The Slave Narrative Unbound
Résumé
In this essay, I argue that the slave narrative has always been a more capacious category than what is assumed when we think of it as a series of separately published works. In the absence of a publishing infrastructure that would have facilitated the circulation of Black books, the stories of formerly enslaved people often traveled outside the pages of bound books, in ephemeral forms that are less easily recoverable today, but which might have served them better then. By considering the slave narrative as a discursive practice rather than a distinct literary genre with its set of well-defined characteristics, we might not only open up the field of slave testimony to accommodate different kinds of differently told stories, but also better appreciate what “the slave narrative” meant to antebellum Americans.