Gender specific forms of oppression and resistance in Harriet Jacobs ́s "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

Gender specific forms of oppression and resistance in Harriet Jacobs ́s Author: Janina Gaiser
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668653844
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description
Academic Paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0, University of Constance, language: English, abstract: “You have seen a man made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” (Douglass, Jacobs, 2004) The experiences of Frederick Douglass, one of the former slaves who escaped the horrors of slavery, became one of the most widely read slave narratives and the most influential African- American text of the antebellum era. Authors like Douglass wanted not only to expose the inhumanity of the slave system, but they also gave incontestable evidence to the humanity of the African American. The question that arises is, how representative Douglass ́s narrative is – does he speak of “man” as a representative for people in general, or is he specifically speaking for the male slave? For the last years scholars have begun to pay more attention to issues of gender in their study of slavery and claim that female slaves faced additional burdens and even more challenges than some of the male slaves. Based on the first female slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs ́s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this paper will investigate how gender influences the way in which bondage can be experienced differently: what specific forms of oppression do women face in slavery, or what forms of oppression do they encounter to a larger extent than men? Claiming that this gender specific oppression results in gender specific forms of resistance, I will furthermore focus on the ways of how female slaves made a stand against this oppression. Again, Jacobs ́s narrative will be the basis for this investigation. Incidents is the first-person account of Jacobs ́s pseudonymous narrator “Linda Brent” and presents an accurate, although selective, story of her life. This paper will not discuss the relationship between Jacobs and her narrator Brent, but will consider Brent ́s account as autobiographical for Jacobs. For over a century, the authenticity of Jacobs ́s experiences was questioned until Jean Fagan Yellin ́ s ground breaking work proved her authorship. The basis for the following investigation will be a brief introduction of the various ways of approaching Incidents. The second part of the paper will then consider two gender specific forms of oppression: patriarchal sexual oppression, and the deprival of identity by neglecting female slaves to live out the “virtues of womanhood”. With Incidents, Jacobs breaks taboos in order to present Brent ́s sexual history in slavery and to emphasize the power of self-determination, motherhood and family relationships as powerful weapons of resistance.

Gender specific forms of oppression and resistance in Harriet Jacobs ́s "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

Gender specific forms of oppression and resistance in Harriet Jacobs ́s Author: Janina Gaiser
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668653844
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Get Book Here

Book Description
Academic Paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0, University of Constance, language: English, abstract: “You have seen a man made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” (Douglass, Jacobs, 2004) The experiences of Frederick Douglass, one of the former slaves who escaped the horrors of slavery, became one of the most widely read slave narratives and the most influential African- American text of the antebellum era. Authors like Douglass wanted not only to expose the inhumanity of the slave system, but they also gave incontestable evidence to the humanity of the African American. The question that arises is, how representative Douglass ́s narrative is – does he speak of “man” as a representative for people in general, or is he specifically speaking for the male slave? For the last years scholars have begun to pay more attention to issues of gender in their study of slavery and claim that female slaves faced additional burdens and even more challenges than some of the male slaves. Based on the first female slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs ́s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this paper will investigate how gender influences the way in which bondage can be experienced differently: what specific forms of oppression do women face in slavery, or what forms of oppression do they encounter to a larger extent than men? Claiming that this gender specific oppression results in gender specific forms of resistance, I will furthermore focus on the ways of how female slaves made a stand against this oppression. Again, Jacobs ́s narrative will be the basis for this investigation. Incidents is the first-person account of Jacobs ́s pseudonymous narrator “Linda Brent” and presents an accurate, although selective, story of her life. This paper will not discuss the relationship between Jacobs and her narrator Brent, but will consider Brent ́s account as autobiographical for Jacobs. For over a century, the authenticity of Jacobs ́s experiences was questioned until Jean Fagan Yellin ́ s ground breaking work proved her authorship. The basis for the following investigation will be a brief introduction of the various ways of approaching Incidents. The second part of the paper will then consider two gender specific forms of oppression: patriarchal sexual oppression, and the deprival of identity by neglecting female slaves to live out the “virtues of womanhood”. With Incidents, Jacobs breaks taboos in order to present Brent ́s sexual history in slavery and to emphasize the power of self-determination, motherhood and family relationships as powerful weapons of resistance.

