This essay interrogates the queer history of slavery through close readings of nineteenth century literature. Specifically the texts Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriett Jacobs, Our Nig (1859) by Harriett E. Wilson, “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, as well as the pro-slavery text, The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker are placed in conversation and tension to examine how cruelty against slaves and free Black people expose the vexed queer encounters of the antebellum period. Rather than thinking of queerness as solely same-sex sexual acts, this argument extends a theory of racial sexuation that considers violence extended by masters, mistresses, and non-slave owning whites as imbued by fantasies and desires about Blackness as sexually open, unruly gendered, and innately erotic. Lastly, in reading texts pertaining to the conditions of slaves and free Black people, this essay interrogates how the racial sexual relations that are present under slavery extend beyond the confines of the plantation.

The Introduction sets out the historiographical and theoretical grounding for this study on old age in slavery, and provide information on the demographic conditions of slavery appertaining to old age. This book challenges narratives of solidarity between enslaved people and their elders, and shows how far age affected the performance of mastery and shaped white southerners’ interactions with one another. In examining how individuals, families, and communities felt about the aging process and dealt with elders, it emphasizes the complex social relations that developed in a slave society. Showing how old age ran through the arguments of Black activists, abolitionists, proslavery propagandists, and enslavers, the book reveals how representations – and the realities of aging – spoke to wider debates on the politics of paternalism and resistance. Ultimately, by illuminating age as a crucial aspect of the complex web of relations that bound together enslavers and enslaved, the book asks readers to rethink existing narratives relating to networks of solidarity in the American South and emphasizes the all-encompassing violence and exploitation of American slavery.

After having discussed the tactics of epic writing in the 1790s and early 1800s, I return to 1789 in my sixth chapter in order to examine the subversive implications of Olaudah Equiano’s anticipation of the Romantic epic revival. Although his Interesting Narrative (1789) is not an epic, it borrows several aspects of the epic form in order to associate Equiano at once with both colonizers and the colonized. Mixing epic with autobiography, conversion narrative, and travel writing, the formal liminality of Equiano’s account amplifies his presentation of himself as a hybrid figure in terms of race and religion, allowing him to promote to his readers not merely Christianity, but a broader conception of identity that challenges the conceptual basis of slavery and imperialism. Drawing on the literary resources of his colonizers’ culture, Equiano ultimately uses his position as ‘other’ to promote in his Narrative a cosmopolitan Christian identity that transcends the categories of nation and race while revealing the flaws in the discourse of both evangelism and empire.

African American culture is best understood as an ongoing community conversation about success that produces homemade citizenship. Because black success so often inspires violence, the community conversation constantly defines and redefines achievement. To pursue success, African Americans debate not only the strategies for attaining it but also its very contours and parameters. That is, they debate how one will even know if one has achieved. As they engage in this process, African Americans create a citizenship that is homemade. Denied basic ingredients like safety by the land of their birth, they cultivate a sense of belonging and achievement that does not depend on civic inclusion; it is a belonging with recourse beyond the nation-state. To recognize homemade citizenship, scholars, teachers, and general readers must look through the lens of achievement rather than resistance. This approach proves especially illuminating when applied to works, such as slave narratives, that readers presume exist to protest injustice. Using the Narrative of Henry Box Brown as a case study, this essay demonstrates the power of reading with an eye toward accomplishment. Brown’s narrative proves animated by a commitment to defining, redefining, and pursuing success while knowing victories inspire violence.

This chapter argues that textual fluidity may be understood as a fundamental component of early Black Atlantic literature, texts orally related or written by individuals of African descent, predominately those first published before 1800. Early Black Atlantic orators and writers revised their texts for various purposes; nonauthorial subjects also regularly altered the literature for a variety of reasons. New – and needed – discoveries concerning the publishing and reception histories of early Black Atlantic literature emerge when unauthorized, posthumous, and abridged editions are studied with the same rigor as authorized editions. By employing this approach, Lamore offers fresh insights on the publishing histories of John Marrant’s, Olaudah Equiano’s, and Venture Smith’s autobiographical narratives.

The complex interaction between the visual and print culture is central to transitions in definitions and perceptions of Black personhood and to an understanding of mid-century African American literature. Marshaled by race science and underwriting the emergence of the periodical as a media form in the United States through its advertisements for fugitives and enslaved Africans for sale, visuality and its imbrication with print were also mobilized by Black authors to contest those racializing scripts through authorial frontispieces. The mid-century explosion of slave narrative publication and the popularization of photographic portraiture are coincident and imbricated, making visuality and viewing practices central to understanding African American autobiographical texts. In this chapter, Michael Chaney focuses on “ex-fugitive” authorial frontispieces between 1850 and 1854 within the frame of what he calls “embedded gazing and looking relations” scripted by the illustration and phenomenal success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In doing so, he traces contestations over visual compositions of “the slave” that he argues form “the emergence of an ‘optic American slave’” during a “volatile juncture” for African American pictorial self-representation in print culture. How might, and did, Black authors challenge what Chaney calls a “viral Uncle Tom”?

In this chapter, Erica Ball focuses on how male-authored slave narratives of the 1850s might be reconsidered as part of a wider conduct discourse depicting what it meant to live “an antislavery life,” itself a form of activism against the slavery system. Taken up by, and often presented to, African Americans as examples of masculine self-transformation, narratives authored by Samuel Ringgold Ward, Solomon Northup, Jermain W. Loguen, and Frederick Douglass taught readers that “dedication to education, morality, and the Protestant work ethic were essential for becoming self-made men.” At the same time, they also reinforced the very same anxieties and ideals articulated in free Black middle-class conduct literature. Ball reenvisions the complex cultural and political work of masculine self-making undertaken by antebellum Black autobiography as exceeding the slave narrative. The result challenges our reading of the slave narrative as emerging within abolitionist politics and focused on proving the violences of (largely southern) slavery and the authority of Black writers who had experienced them. Rather, such narratives testified to an “emerging Black middle-class identity and political culture” that also contested a racial capitalist logic of accounting for Black citizenship.

This chapter seeks to reconnect American puritan literary histories with the Caribbean, to show that we cannot fully understand seventeenth-century American literature without taking into account the fact that the Caribbean was a place in which and through which American puritan literature was written. The chapter traces the entanglement of the Caribbean with New England through the circulation and exchange of goods, bodies, citizens, texts, and ideas. The chapter considers, in particular, two historical examples of New England puritan engagement with the Caribbean – the slave trade and Quaker dissent – and two examples of literary engagement – A Continuation of the State of New England (a pamphlet describing King Philip’s War in New England and a thwarted slave rebellion in Barbados) and records from the Salem witch trials. This chapter argues that the both the material reality and the idea of the Caribbean shaped the American puritan imaginary. On the one hand, the islands were key trading partners, and the continued existence of a puritan “New England Way” depended on this trade as a source of steady income. On the other, New Englanders sought to distance themselves from the islands and represent themselves as singularly “godly” English settlers.