{"id":667,"date":"2016-12-10T09:32:32","date_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:32:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=667"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:36:37","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:36:37","slug":"nicole-n-aljoe-and-ian-finseth-eds-journeys-of-the-slave-narrative-in-the-early-americas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/12\/10\/nicole-n-aljoe-and-ian-finseth-eds-journeys-of-the-slave-narrative-in-the-early-americas\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth, eds. Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth, eds. Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas<\/em>. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 256p. ISBN 9780813936383. US $29.50 (paperback and ebook); US $59.50 (hardback).<\/p>\n

\u201cBooks \u2026 have life spans and life chances… that correlate positively with the race of the author\u201d argues Joanna Brooks in her brilliant essay, \u201cThe Unfortunates: What the Life Spans of Early Black Books Tell Us about Book History.\u201d Brooks is particularly interested in \u201cthose substantial, more pricey books of more than forty-eight pages.\u201d Still, we can cautiously extend her insight to other racialized material texts, which face some of the same existential challenges, from \u201cbeing written, published, sold, bought, read, reprinted, [and] circulated\u201d in the first place to being \u201ccollected and preserved\u201d over time. Hence the foundational importance of collections like Dorothy Porter\u2019s Early Negro Writing 1760-1837<\/em> (1971) to the institutionalization of Black Studies. However unfashionable such \u2018recovery projects\u2019 may have become in English and history departments, African-American literature continues to be enlivened by the ongoing critical resuscitation of early works.<\/p>\n

To this end, Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth have brought together seven other literary scholars and one historian to offer analyses of a genre whose scope is as transnational as the vectors out of which it arose: \u201cinstitutions of African enslavement,\u201d \u201cmissionary and abolitionist movements,\u201d and a rapidly expanding early modern print culture (5). Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas<\/em> is only the most recent in a series of anthologies that seek to get Beyond Douglass<\/em> (in the apt title of Michael Drexler and Ed White\u2019s 2008 collection) by setting back the clock and widening the compass of Afro-diasporic life-writing. Briton Hammon, Boyrereau Brinch, Juan Francisco Manzano, and Omar Ibn Said \u2013 not<\/em> Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs \u2013 are the key figures here. (The absence of female authors is duly noted.)<\/p>\n

Although the focus remains on such conventional narratives, Jos\u00e9 Guadalupe Ortega makes fascinating use of the judicial records housed in the Cuban National Archives to reconstruct the strategic legal self-fashioning of a Bahamian slave who, in the upheaval of the Haitian Revolution, escaped to Cuba. As Juan Antonio, the fugitive English slave forged a new identity as a skilled wage laborer even as Cuba\u2019s slaveholding sugar economy benefited from the influx of such workers.<\/p>\n

But the collection\u2019s most original, substantive essays come from its most junior contributors. Basima Kamel Shaheen offers an informative account of the literary, Qu\u2019ranic allusions and structures that, she argues, makes the Arabic Life of Omar Ibn Said<\/em> (1831) a revealing countertext to the highly publicized life of this purported Christian convert and South Carolina slave. R. J. Boutelle persuasively excavates the Cuban and British literary and political contexts that informed the production and reception of Irish abolitionist R. R. Madden\u2019s compilation of Manzano\u2019s (and Madden\u2019s own) poetry and prose in Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba<\/em> (1840).<\/p>\n

Yet Boutelle\u2019s efforts to \u201cinterrogate the privilege accorded to the author function in slave narrative studies\u201d through a \u201cprint cultural methodology\u201d that \u201cshifts us away from the figurative language of vocality\/voice that dominates\u201d the field \u2013 laudable as they are \u2013 points to a central problem with the collection. Published in November 2014 after \u201ca very long journey from the 2010 Society of Early Americanists Special Topics conference on Borderlands\u201d (ix), the collection feels surprisingly out of date. Boutelle\u2019s excellent essay is only one of the chapters that could have been strengthened by dialogue with (among other recent book-historical projects) Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein\u2019s Early African American Print Culture<\/em>. (Published in spring 2012 by Penn Press, the collection includes Brooks\u2019s \u201cUnfortunates.\u201d) Other than in Kristina Bross\u2019s apparently more recent \u201cCoda,\u201d the only citations to sources published after 2011 are to Marcus Rediker\u2019s Amistad Rebellion<\/em> and editor Aljoe\u2019s own Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1838<\/em>. (Citations to 2011 and 2010 sources are nearly as rare.)<\/p>\n

As this 2016 review of a 2014 anthology illustrates, academic publishing faces its own challenges to survival. But surely, in the terms of the marketing argot by which we are increasingly asked to \u201cassess\u201d our \u201coutcomes,\u201d the \u201cvalue-added\u201d of a published volume of critical essays over a conference is its more thorough \u2013 and thus enduring \u2013 engagement with ongoing critical discussions in the field. It is only by speaking with, not past, each other that scholars can ensure that textualized Black lives continue to matter \u2013 and survive \u2013 in the future.<\/p>\n

Jeannine Marie DeLombard
\nUniversity of California, Santa Barbara<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth, eds. Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 256p. ISBN 9780813936383. US $29.50 (paperback and ebook); US $59.50 (hardback). \u201cBooks \u2026 have life spans and life chances… that correlate positively with the race of the author\u201d argues Joanna Brooks in her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1899,1907,1919,1950],"class_list":["post-667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-activism","tag-black-studies","tag-critical-race-theory-praxis","tag-print-culture"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":668,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions\/668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}