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Author Hutchins, Zachary McLeod, author.

Title Before Equiano : a prehistory of the North American slave narrative / Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Published Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2022]

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Description 1 online resource (307 pages)
Contents Introduction. Slavery and the Newspaper: A Foreign Affair -- Sewall's Secret: The Selling of More than Two Dozen Black Africans -- Daniel and the Scotts: The Serialized Stories of Serial Runaways -- Royalty Enslaved: Of Princes, Pretenders, and Politics -- Fighting for, and against, the English: Briton Hammon and the Power of Black Africans' Allegiance -- Narratives of Slavery and the Stamp Act: Dickinson and Crèvecoeur Debate the Racial Limits of a Genre -- Conclusion. After Equiano: The Medium and the Message
Summary "In the antebellum United States, formerly enslaved men and women who told their stories and advocated for abolition helped establish a new genre with widely recognized tropes: the slave narrative. This book investigates how enslaved black Africans conceived of themselves and their stories before the War of American Independence and the genre's development in the nineteenth century. Zachary McLeod Hutchins argues that colonial newspapers were pivotal in shaping popular understandings of both slavery and the black African experience well before the slave narrative's proliferation. Introducing the voices and art of black Africans long excluded from the annals of literary history, Hutchins shows how the earliest life writing by and about enslaved black Africans established them as political agents in an Atlantic world defined by diplomacy, war, and foreign relations. In recovering their stories, Hutchins sheds new light on how black Africans became Black Americans; how the earliest accounts of enslaved life were composed editorially from textual fragments rather than authored by a single hand; and how the public discourse of slavery shifted from the language of just wars and foreign policy to a heritable, race-based system of domestic oppression."-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Slave narratives -- United States -- History and criticism
Slavery -- United States -- History -- 17th century
American newspapers -- History -- 17th century
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
American newspapers
Slave narratives
Slavery
Politics & government.
Politics and Government.
United States
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781469671567
1469671565
9781469671550
1469671557