NARRATIVES OF THE ENSLAVED

Catalog description

Prior to the Civil War, slave narratives advanced the cause of abolition by revealing the inhumanity of slavery and the humanity of the enslaved. During the Civil Rights movement, the slave narrative was rediscovered as a source of African-American history. Some African-American novelists, such as Margaret Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, David Bradley and Gloria Naylor have recuperated the genre to re-examine the African-American past and to recreate it for a new generation. Readings will range from Olaudah Equiano's eighteenth century narrative to the present.