This chapter surveys the interrelated histories of literature, religion, and politics in the nineteenth-century United States. In the wake of official church disestablishment, a wave of religious fervor combined with a rising tide of immigrants to form a nation in which literature became a venue for conversion, condemnation, and cultural affirmation. From early national historical romances that sought to confirm the new nation as God’s (Protestant) chosen land to Transcendentalist writings that celebrated the sacredness of the individual American soul, nineteenth-century literature tied American identity to religious pluralism and personal devotion. Sentimental novels penned by women writers and narratives of escape written by the formerly enslaved fitted religious tropes of conversion and resurrection to visions of social reform and political regeneration, while Mormons, Millerites, Shakers, Spiritualists, and other religious innovators developed new models of spiritual identity and literary language suited to an expansive and imperial nation. Over the course of the century, literature served as a venue for theological debate, a vehicle for conversion, a passionate plea for abused humanity, and an imaginative space for envisioning social reform. In each of these modes, authors of literature intervened not only in religious discourses but in the vital political life of the nation.

Known for its brutal descriptions of punishment – and the resistance of its narrator – The History of Mary Prince is usually read as a slave narrative that argues for abolition by way of affective appeals. While its explicit set pieces of violence and sexual humiliation played upon the sentiments of British readers, provoking an instinctual repulsion towards slavery, these scenes may have also encouraged readers to identify the enslaved as permanently degraded. Mary Prince and her editor Thomas Pringle, however, challenge this acceptable debasement of slaves by connecting the concept of honor to Prince’s physical character. In doing so, the History addresses a prejudice long-held by both abolitionists and colonialists towards the black female body and demonstrates how Romantic abolitionism could pivot from the bourgeois liberal ideal of freedom – or the negative right of non-restraint – to dignity, a positive, material affirmation of social worth. A concluding section treats the History as a prospectus – or, perhaps, Afrofuturist manifesto – for the political subject that can exist outside of the state, capitalist institutions, and even the bounds of recognizable sovereignty.

A contemporary anti-slavery movement has emerged in response to the diverse array of forms of forced labour that proliferate in the twenty-first-century global economy. The movement has encouraged survivors to speak out about their experiences of enslavement and to work as activists in a new abolitionist cause. As a result, the genre of the slave narrative, so popular among nineteenth-century abolitionists, has reemerged as a form of protest literature. This article suggests that by documenting the very fact of enslavement in the 21st century, the new slave narrators collectively reveal the widespread failure of the promises of globalisation, even as they celebrate their emergence into it. Through these narratives, we are able to discern the true contours of globalisation, the radical inequalities that remain and are fed by the transnational flow of commodities, including but not exclusively labour, and the slavery that is endemic and even encouraged in these global transactions.

In her chapter, Thomas reads pre-1800 legal writings about people of African descent as Black life writing. She expands autobiographical writing beyond an account of an individual’s growth and development in cases of people of African descent to narratives regarding Black people as active agents forming an embodied community racialized and marginalized by the dominant culture. Thomas argues that Black writers published autobiographical writings and also wove personal narratives into legal documents from fidavits to freedom petitions, as well as into traditional literary forms such as poems and letters. However, during the same colonial and early American eras, people of European descent inscribed details about Black peoples in a variety of historical records such as the census, bills of sale, antislavery pamphlets, court records, and runaway slave advertisements to accentuate their differences from and inability to assimilate into the majority culture.

Lamore examines revisions found in the full-length and abridged editions of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative published in the United States, and contends that they serve as a type of textual signature; they record how the editor and/or book publisher revised the autobiography to appeal to different readers in the United States. The US publishing history of Equiano's Narrative demonstrates that whereas the publishing history of the authorized editions of the autobiography underscores Equiano’s successful attempts to control his life, text, and self, the publishing history of the US editions of the autobiography repeatedly reveals that his life, text, and self were edited by others. For Lamore, the editing of an autobiographical text by a non-authorial agent forms an essential part of its reception history and the history of the multiple actors present in published life narratives. The publishing history of A Narrative of the Lord’s Most Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a frequently read eighteenth-century autobiography related by a free person of African descent, provides another occasion to study unauthorized editions of transatlantic autobiography.

