When I chose to focus on Slave Narrative as my sub-genre, I had a decent idea of what to look for as I was pretty familiar with at least a few of the aspects that make it up. However, before research even really began, the class reading that was an autobiography by Occum and the followed group discussion made the genre broaden in my mind. Though the text was by no means a "slave" narrative in the typical sense of the word, it contained a few of the aspects usually associated with it.
With this I was interested to explore the genre further, not just in the sense of autobiographies written by slaves, like the more famous ones like that of Frederick Douglas, but also how the slave narrative sub genre of autobiography prose can be expanded. However, I was not so much able to find how texts that wouldn't outwardly seem like slave narratives can fit into the genre, but rather how the genre can be applied to modern day literature when America no longer employs the idea of slaves as it once did.
One of the most fascinating ideas I came across in my research was the idea of the white editor. This actually was the focus of the first good journal article I came across on the MLB bibliography and it spurred a lot more of my research after that. It brought up the very relevant idea of the question of authenticity in these works. The editing done by the white elites shows the struggle to represent an already marginalized group of people. However, the editors are also the ones who were attempting to bring an often illiterate group of people into the world of literature. I found in my research many scholars searching for sources of interpolation amongst the narratives in order to search for a certain sense of an outside influence.
This made me very curious about the dichotomy of the slave writer and the white editor. The white editor perhaps changes the text but without him the text would not exist in our world. This is the impossible struggle with the slave narrative of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I never really considered the fact that slave narratives had to be edited by someone, who would almost certainly be white. I wonder if different versions of a slave narrative would yield different interpretations, and perhaps insight into the ways that it was changed by editors? (similar to how we read different versions of Wheatley's poems)
ReplyDeleteI would also wonder what the purpose of the slave narrative was, especially when published by white editors. Was it to attract support for abolition, or more because they are fascinating stories about things of which most readers of the day had no experience?
I also find the white editor role really fascinating. Does it also affect the way the English language is translated from a specific dialect into another? And I wonder if there are tangible records that indicate if there were editors, or if for some texts we'll never be sure.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that you acknowledge the complexity of white editors revising works composed by black authors, and I wonder if you know of any abolitionist editors who actively worked to preserve the authentic voice of the writer.
ReplyDeleteFollow up post: Upon turning in my primary sources I attempted to scope out a few more secondary sources that I could use. Professor Burnham wrote a comment on my original annotated bibliography about how it was almost an entirely 19th century antebellum genre. So instead of looking for evolution of the genre and how it had changed over time (since most of the works were all written relatively close together) I decided to look for any variety within the genre simply based on experience, location, personal identity, and other issues like that. I also found a source discussing how while the slave narrative is often given a lot of credit for historical importance, how it also plays a role in the world of literature and how this should not be overlooked. The database I was recommended to by Professor Danielle Morgan, who focuses in African American literature, had not only hundreds of original slave narratives, but also a great deal else that was helpful for this project. It even had some newspaper accounts of the 1800s of critical responses to the works. Overall, linking my primary sources to my secondary source research was quite helpful in narrowing my scope in a sense. I knew better what to focus on and I feel it allowed me to understand the genre a bit better.
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