Wench

Wench PDF Author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061966355
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s enchanting and unforgettable novel, based on little-known fact, combines the narrative allure of Cane River by Lalita Tademy and the moral complexities of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World as it tells the story of four black enslaved women in the years preceding the Civil War. wench \'wench\ n. from Middle English “wenchel,”1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child. Situated in Ohio, a free territory before the Civil War, Tawawa House is an idyllic retreat for Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their enslaved black mistresses. It’s their open secret. Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at the resort, building strong friendships over the years. But when Mawu, as fearless as she is assured, comes along and starts talking of running away, things change. To run is to leave everything behind, and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances—all while they bear witness to the end of an era. An engaging, page-turning, and wholly original novel, Wench explores, with an unflinching eye, the moral complexities of slavery. “Readers entranced by The Help will be equally riveted by Wench. A deeply moving, beautifully written novel told from the heart.”—USA Today

Kindred

Kindred PDF Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807083704
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.

Acts of Narrative Resistance

Acts of Narrative Resistance PDF Author: Laura J. Beard
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 081393057X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This exploration of women's autobiographical writings in the Americas focuses on three specific genres: testimonio, metafiction, and the family saga as the story of a nation. What makes Laura J. Beard’s work distinctive is her pairing of readings of life narratives by women from different countries and traditions. Her section on metafiction focuses on works by Helena Parente Cunha, of Brazil, and Luisa Futoranksy, of Argentina; the family sagas explored are by Ana María Shua and Nélida Piñon, of Argentina and Brazil, respectively; and the section on testimonio highlights narratives by Lee Maracle and Shirley Sterling, from different Indigenous nations in British Columbia. In these texts Beard terms "genres of resistance," women resist the cultural definitions imposed upon them in an effort to speak and name their own experiences. The author situates her work in the context of not only other feminist studies of women's autobiographies but also the continuing study of inter-American literature that is demanding more comparative and cross-cultural approaches. Acts of Narrative Resistance addresses prominent issues in the fields of autobiography, comparative literature, and women's studies, and in inter-American, Latin American, and Native American studies.

Neo-slave Narratives

Neo-slave Narratives PDF Author: Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195125339
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding its first appearance in the 1960s, Neo-Slave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent cultural debates that arose during the sixties."--BOOK JACKET.

Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation

Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation PDF Author: Kathryn Kish Sklar
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300137869
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Approaching a wide range of transnational topics, the editors ask how conceptions of slavery & gendered society differed in the United States, France, Germany, & Britain.

The Bondwoman's Narrative

The Bondwoman's Narrative PDF Author: Hannah Crafts
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 0759527644
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Possibly the first novel written by a black woman slave, this work is both a historically important literary event and a gripping autobiographical story in its own right. When her master is betrothed to a woman who conceals a tragic secret, Hannah Crafts, a young slave on a wealthy North Carolina plantation, runs away in a bid for her freedom up North. Pursued by slave hunters, imprisoned by a mysterious and cruel captor, held by sympathetic strangers, and forced to serve a demanding new mistress, she finally makes her way to freedom in New Jersey. Her compelling story provides a fascinating view of American life in the mid-1800s and the literary conventions of the time. Written in the 1850's by a runaway slave, THE BONDSWOMAN'S NARRATIVE is a provocative literary landmark and a significant historical event that will captivate a diverse audience.

Demonic Grounds

Demonic Grounds PDF Author: Katherine McKittrick
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145290880X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women’s geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

Witnessing Slavery

Witnessing Slavery PDF Author: Frances Smith Foster
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299142148
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
**** New edition of the Greenwood Press original of 1979 (which is cited in BCL3), with a new introduction, chapter, and a supplementary bibliography. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The Philosophy of Autobiography

The Philosophy of Autobiography PDF Author: Christopher Cowley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022626792X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book promises to be the first of its kind: a philosophical investigation of autobiographical writing. All of us are autobiographers at least some of the time, and all of us crave certain kinds of recognition and confirmation from others, just as we fear blame and reproach from those who know us well. The philosophy of autobiography examines this fundamental story-telling process and its place in our lives. As such it straddles a number of long-standing philosophical questions, having to do with the meaning of life, the problems of autonomy and responsibility and authenticity, the nature of self-deception and bad faith, the structure of the self and its existence through time, the question of the reliability and meaning of memory, and the problem of understanding another person and imaginatively identifying with him. The contributors to the volume are mostly philosophers, but many of them have interests outside philosophy and have been informed by research findings from literary theory and from psychiatry. Some of the contributors are also literary theorists, and one of them has even published autobiographical work. Contributors also examine specific autobiographies and diaries, of philosophers and non-philosophers, as well as fictional works using an autobiographical format, in order to explore the philosophical implications and presuppositions of the genre. The result is a most useful and productive interdisciplinary exchange."