The heroic voice in black slave narratives and its reconstruction of the black slave community: Talking about, to, and through whiteness

The major objectives of this dissertation are three: First, to investigate the relationship between the heroic voice and content of the ante-bellum slave narrative and the social status of the ex-slave while he or she was still a slave---The Malcolm X Hypothesis. More exactly, is there a discernible relationship between where the slave works and sleeps, and the structure and content of the slave's narrative? Do rural slaves have one perspective and urban slaves another? Do slaves who are the product of black slave mothers and white slave master fathers tell a different tale from those slaves whose parents, whose mothers and fathers, were both black? Does the field slave have a different tale from the house slave? Does the cane cutter have a different tale from the carpenter?;The second and related objective is to investigate whether the slave experiences of blacks vary by national site of slavery. Does the ex-slave of Cuba or Jamaica have a thematically or structurally different tale to tell from that of the ex-slave in the United States? In attempting to contrast the varying pictures of slavery as reconstructed within slave narratives, the dissertation situates the slave narrative within the larger black, 19th century discourse on race and slavery and the literary forms that gave representation to that discourse.;The third objective is to identify, analyze, and discuss the overarching influences of white people, friends and foes, masters and abolitionists, northerners and southerners, publishers and readers, editors and detractors on the production of a black aesthetic as it manifests itself in the black slave narrative.;For many blacks in the Americas, the struggle for being, the struggle to define themselves in the Americas can be traced back to the struggle for freedom by Africans and their diaspora descendants in the New World. The struggle for freedom is undertaken on multiple fronts, employing manifold devices. These fronts span from the Orinoco to the Mississippi, from the big houses of Pernambuco to the small thatch roofs of El Choco; and the literary and social devices range from family-centered narratives of Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs to the defiant confessional prose of Nat Turner to the revolutionary polemic of David Walker to the Christian denial of a black self by James Albert Gronniosaw.