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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Le récit d’esclave africain-américain : réflexions sur une appellation générique

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What do we talk about when we talk about 'slave narratives?' African American slave narratives have been a staple of American literary studies over the past decades. The narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and other ex-slaves have been recovered, anthologized and discussed by eminent critics such as Marion Wilson Starling, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Frances Smith Foster and William L. Andrews. For all its ubiquity, however, the generic label 'slave narrative' has been used in many different ways by specialists of African American literature. In this essay I argue that the systematic and sometimes uncritical use of the label has led to generalizations that limit our understanding of the literary form of the antebellum slave narrative and its many variations.