Steve McQueen’s 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) brought Northup’s narrative to new, large audiences and stimulated discussion and research. It is striking that...Show moreSteve McQueen’s 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) brought Northup’s narrative to new, large audiences and stimulated discussion and research. It is striking that McQueen chose to adapt this particular slave narrative, as Northup was a free-born man and his narrative and agency therefore differs from widely read and taught slave narratives of slave-born narrators. Agency is central in these narratives as the narrators decide to escape the limited conditions of slavery and rebel against their master in order to live a life in which they are free to make their own decisions. The representation of slaves’ agency in their narratives is influenced by the socio-political environment at the time and place of writing and publication of the narrative. The genre of the autobiographical slave narrative has influenced the literature about slavery that has followed it, as can be seen in the autobiographies of former slaves published after the emancipation of all slaves in 1865 and in the genre of the neo-slave narrative that appeared in the 1970s. As the times in which they are made differ, so does their representation of agency, as they are all influenced by the socio-political environment they were published in. Autobiographies of former slaves offer a softened version of slavery and an optimistic view of the future that can be achieved through hard work, neo-slave narratives emphasize the rebellious agency of slaves, and contemporary films dwell on the ways slavery limits slave agency which makes every act of rebellion heroic. This thesis will argue that the forms of agency that are represented in contemporary novels and film dealing with slavery differ from those in the nineteenth-century autobiographical narratives that have influenced them, as all are influenced by the socio-political environment of the narrator and/or author. In order to research the theme of agency, I will look at slave narratives and works from different periods, and show different forms of agency. The works used are Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), and Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave (2013).Show less
Although the Victorian age is popularly understood to be an age in which motherhood was glorified, by the end of the nineteenth century mothers in late Victorian novels were often portrayed as...Show moreAlthough the Victorian age is popularly understood to be an age in which motherhood was glorified, by the end of the nineteenth century mothers in late Victorian novels were often portrayed as negative characters and motherhood as an institution was under attack. The rise of feminism and the introduction of the New Woman could be seen as provoking this negative portrayal. Not only women but also men criticized women’s and mothers’ positions in society. Straightforward criticism on the position of mothers was likely to be censured. Writers took it on themselves to portray the mother’s distorted social position, one that made her practically invisible within the public realm. Some feminist writers attacked motherhood in order to advocate another life and lifestyle equal to men; in literary texts, they used discouraging depictions to show women what would happen to them if they too would walk into the trap of marriage and motherhood. I shall argue that such writers portrayed mothers as undesirable characters in order to expose what the social conventions invented by a patriarchal society did to mothers and how it affected their behaviour. I shall analyse what motherhood meant in the late nineteenth century and how ‘the mother’ was characterized in literature during that time period. Two novels and a play will be analysed for the support of my argument: George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1894); Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton (1897); and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). I shall demonstrate that in each primary source the author criticizes a distorted situation that affects mothers and their behaviour that is regarded as deleterious.Show less
Since, as anthropologists and cultural critics have argued, food and food practices constitute a system of communication that conveys social meaning, food as a cultural and social practice and as a...Show moreSince, as anthropologists and cultural critics have argued, food and food practices constitute a system of communication that conveys social meaning, food as a cultural and social practice and as a literary trope provides insight into society and culture and the identities they produce. If we are what we eat, food is an important means to define and, more specifically, perform our identities. In a globalizing world, in which both people and products constantly travel, food follows migratory flows. When placed in a political, economic, and cultural context food functions as a boundary marker as well as a boundary crosser. This makes food a useful trope in postcolonial and other migrant literature in particular, as these novels explore the effects of migration and cultural encounters on the formation, negotiation, and performance of identities. Placing my reading of Desai’s postcolonial novel The Inheritance of Loss in the theoretical framework of food theories, I will argue that Desai uses food as a metaphorical instrument not only to deconstruct colonial identities, such as that of the Anglophile judge and his friends, and fixed ethnic identities, such as Biju’s, but also to imagine more fluid, multiple, migrant identities, such as Saeed Saeed’s, and to focus attention on unequal power relations and the fluidity of nationhood and national identity.Show less
The experience of illness produces profound disturbances in a person’s sense of self and integrity. Beyond the uncertainty caused by the incongruence between the sickened person’s self-concept and...Show moreThe experience of illness produces profound disturbances in a person’s sense of self and integrity. Beyond the uncertainty caused by the incongruence between the sickened person’s self-concept and his or her state of illness, there comes also an experience of uncertainty over the concept and potential prospect of death. The process of autopathography—defined by Smith and Watson as “[creating] first-person illness narratives”—often serves as a therapeutic outlet for those stricken by serious illnesses, allowing for them to both reflect on the past, as well as prompt for social change within the greater society. With reference to Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, and their resultant “virtues”, the study considers the tramatized’s intrapsychic and social orientations. It describes a functional method for analyzing autopathographical works for evidence of their authors’ working through of their trauma from these dimensions. Aude Lorde’s “The Cancer Journals” is used as a proof-of-concept case study.Show less
In this thesis two recent travel narratives are discussed in which diasporic writers of African descent return to Ghana to work through both their personal problems of identity and exile and the...Show moreIn this thesis two recent travel narratives are discussed in which diasporic writers of African descent return to Ghana to work through both their personal problems of identity and exile and the collective trauma of slavery: Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound (2000) and Ekow Eshun’s Black Gold of the Sun (2005). Regarding Ghana as their ancestral homeland, Phillips and Eshun use the genre of the travel narrative to trace the physical, but more importantly psychological journey they undertake in hopes of resolving the problem of diasporic identity and feelings of non-belonging they have encountered in Britain and America. Their journey to Ghana, however, dismantles the idea of a homecoming and the concept of a whole sense of self. The silence and contradictions they find about the slavery past in Ghana force them to tell, and imagine, stories about well known historical figures instead, such as Jacobus Capitein, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Judge J. Waties Waring, as well as less known historical figures such as Ghanaian business man John Emmanuel Ocansey. These stories function partly as a means to affirm a sense of identity. Despite the fact that there is no real closure, both authors stress the necessity to remember and acknowledge the history of slavery. The journey to Ghana, and even more importantly writing the travel narrative, is a process of self-discovery; it is in the writing process that the authors, to some extent, come to terms with themselves and work through their ancestors’ slavery (and slave trading) history. They find a resolution in embracing a fluid identity.Show less
