In this essay, I will be examining the works of two authors on the topic of slavery in America: Ulrich B. Phillips American Negro Slavery (1918) and Toni Morrison Beloved (1987). One writes as a Southerner and a historian who is defending southern slaveholders and draws upon contemporary racial theory to justify the system as beneficial to African Americans. The other writes as an African-American woman who is looking to write women into history and in doing so, add a female voice to the past. The purpose of comparing these two texts is to bring awareness that historical knowledge is constructed and not a given and that the profile of the author influences the content of their work.
When examining the history of slavery in America, we have a number of different sources to draw on. These include the accounts of fugitive slaves, of slave owners and of abolitionists. There are also fictional works of black and white authors who use these accounts as a hook from which to hang their own stories. There are the analyses of those who identify as anthropologists, sociologists and historians. Not all that has been written on the subject has survived or been preserved, so at times, all we have are fragments of written accounts. There is also a distinction to be made between texts written at the time of slavery, such as Phillips work, and interpretative texts which have been written since by novelists or academics, such as Morrison's Beloved. All provide us with insights into the same period in history, yet do so from different perspectives and offer the reader the opportunity to hear from more than one homogenous voice.
Toni Morrison wrote Beloved in 1987 in an attempt to deal adequately with imagining slavery and with the...
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Angelo, Bonnie. TIME magazine "The Pain of Being Black" an interview with Toni Morrison, May 22, 1989
Books and writers website: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tmorris.htm
Jaffery, Zia. The Salon Interview, February 2 1998
Montgomery, Maureen. Lecture notes "Historians on Slavery" University of Canterbury 2005
Morrison, Toni. Beloved, Vintage Press (1987)
Nigro, Marie. Revisioning History through Literary Characters: Louise Erdrich's Pauline and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Lincoln University. WILLA, Vol 9, Fall 2000
Olmstead, Fredrick Law. Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. 1856
Phillips, Ulrich. B. American Negro Slavery (1918)
Zinsser, William (editor), Toni Morrison: The Site of Memory. Taken from Inventing the Truth. Houghton Mifflin company: New York, 1995.
When reading about the institution of slavery in the United States, it is easy to focus on life for the slaves on the plantations—the places where the millions of people purchased to serve as slaves in the United States lived, made families, and eventually died. Most of the information we seek is about what daily life was like for these people, and what went “wrong” in our country’s collective psyche that allowed us to normalize the practice of keeping human beings as property, no more or less valuable than the machines in the factories which bolstered industrialized economies at the time. Many of us want to find information that assuages our own personal feelings of discomfort or even guilt over the practice which kept Southern life moving
insights into what the narratives can tell about slavery as well as what they omit,
As the United States grew, the institution of slavery became a way of life in the southern states, while northern states began to abolish it. While the majority of free blacks lived in poverty, some were able to establish successful businesses that helped the Black community. Racial discrimination often meant that Blacks were not welcome or would be mistreated in White businesses and other establishments. A comparison of the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs demonstrates the full range of demands and situations that slaves experienced, and the mistreatment that they experienced as well. Jacobs experienced the ongoing sexual harassment from James Norcom, just like numerous slave women experienced sexual abuse or harassment during the slave era. Another issue that faced blacks was the incompetence of the white slave owners and people. In ...
Slave narratives were one of the first forms of African- American literature. The narratives were written with the intent to inform those who weren’t aware of the hardships of slavery about how badly slaves were being treated. The people who wrote these narratives experienced slavery first hand, and wanted to elicit the help of abolitionists to bring an end to it. Most slave narratives were not widely publicized and often got overlooked as the years went by; however, some were highly regarded and paved the way for many writers of African descent today.
The controversies surrounding slavery have been established in many societies worldwide for centuries. In past generations, although slavery did exists and was tolerated, it was certainly very questionable,” ethically“. Today, the morality of such an act would not only be unimaginable, but would also be morally wrong. As things change over the course of history we seek to not only explain why things happen, but as well to understand why they do. For this reason, we will look further into how slavery has evolved throughout History in American society, as well as the impacts that it has had.
Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering that was brought on by slavery. Several critical works recognize that Morrison incorporates aspects of traditional African religions and to Christianity to depict the anguish slavery placed not only on her characters, but other enslaved African Americans. This review of literature will explore three different scholarly articles that exemplifies how Morrison successfully uses African religions and Christianity to depict the story of how slavery affected the characters’ lives in the novel, even after their emancipation from slavery.
Slavery is a term that can create a whirlwind of emotions for everyone. During the hardships faced by the African Americans, hundreds of accounts were documented. Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball and Kate Drumgoold each shared their perspectives of being caught up in the world of slavery. There were reoccurring themes throughout the books as well as varying angles that each author either left out or never experienced. Taking two women’s views as well as a man’s, we can begin to delve deeper into what their everyday lives would have been like. Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later
Analyzing the narrative of Harriet Jacobs through the lens of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du bois provides an insight into two periods of 19th century American history--the peak of slavery in the South and Reconstruction--and how the former influenced the attitudes present in the latter. The Reconstruction period features Negro men and women desperately trying to distance themselves from a past of brutal hardships that tainted their souls and livelihoods. W.E.B. Du bois addresses the black man 's hesitating, powerless, and self-deprecating nature and the narrative of Harriet Jacobs demonstrates that the institution of slavery was instrumental in fostering this attitude.
Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? details the grueling experiences of the African American female slaves on Southern plantations. White resented the fact that African American women were nearly invisible throughout historical text, because many historians failed to see them as important contributors to America’s social, economic, or political development (3). Despite limited historical sources, she was determined to establish the African American woman as an intricate part of American history, and thus, White first published her novel in 1985. However, the novel has since been revised to include newly revealed sources that have been worked into the novel. Ar’n’t I a Woman? presents African American females’ struggle with race and gender through the years of slavery and Reconstruction. The novel also depicts the courage behind the female slave resistance to the sexual, racial, and psychological subjugation they faced at the hands of slave masters and their wives. The study argues that “slave women were not submissive, subordinate, or prudish and that they were not expected to be (22).” Essentially, White declares the unique and complex nature of the prejudices endured by African American females, and contends that the oppression of their community were unlike those of the black male or white female communities.
Mock, Michelle. “Spitting out the Seed: Ownership if Mother, Child, Breasts, Milk, and Voice in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” College Literature, Vol. 23, No.3 (Oct, 1996): 117-126. JSTOR. Web. 27. Oct. 2015.
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 ...
For most American’s especially African Americans, the abolition of slavery in 1865 was a significant point in history, but for African Americans, although slavery was abolished it gave root for a new form of slavery that showed to be equally as terrorizing for blacks. In the novel Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon he examines the reconstruction era, which provided a form of coerced labor in a convict leasing system, where many African Americans were convicted on triumphed up charges for decades.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18,1931 in Lorain, Ohio to George and Ramah Willis Wofford. She was the second of four children. Her parents influenced her writing because of their contrasting views. Her father had a very pessimistic view of hope for his people; however, her mother had a more positive belief that a person, with effort, could rise above African-Americans’ current surroundings (Carmean 1-2). Her parents also influenced her because they were “gifted storytellers who taught their children the value of family history and the vitality of language”(Carmean 2).
Lubiano, Wahneema. "Morrison, Toni (1931– )." African American Writers. Ed. Valerie Smith. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. 581-597. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 24 Oct. 2013.
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’.