This essay explores how writers of the slave narrative, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, use food to communicate the horrors of slavery, relay sensory experiences, and highlight acts of resistance. The essay further argues that Douglass and Jacobs use food imagery and metaphor creatively and in doing so, establish their own literary prowess. Following the developing field of literary food studies, this essay first makes a case for the importance of examining food within genre more broadly, and likewise argues for the literariness of the slave genre, as well as its firm position within the American literary canon. Finally, this essay briefly links Douglass and Jacobs to contemporary African American memoir by tracing how food continues to appear as a vehicle through which writers discuss white supremacy, economic and physical exploitation, and black empowerment within American society.

This chapter interrogates the multiple and nuanced ways in which Harriet Jacobs engaged with developing communications technologies and policies ostensibly designed to connect different sections of the nation to one another. Reading Jacobs’s experiences in the 1830s in relation to an ongoing communications revolution in the United States, this chapter shows how Jacobs ingeniously manipulates formal and informal networks in order to secure freedom for herself and her family.

This chapter explores the interplay between the genre of the slave narrative and Supreme Court cases concerning copyright and fugitivity decided in the 1830s and 1840s. Looking in particular at the 1838 Narrative of James Williams, a work quickly challenged for its veracity, this chapter reveals important connections between literary works and legal decisions.

This chapter reveals the profound impact that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had on the slave narrative by comparing narratives from the same author published before and after the passage of the act. Consulting pre- and post-1850 narratives by Henry Box Brown, William Grimes, and Josiah Henson, this chapter illuminates key ways in which the Fugitive Slave Act shaped one of the premier genres of African American literature.

Keith Michael Green’s “Disabling Freedom: Bloody Shirt Rhetoric in Postbellum Slave Narratives” explores the mystifications and erasures of anti-Black violence that characterized Reconstruction-era writing.Green pays deep attention to how select narratives – especially the much-neglected Story of Mattie Jackson and Keckley’s better-known Behind the Scenes – strategically employed oblique narrativizations of Black pain and personhood to avoid pernicious narratives of Black unfitness and hyper-embodiment.Green draws on what he calls the “poetics of the bloody shirt” to study the ventriloquization of injury through surrogate objects and persons, with emphasis on not only Jackson and Keckley’s texts but also works by Sojourner Truth, Still, and William Wells Brown to underscore how indirect representations of injury helped postbellum slave narratives articulate the contradictions and risks of Black life and to revise ableist visions of freedom – in the process, contesting the erasure of Black pain in post-emancipation discourse.

Paul Robeson, Negro sits uneasily alongside recent reconsiderations of the Harlem Renaissance as a localized if significant instance of wider afromodernist currents in play in the early decades of the twentieth century, and has received little attention in scholarship.

Since the seventeenth century, the Caribbean existed in the European imagination as a place of unfreedom, in opposition to European enlightenment and liberty. But the voices of the enslaved in the Caribbean, which are often tucked away in the writings of others, such as spiritual and conversion narratives, abolitionist speeches and portraits in ‘manners and customs’ accounts, or more ephemeral narrative fragments – offer a more complicated picture. Compared to the United States, far fewer texts that conform to the slave narrative genre survived from the Caribbean, and virtually all are mediated by a white amanuensis. This essay argues that despite this mediation, the slave narrative can be understood as dialogic, as a combined effort. Grounded in the notion of ‘creole testimony’ – a hybrid version that combines written with oral input and insists on reading against the grain to hear the subaltern’s voice – this essay demonstrates the utility of this strategy through reading several narratives by enslaved Caribbean women.

This chapter focuses on modes of resistance in the writings of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772), Ignatius Sancho (1782), Ottobah Cugoano (1787), Olaudah Equiano (1789), and Mary Prince (1831), who published some of the first publications in English by writers of African descent. The chapter describes their different backgrounds and explores how they used diverse literary forms, including letters, essays, polemics, and life-writing, to address a range of social and cultural issues. Comparative in focus, it examines how these writers’ published works can be linked through an analysis of the genres of life-writing and autobiography as narratives of resistance to slavery, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and its inequalities and inconsistencies. It places these publications in the context of Enlightenment racism, and shows some of them, especially Equiano and Cugoano, were written in the context, and to advance the cause, of the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade.  The chapter ends with a consideration of the literary legacy of this body of writing by showing how they have been reimagined by contemporary black British novelists.