Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in British and French America, 1700–1848

Description

This book focuses on alternative types of slave narratives, especially courtroom testimony, and interrogates how such narratives were produced, the societies (both those that were majority slave societies and those in which slaves were a distinct minority of the population) in which testimony was permitted, and the meanings that can be attached to such narratives. The chapters in this book provide valuable information about the everyday lives―including the inner and spiritual lives―of enslaved African American and Native American individuals in the British and French Atlantic World, from Canada to the Caribbean. It explores slave testimony as a form of autobiographical narrative, and in ways that allow us to foreground enslaved persons’ lived experience as expressed in their own words. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures Introduction: Slave Narratives in British and French America, 1700–1848 Section One Voices in the Archives 1 “Said Without Being Asked”: Slavery, Testimony, and Autobiography 2 Fictions in the Archives: Jupiter alias Gamelle or the Tales of an Enslaved Peddler in the French New Orleans Court 3 Slave Judiciary Testimonies in the French Caribbean: What to Do with Them Section Two Native Americans 4 A “Spanish Indian Squaw” in New England: Indian Ann’s Journey from Slavery to Freedom 5 In the Borderlands of Race and Freedom (and Genre): Embedded Indian and African Slave Testimony in Eighteenth-Century New England 6 “She Said Her Answers Contained the Truth”: Listening to and with Enslaved Witnesses in Eighteenth-Century New France Section Three African Americans 7 Ideologies of the Age of Revolution and Emancipation in Enslaved African Narratives 8 Slave Voice and the Legal Archive: The Case of Freedom Suits before the Paris Admiralty Court 9 “I Know I Have to Work”: The Moral Economy of Labor among Enslaved Women in Berbice, 1819–1834 10 “An Anomalous Population”: Recaptive Narratives in Antigua and the British Colonial Archive, 1807–1828 Conclusion: Slave Testimonies: The Long View List of Contributors Index