ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part Section One|64 pages
Voices in the Archives
chapter 2|18 pages
Fictions in the Archives
part Section Two|64 pages
Native Americans
chapter 4|17 pages
A “Spanish Indian Squaw” in New England
chapter 5|21 pages
In the Borderlands of Race and Freedom (and Genre)
chapter 6|24 pages
“She Said Her Answers Contained the Truth”
part Section Three|80 pages
African Americans