Module description
This course explores the fluctuating significance of racial slavery for the development of American and African American literary tradition. It departs from investigation of the idea that particular approaches to selfhood, writing and freedom arose from the institution of slavery and in particular grew with the slaves’ forced exclusion from literacy and their distinctive relationship with Christianity. Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a central point of reference, we will look at the development of abolitionist reading publics and the role of imaginative literature in bringing about the demise of slavery. That controversial text also provides a means to consider the relationship of sentimentalism to suffering and identification as well as the problems arising from the simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of racial categories, as oppression and as emancipation. When formal slavery ended, new literary habits emerged in response to the memory of it and the need imaginatively to revisit the slave past as a means to grasp what the emergent world of civic and political freedoms might mean and involve. Other issues covered include the disputed place of imaginative writing in the educational bodies that were created for ex-slaves and their descendants, the issues of genre, gender and polyvocality in abolitionist texts, the problems of representation that arose in the plantation’s litany of extremity and suffering and the contemporary significance of slavery in the culture of African American particularity.
Assessment details
1 x 3000 word essay (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module will introduce the literary study of material produced by African American slaves, their descendants and other writers and thinkers who have used the archive of US slavery as the point of departure for their creative endeavours. Students will explore the debates over canon formation in this area, encounter the principal texts involved and discuss the variety of critical and interpretative perspectives that have emerged. They will encounter the issues of ethics and representation that have been a particular feature of the debates generated by this material.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 5 module and in particular will be able to:
- Analyse critically texts from a range of different genres.
- Grasp the significance of imaginative writing in the abolitionist movement and of the social memory of slavery during its aftermath.
- Demonstrate broad awareness and relevant reference to the political and social context of the post-slavery period.
- Demonstrate detailed knowledge of the principal critical approaches that have been used to evaluate and explore these texts.
- Analyse patterns of continuity and change in the historical communication of ideas about slavery and freedom in this archive.
- Gather, synthesise and analyse research materials in response to weekly readings and as part of the summative module assessment.
- Articulate his or her ideas within a seminar environment.
- Communicate reading and research effectively, through oral presentations and discussion (formative assessment).
- Develop and sustain an argument in a 3000 word essay, drawing on appropriate resources (to be demonstrated through final essay).
Teaching pattern
One lecture and one seminar, weekly
Suggested reading list
Core reading
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave: Related by Herself (1831)
Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood (1902/1903)
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Please try, before the course commences to familiarize yourself with the archive of slave narratives. These texts are heavily anthologized. Some of the best anthologies are:
The classic slave narratives / edited and with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
William L. Andrews’ collection of Six Women's Slave Narratives (The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)
Some of this material is on closed access in the Maughan Library.