West African Narratives of Slavery
West African Narratives of Slavery

Author: Sandra E. Greene

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2011-02-16

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 025322294X

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Slavery in Africa existed for hundreds of years before it was abolished in the late 19th century. Yet, we know little about how enslaved individuals, especially those who never left Africa, talked about their experiences. Collecting never before published or translated narratives of Africans from southeastern Ghana, Sandra E. Greene explores how these writings reveal the thoughts, emotions, and memories of those who experienced slavery and the slave trade. Greene considers how local norms and the circumstances behind the recording of the narratives influenced their content and impact. This unprecedented study affords unique insights into how ordinary West Africans understood and talked about their lives during a time of change and upheaval.

Three Narratives of Slavery
Three Narratives of Slavery

Author: Sojourner Truth

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-09-11

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0486136108

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Straightforward, yet often poetic, accounts of the battle for freedom, these memoirs by three courageous black women vividly chronicle their struggles in the bonds of slavery, their rebellion against injustice, and their determination to attain equality.

Slave Owners of West Africa
Slave Owners of West Africa

Author: Sandra E. Greene

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2017-05-22

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 0253026024

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In this groundbreaking book, Sandra E. Greene explores the lives of three prominent West African slave owners during the age of abolition. These first-published biographies reveal personal and political accomplishments and concerns, economic interests, religious beliefs, and responses to colonial rule in an attempt to understand why the subjects reacted to the demise of slavery as they did. Greene emphasizes the notion that the decisions made by these individuals were deeply influenced by their personalities, desires to protect their economic and social status, and their insecurities and sympathies for wives, friends, and other associates. Knowing why these individuals and so many others in West Africa made the decisions they did, Greene contends, is critical to understanding how and why the institution of indigenous slavery continues to influence social relations in West Africa to this day.

The History of Mary Prince
The History of Mary Prince

Author: Mary Prince

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 82

ISBN-13: 0486146936

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Prince — a slave in the British colonies — vividly recalls her life in the West Indies, her rebellion against physical and psychological degradation, and her eventual escape in 1828 in England.

A Muslim American Slave
A Muslim American Slave

Author: Omar Ibn Said

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2011-07-20

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0299249530

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Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Survivors of Slavery
Survivors of Slavery

Author: Laura T. Murphy

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-03-25

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0231535759

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Slavery is not a crime confined to the far reaches of history. It is an injustice that continues to entrap twenty-seven million people across the globe. Laura Murphy offers close to forty survivor narratives from Cambodia, Ghana, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United States, detailing the horrors of a system that forces people to work without pay and against their will, under the threat of violence, with little or no means of escape. Representing a variety of circumstances in diverse contexts, these survivors are the Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner Truths, and Olaudah Equianos of our time, testifying to the widespread existence of a human rights tragedy and the urgent need to address it. Through storytelling and firsthand testimony, this anthology shapes a twenty-first-century narrative that many believe died with the end of slavery in the Americas. Organized around such issues as the need for work, the punishment of defiance, and the move toward activism, the collection isolates the causes, mechanisms, and responses to slavery that allow the phenomenon to endure. Enhancing scholarship in women's studies, sociology, criminology, law, social work, and literary studies, the text establishes a common trajectory of vulnerability, enslavement, captivity, escape, and recovery, creating an invaluable resource for activists, scholars, legislators, and service providers.

The Odyssey of an African Slave
The Odyssey of an African Slave

Author: Sitiki

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2009-09-27

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0813047951

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Recently discovered as a hand-written document in the Buckingham Smith Collection at the New York Historical Society, this remarkable first-person narrative traces the life of Sitiki, whose name was changed to Jack Smith after his enslavement in America. Captured and sold into slavery in Africa as a five-year-old, Sitiki traveled to America as a cabin boy. Eventually sold by the ship's captain to Josiah Smith of Savannah, Georgia, he lived there and in Connecticut with his new master. Captured by the British during the War of 1812, he was returned to the Smiths, to be freed only after the Civil War. He went on to become the first black Methodist minister in St. Augustine, Florida, where he established his own church. Patricia Griffin does not leave the story at the conclusion of the slave narrative, but explores Sitiki's experiences and places them in clear and valuable context. She presents the narrative unencumbered, allowing Sitiki’s authority, compassion, and personality to speak for itself.