WATER

EXPLORE: The Middle Passage

Timelapse of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade with prominent Middle Passage (slavevoyages.org)

John Keene

John R. Keene was born in St. Louis in 1965. He graduated from Harvard College and New York University, where he was a New York Times Fellow. In 1989, Mr. Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations (1995) and Counternarratives (2106), which contains the short story “Rivers.” Keene is the recipient of many awards and fellowships—including a MacArthur Genius Award. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.

John Keene’s website

The Neo-Slave Narrative as Counternarrative

READ: “Rivers” by John Keene

READ: “An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of The American Revolution” by John Keene

Read the first 132 pages of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella, Passing. Click below for a pdf of the text.

Larsen, Nella_PassingDownload

Slave Narratives

From a literary standpoint, the autobiographical narratives of former slaves comprise one of the most extensive and influential traditions in African American literature and culture. Until the Depression era slave narratives outnumbered novels written by African Americans. Some of the classic texts of American literature, including the two most influential nineteenth-century American novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Mark Twain‘s Huckleberry Finn (1884), and such prize-winning contemporary novels as William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), bear the direct influence of the slave narrative.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project, 1936-38

  • Sarah Gudger
  • William Moore
  • Josephine Hill
  • Charley Williams
  • Georgia F;lournoy
  • Tempie Cummins