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Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2014

Laura T. Murphy
Laura T. Murphy*
Affiliation:
Loyola University, New Orleans
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Abstract

Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.

Keywords

slaveryslave narrativeabolitionhuman traffickingblackface
Type
General
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 2 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Literature and Law , March 2015 , pp. 93 - 113
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

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