Walk down the streets of New York on a misty, Monday morning in the early 1850’s and pick any white man out at random. If he had read Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, he would probably identify physical force as the biggest determinant of success of the slave rebellion aboard the San Dominick. He’d likely also perceive slaves to be primitive and unintelligent. He’d be wrong.
While Amasa Delano’s A Narrative of Voyages and Travels presents the rebellion of slaves aboard the Tryal as a string of events, Melville’s tale spotlights the often inconsistent nature of the master-slave relationship between Babo and Cereno, and more broadly, between the slaves and the Spaniards. In doing so, Melville upsets 19th century cultural expectations of black
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In the original account, Delano observes Cereno “frightened at his own shadow” because he’s been “effectually conquered and his spirits broken.” This implies that Cereno suffers from some form of trauma attributed to the general state of affairs that he suffered through, but does not provide a direct link to the role Babo played in Cereno’s trauma. In Melville’s tale, it is “The Negro” that has “cast such a shadow upon [Cereno].” Whereas “frighten” connotes fear and anxiety, “cast” suggests that Cereno, like a fish caught in a net, was held captive to emotions forced or “cast” upon him from an external source. Babo’s manipulation of Cereno compels Cereno to revisit the foundations of slavery that rest upon white superiority as justification for black enslavement. In demonstrating that blacks are equally as capable and intelligent as their white counterparts, Babo topples the pillar of white superiority, impelling Cereno to reflect upon the morality of slavery. Unable to reconcile the pro-slavery acts that he has already committed with the newfound realization of slavery’s inhumanity, Cereno falls into a silent depression. His silence reveals the wounds his skin conceals. Thus, Babo’s mind is the agent, whom Delano originally leaves ambiguous, responsible for “effectually conquer[ing]”
10. Richmond, Douglas. “The Legacy of African Slavery in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1810.” Journal of Popular Culture 35, no. 2 (2001): 1-17.
The fight for racial equality is one of the most prominent issues Americans have faced throughout history and even today; as the idea that enslaving individuals is unethical emerged, many great and innovative authors began writing about the issues that enslaved people had to face. Olaudah Equiano was no exception. In his work The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, he attempts to persuade his readers that the American way of slavery is brutal, inhumane, and unscrupulous. Equiano manages to do this by minimizing the apparent differences between himself and his primarily white audience, mentioning the cruelties that he and many other slaves had to face, and the advantages of treating your slaves correctly.
Slave rebellions are the common topic of the two stories. Melville plays with the anxiety whites had of such and Douglass of its possibility to elevate slaves out of their misery. If paraphrased, the end of chapter X in Douglass’s Narrative serves as a perfect illustration of this: Douglass describes his Master Hugh seizing the money Douglass had earned; “not because he [Hugh] earned it, - not because he had any hand in earning it … but solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up.” Exchange ‘money’ with ‘liberty’ and Babo’s right to revolution as that “of the grim-visaged pirate upon the high seas”, becomes as right as the white man’s enslavement of blacks. In understanding this, Babo turns into a true hero – albeit a literate one – on a level with Nat Turner, Madison Washington and others. His quest for freedom and his struggle to achieve it deserves to be remembered, just as Douglass is remembered today.
The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, first published in 1789, is the first example of a slave narrative. Unlike most of the class, I took it upon myself to read the entire story of Equiano’s Travels, abridged and edited by Paul Edwards. In that version, as in the version represented in The Norton Anthology American Literature Shorter Fifth Edition, the journey of Olaudah Equiano is expressed in his own words, from his own point of view. That makes this writing a truly unique piece of literature. It is not only the first slave narrative but also one of the only ones written pre-civil war by a former slave, and someone seized from Africa. These facts give the writing a unique feel, for it is the words of a man that was born a free man, raised to be a ruler of his tribe, kidnapped and made into a slave as a young child, and then journeying through life to become once again free as a mature adult. Equiano experienced almost all parts of a slave’s existence. He was a slave throughout Africa, England, and the New World.
Freud defined civilization as the “whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes-namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations” (Freud, Sigmund 42). Knowing the history of a civilization is crucial to understanding its effects on its own people. Frantz Fanon wrote in his book, Black Skin, White Masks that the black man “has no culture, no civilization, and no ‘long historical past’” (Fanon 17). The black man’s lack of civilization can be attributed to their enslavement. Once black men were taken from their home country and forced into slavery, they lost their own civilization. They were thrust into the New World,
"The Life of Olaudah Equiano” is a captivating story in which Equiano, the author, reflects on his life from becoming a slave to a freeman during the 19th century. Through his experiences and writing, Equiano paints a vivid picture of the atrocities and cruelties of European slavery. Ultimately through his narrative, Equiano intends to persuade his audience, the British government, to abolish the Atlantic slave trade as well as alert them of the harsh treatment of slaves. He successfully accomplishes his goal by subtly making arguments through the use of character, action, and setting.
