literature of the past can help us interrogate the present, cultivate curiosity and care, and inhabit painful uncertainty. In this introductory undergraduate course, we will explore the call and response between slave narratives and their modern/contemporary afterlives in African American literature. Examining the strategies formerly enslaved people used to navigate the surveilled forms of English literature, we will ask: how did African-descended people claim space for themselves as authors, strategically manipulating literary forms that erased their complex selfhood? How do their writings configure relationships to land and kin? Turning to “neo slave narratives,” we will explore many reasons modern and contemporary authors look to the past: the need for literary ancestors, for deeper contexts of racial violence, and for fugitive strategies to survive in the present. How do their reinventions of specific slave narratives navigate these longings and the frustrating opacities of a slim and manipulated archive? How do their formal inventions and imaginative remembering invite us to inhabit the histories we carry within us? Some author pairings include: Phillis Wheatley Peters and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison, Harriet Jacobs and Toni Morrison, Henry “Box” Brown and Tyehimba Jess, and others.