Focusing on slave narratives from the Atlantic world of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, this interdisciplinary collection of essays suggests the
importance--even the necessity--of looking beyond the iconic and ubiquitous works of
Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. In granting sustained critical attention to
writers such as Briton Hammon, Omar Ibn Said, Juan Francisco Manzano, Nat Turner, and Venture Smith,
among others, this book makes a crucial contribution not only to scholarship on the slave narrative
but also to our understanding of early African American and Black Atlantic literature.
The essays explore the social and cultural contexts, the aesthetic and rhetorical
techniques, and the political and ideological features of these noncanonical texts. By concentrating
on earlier slave narratives not only from the United States but from the Caribbean, South America,
and Latin America as well, the volume highlights the inherent transnationality of the genre,
illuminating its complex cultural origins and global circulation.