Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts

by Fulton, Doveanna S.; Pitts, Reginald H.

• ISBN13: 9781438429649
• ISBN10: 1438429649
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-04
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts is a critical collection of three women’s oral slave narratives, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life (1861), The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866), and Sylvia Dubois, A Biography of The Slave Who Whipped Her Mistress and Gained Her Freedom (1883), that have received little scholarly attention owing both to the oral nature of the texts and the circumstances of their publication and republication. Taken together, these narratives display African American women’s discursive practices that subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations of the past that counter dominant narratives of both slavery and American culture. This volume ensures that twenty-first-century readers hear” these voices to not only gain historical knowledge, but also to understand the dynamics of literacy and self-representation, and to locate oral narratives in the spectrum and tradition of African American literary production.

Author Biography

DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor is Associate Professor and Chair of Women's Studies and Director of African American Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery, also published by Suny Press. Reginald H. Pitts is Associate Editor, Clarence Mitchell Jr. Papers. He is the coeditor (with P. Gabrielle Foreman) of Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts: African American Women's Voices Raised for Freedom

Chronology of Louisa Picquet

Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life (1861)

Chronology of Mattie J. Jackson

The Story of Mattie J. Jackson(1866)

Chronology Of Sylvia Dubois

Sylvia Dubois (Now 116 Years Old), A Biography of the Slave Who Whipped Her Mistress and Gained Her Freedom

Silvia Dubois (Now 116 Yers Old), A Biografy of The Slav Who Whipt Her Mistress and Gand Her Fredom(1883) (Facsimile)

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