The first element of slavery that Frederick attacks is that slavery puts constraints on a slave’s individuality. In his narrative, he states that slaves were compared to animals by the way the slave owner treated them because slaves were considered as property and not as human beings. When slaves came into the new world, they were sold and given new names and over time were supposed to assimilate to the American culture. Since slave masters did not think slaves could assimilate to the American culture, slave masters kept them as workers; therefore, slaves were not given an education, leaving them illiterate, and thereby leaving them without any knowledge on how the American political system works. Slave owners thought that if slaves would become literate, that slaves would start to question the rights they have. Frederick argues that slaves l...
Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship A Human History. New York, New York: Penguin Group, 2007. Print.
Throughout his account of San Domingos' slavery, James maintains the perseverance of the humanity of the slave population. The slaves did not succumb to their conditions by becoming inanimate objects devoid of any human qualities. Although the "majority of the slaves accommodated themselves to [the] brutality by a profound fatalism and a wooden stupidity before their masters", the slaves still maintained their intelligence and creativity. "The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings" (11-12). Moreover, it "was this intelligence which refused to be crushed, these latent possibilities, that frightened the colonists, as it frightens the whites in Africa to-day" (18).
Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.
Frederick Douglass’ landmark narrative describes the dehumanization of African-American slaves, while simultaneously humanizing them through his moving prose. Douglass shows the dehumanization of slaves through depictions of violence, deindividuation, and the broken justice system. However, Douglass’ pursuit of an education, moving rhetoric, and critique of his own masters demonstrates to the reader that African-Americans are just as intelligent as white people, thus proving their humanity.
In this essay I intend to delve into the representation of family in the slave narrative, focusing on Frederick Douglas’ ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave’ and Harriet Jacobs ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.’ Slave narratives are biographical and autobiographical stories of freedom either written or told by former slaves. The majority of them were ‘told to’ accounts written with the aid of abolitionist editors between 1830 and 1865. An amount of narratives were written entirely by the author and are referred to as authentic autobiographies. The first of more than six thousand extant slave narratives were published in 1703. Primarily written as propaganda, the narratives served as important weapons in the warfare against slavery. Slave narratives can be considered as a literary genre for a number of reasons. They are united by the common purpose of pointing out the evils of slavery and attacking the notion of black inferiority. In the narratives, you can find simple and often dramatic accounts of personal experience, strong revelation of the char...
...ns it held. Melville creates a character who never sees the reality on board the ship in his many speculations, particularly because Delano sees the slaves as too ignorant as to be able to devise such a thing, when the grand irony is the he is too blind to see it. Melville reverses the master and slave roles and brings them before a very slavery-conscious audience to whom he leaves the interpretation open, but laden with subtle messages about the horrible institution of slavery.
The study of African American history has grown phenomenally over the last few decades and the debate over the relationship between slavery and racial prejudice has generated tremendous amounts of scholarship. There’s a renewed sense of interest in the academia with a new emphasis on studies and discussions pertaining to complicated relationships slavery as an institution has with racism. It is more so when the potential for recovering additional knowledge seems to be limitless. Even in the fields of cultural and literary studies, there is a huge emphasis upon uncovering aspects of the past that would lead one towards a better understanding of the genesis of certain institutionalized systems. A careful discussion of the history of slavery and racism in the new world in the early 17th Century would lead us towards a sensitive understanding of the kind of ‘playful’ relationship African Americans have with notions pertaining to location, dislocation and relocation. By taking up Toni Morrison’s ninth novel entitled A Mercy (2008), this paper firstly proposes to analyze this work as an African American’s artistic representation of primeval America in the 1680s before slavery was institutionalized. The next segment of the study intends to highlight a non-racial side of slavery by emphasizing upon Morrison’s take on the relationship between slavery and racism in the early heterogeneous society of colonial America. The concluding section tries to justify “how’ slavery gradually came to be cemented with degraded racial ideologies and exclusivist social constructs which ultimately, led to the equation of the term ‘blackness’ almost with ‘slaves’.