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Nineteenth-Century Black Literature

01-Fictions of Factual Representation

This course examines the development of black cultural expression in nineteenth century America by reading a diverse selection of novels, slave narratives, speeches, autobiographies, and short stories. We will begin to trace the dynamic circulation and transmission of ideas and genres characterizing nineteenth-century black literature through the phantasm of slave insurrections that haunted the antebellum cultural imagination. Both black and white writers felt compelled to “re-tell” the stories of slave mutinies in fictional form to an audience already acquainted with these events. How do these historical fictions produce a radically different understanding of national history and the patriarchal genealogy of civil liberty emerging from the revolutionary “founding fathers”? These writings, like the fugitive slave narrative, often trouble the distinction between “fact” and “fiction” that antebellum readers held dear. In the second half of the semester, we will explore the increasing use of black vernacular voice and the growing popularity of local color fictions from the U.S. South. Why was there such a national interest in fictions that “returned” readers to antebellum slavery at the dawn of the new century, which W.E.B. DuBois famously identified with the “problem of the color line”? We conclude the semester by investigating how racial slavery became a powerful touchstone for writers in post-Emancipation America.

Readings May Include:

William Wells Brown, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter

Hannah Crafts, The Bondswoman’s Narrative

Charles Chesnutt, Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line & Marrow of Tradition

Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave

Thomas Gray/Nat Turner, Confessions of Nat Turner

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

Mark Twain, Puddn’head Wilson

Harriet Wilson, Our Nig