Slave narrative
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The slave narrative is a literary form which grew out of the experience of enslaved Africans in Britain and its colonies. Some six thousand former slaves from North America (including Canada, the United States and the Caribbean) gave an account of their lives during the 18th and 19th centuries, with about 150 published as separate books or pamphlets. There are also memoirs written by white Americans or Europeans captured and enslaved in North Africa, usually by Barbary pirates. There are other more disparate memoirs that fall under this category, from other times and places too. The division between slaves and prisoners of war, for example, is not always watertight; a broader name for the genre is "captivity literature". As more attention is brought to the problem of contemporary slavery, more slave narratives continue to be published.
See also
- Literature
- Biographies of individuals with slave narratives
- William J. Anderson
- Jared Maurice Arter
- Lucinda Davis
- Moses Grandy
- Lunsford Lane
- J. Vance Lewis
- Moses Roper
- Other links
- Unchained Memories - HBO documentary with readings from slave narratives (2003)
