W illiam L. A ndrews . Slavery and Class in the American South

William L. Andrews has had a long and distinguished career as a scholar of nineteenth-century African American literature. His most recent work, Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865, builds on Andrews’s impressive contributions to the field. Based on a close analysis of sixty-one narratives written by fifty-two fugitive slaves published from 1840 to1865, Andrews’s book focuses specifically on social and economic differentiation within the enslaved community, as well as between enslaved people and white Southerners. Over the course of four lengthy chapters, Andrews details how these authors understood how power and privilege defined every aspect of the institution of slavery. At the same time, their status as fugitive authors generated certain themes in their narratives that revealed their personal alienation from their enslaved brothers and sisters. Historians familiar with prominent narratives by Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs will...

Alienation · Art · Institution · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Power (physics) · Privilege (computing) · Social science · Sociology · White (mutation) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies