Journeys of the slave narrative in the early Americas

Focusing on slave narratives from the Atlantic world of the eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries, this interdisciplinary collection of essays suggests theimportance-even the necessity-of looking beyond the iconic and ubiquitous works ofOlaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs.

In granting sustained critical attention towriters such as Briton Hammon, Omar Ibn Said, Juan Francisco Manzano, Nat Turner, and Venture Smith,among others, this book makes a crucial contribution not only to scholarship on the slave narrativebut also to our understanding of early African American and Black Atlantic literature.The essays explore the social and cultural contexts, the aesthetic and rhetoricaltechniques, and the political and ideological features of these noncanonical texts.

By concentratingon earlier slave narratives not only from the United States but from the Caribbean, South America,and Latin America as well, the volume highlights the inherent transnationality of the genre,illuminating its complex cultural origins and global circulation.