Given the rise of new interdisciplinary and methodological approaches to African American and Black Atlantic studies, The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative will offer a fresh, wide-ranging assessment of this major American literary genre. The volume will begin with articles
that consider the fundamental concerns of gender, sexuality, community, and the Christian ethos of suffering and redemption that are central to any understanding of slave narratives. The chapters that follow will interrogate the various agendas behind the production of both pre- and
post-Emancipation narratives and take up the various interpretive problems they pose.
Strategic omissions and veiled gestures were often necessary in these life accounts as they revealed disturbing, too-painful truths, far beyond what white audiences were prepared to hear. While touching
upon the familiar canonical autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the Handbook will pay more attention to the under-studied narratives of Josiah Henson, Sojourner Truth, William Grimes, Henry Box Brown, and other often-overlooked accounts. In addition to the literary
autobiographies of bondage, the volume will anatomize the powerful WPA recordings of interviews with former slaves during the late 1930s.
With essays on the genre's imaginative afterlife, its final essays will chart the emergence and development of neoslave narratives, most notably in
Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Toni Morrisons's Beloved and Octavia Butler's provocative science fiction novel, Kindred. In short, the Handbook will provide a long-overdue assessment of the state of the genre and the vital scholarship that continues to grow around it, work that is offering
some of the most provocative analysis emerging out of the literary studies discipline as a whole.
John Ernest: Introduction
Historical Fractures
1. Mitch Kachun: Slave Narratives and Historical Memory
2. Eric Gardner: Slave Narratives and Archival Research
3. Dickson Bruce: Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding
4. Jeannine DeLombard: Slave Narratives and
U.S. Legal History
Layered Testimonies
5. Marie Jenkins Schwartz: The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources
6. Sharon Ann Musher: The Other Slave Narratives: the Works Progress Administration Interviews
7. Elizabeth Regosin: Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files
8.
John Michael Vlach: The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narratives
Textual Bindings
9. Teresa Goddu: Slave Narratives as Texts
10. Dwight McBride and Justin A. Joyce: Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader
11. Kenneth
Warren: Slave Narratives and American Literary Studies
12. Marcus Wood: Slave Narratives and Visual Culture
13. William Andrews: Post-Emancipation Slave Narratives
Experience and Authority
14. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman: "This Horrible Exhibition": Sexuality in Slave
Narratives
15. DoVeanna Fulton: "There is Might in Each": Slave Narratives and Black Feminism
16. Maurice O. Wallace: "I Rose a Freeman": Power, Property and the Performance of Manhood in Slave Narratives
17. Brenda Stevenson: Beyond the Protagonist: Families and Communities in Slave
Narratives
18. Barbara McCaskill: Collaborative Slave Narratives
Environments and Migrations
19. Kimberly Smith: The Ecology of Slave Narratives
20. Rhondda R. Thomas: Locating Slave Narratives
21. Winfried Siemerling: Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies
22.
Nicole N. Aljoe: Caribbean Slave Narratives
23. Helen Thomas: Slave Narratives and Transatlantic Literature
Echoes and Traces
24. Daphne Brooks: Slave Narratives and the Performance of Race and Freedom
25. Jocelyn Moody: "The Truth of Slave Narratives": Slavery's Traces in
Postmemory
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John Ernest is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of American Literature. He is the author of Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature and Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861.
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