Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chronology of Publications and Events
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Genres
- 1 Bodies in Early US-Atlantic Theater
- 2 Sentimentalism and the Feeling Body
- 3 Slavery, Disability, and the Black Body/White Body Complex in the American Slave Narrative
- 4 Monstrous Bodies of the American Gothic
- 5 Bodies at War
- 6 Decolonizing the Body in Multiethnic American Fiction
- 7 Science Fiction’s Humanoid Bodies of the Future
- 8 Contemporary North American Transgender Literature
- Part II Critical Methodologies
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
3 - Slavery, Disability, and the Black Body/White Body Complex in the American Slave Narrative
from Part I - Genres
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chronology of Publications and Events
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Genres
- 1 Bodies in Early US-Atlantic Theater
- 2 Sentimentalism and the Feeling Body
- 3 Slavery, Disability, and the Black Body/White Body Complex in the American Slave Narrative
- 4 Monstrous Bodies of the American Gothic
- 5 Bodies at War
- 6 Decolonizing the Body in Multiethnic American Fiction
- 7 Science Fiction’s Humanoid Bodies of the Future
- 8 Contemporary North American Transgender Literature
- Part II Critical Methodologies
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
The sufferings of the enslaved in the Americas and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were myriad and complex. They were general and particular – which is to say, on the one hand, elemental to the slave condition, and, on the other, differential according to age, sex, and (though often understated) geography. The regular allusions to the formerly enslaved narrators’ “life and sufferings” in the titles and subtitles of their published testimonies – Briton Hammon’s A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (1760), for instance, or The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher (1811) by John Jea – foreshadowed chroniclings of unspeakable abuses to the captives’ bodies and minds. While these violations of the physical and psychological personhood of the enslaved were so severe as to be mostly indivisible categories of Black captive injury, it is undeniable that they were borne on and by the body. Even as the most significant reflections on the body in antebellum American culture – Hortense Spillers, Walter Johnson, Thavolia Glymph, and Saidiya Hartman included – devote invaluable attention to the bodies of Black women and men in bondage, Toni Morrison also made clear in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) that Black captivity had deep consequences for enactments of white embodiment too.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022