Traumas of the Middle Passage: The foundations of narrative and political discourse in 19th-century African American literature

"Traumas of the Middle Passage" employs the concepts of collective memory, cultural trauma, and communal storytelling in order to impart new meanings to the Middle Passage by recovering the suppressed versions of it, as symbolically expressed in selected African-American literature published from 1848 to 1899. This timeline is significant in that it represents the eras when the African slave trade was still viable, the publication and dissemination of slave narratives steadily increased, the first African-American novels appeared, and the debates about racial identity predominated American literature.; In applying a critical methodology that combines textual analysis with psychological and cultural trauma theories, I access valuable information, overlooked in existing studies of the Middle Passage, which unveils the linkages between the struggles of enslaved Africans, such as Olaudah Equiano, Mahommah Baquaqua, and Boyrereau Brinch, to outlive the transoceanic voyage and the struggles of their descendants to resist racial oppression in 19th-century America. My central argument is that the 19th-century African-American authors in my study commemorate the Middle Passage by emphasizing the perennial traumas of the ocean voyage---terror, homelessness, and confinement---as the basis upon which they formulate their narrative and political ideologies of survival.; Focusing on William Wells Brown's Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown (1848) and his Clotel or the President's Daughter (1853), Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899), this study suggests that each of these authors fashion American Middle Passage discourses. Specifically, William Wells Brown translates components of his journey as a captive on American waters into fictional form and therefore resituates his trauma, and by extension the trauma of slaves who endured the transatlantic voyage, in American consciousness. Moreover, Harriet Jacobs and Sutton Griggs challenge the spatial assignment of power by symbolically reconstituting slave ships' holds (Jacobs's garret, Griggs's underground meeting place) as not merely sites of trauma, but more importantly sites of empowerment and survival. This study ultimately concludes that writing and disseminating these autobiographies and novels that address cultural trauma are the authors' methods of communal healing.