Sarah McCall DeLaRosa

Research Post 1: American Slave Literature

            I am seriously considering writing about American slave literature for my Master’s Thesis. I thought I would use my first research post to explore what kind of research is already out there in this subject area—not just slave narratives, but also their poetry and songs. These are the main types of texts I have found by slave or former-slave authors. We have studied a few slave narratives and one poem by a slave in class, and this is what interested me. In order to know if this is a topic I could write extensively about, and depend on to help me achieve my Master’s degree, I need to know the area of American slave literature better.

            I began my research on the Internet, looking mainly to Wikipedia.com to help steer me towards subject matter. There, I came across articles on slave narratives[1], the history of slavery in the United States[2], African American literature[3], field hollers[4], and African American work songs[5]. These articles introduced me to several terms, events, and important people to focus on in my research. The article on slave narratives outlined the three categories of African American slave narratives: “tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle, and tales of progress” (see endnote 1); and named the authors we had read this semester, Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and Harriet Jacobs as examples. They also listed about thirty other slave narratives written by African American slaves. Besides this general background and these excellent study leads, what I found on Wikipedia in the articles on field hollers and African American work songs was also very productive. These two articles specifically led me to request books from the University of Houston’s main library for further reading.

            The article on field hollers also referenced a government effort in 1939 for the Archive of American Folk Song, the John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip[6]. This is a vast website, albeit visually underwhelming. It categorizes and links to every recording made on this three-month, 6,502-mile trip from Port Aransas, Texas to the Library of Congress in Washington DC. As the homepage of the website explains, the Lomaxes and their team “recorded approximately 25 hours of folk music from more than 300 performers,” representing “a broad spectrum of traditional musical styles, including ballads, blues, children's songs, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs” (see endnote 6). It is the field hollers and work songs, referenced in Wikipedia as being forms of American slave music, that I am most interested in and have been exploring.

            I have also looked into the scholarly research on the subject of slave literature and have had some difficulty finding exactly what is in my scope. My searches have pulled up a good deal of scholarship theorizing slave literature and its significance in Black literature today, but it has been hard to find actual examples of slave literature and scholarship concerning those pieces. However, what I have found has been various and interesting. Albert Tricomi’s article, “Dialect and Identity in Harriet Jacobs’s Autobiography and Other Slave Narratives[7],” discusses the problem of whether and how to represent a (black) person’s dialect in transcripts, and the disparity of treatment between black dialects and white ones (or lack thereof, as the case would seem). This still is not quite what I am looking for, as it is more discussing the treatment of American slave literature, rather than discussing and studying the literature itself. Also, two books by Eileen Southern on African American music came up in my searches and I have asked for them to be sent to the UHCL library for me. I look forward to checking into those when they arrive.

            This represents my research so far into the area of American slave literature; I think it has built a good foundation to lead me further into the topic. I am very interested in this as a potential subject for my Master’s Thesis. So far my research is still preliminary, as it has been hard to penetrate into the area of scholarly research with so much work done on the outskirts of my topic but not actually touching on it. I am not discouraged, however, and await the books by Ms. Southern because I think they have a lot of potential. In more time, I will also scour the “works cited” sections of the Wikipedia articles for more leads. American slave literature—the narratives, songs, and poetry—is something I plan to pursue still in my second research post, perhaps with a focus on the presence and representation of motherhood in American slave literature.