By Doveanna S. Fulton
In talking energy, DoVeanna S. Fulton explores and analyzes using oral traditions in African American women's autobiographical and fictional narratives of slavery. African American girls have continuously hired oral traditions not just to narrate the ache and degradation of slavery, but additionally to rejoice the subversions, struggles, and triumphs of Black event. Fulton examines orality as a rhetorical approach, its function in passing on kin and private background, and its skill to empower, subvert oppression, assert enterprise, and create representations for the previous. as well as taking an insightful examine imprecise or little-studied slave narratives like Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon and the Narrative of Sojourner fact, Fulton additionally brings a clean viewpoint to extra wide-spread works, similar to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents within the lifetime of a Slave woman and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and highlights Black feminist orality in such works as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes have been staring at God and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
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Extra resources for Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery
Sample text
Has it come to this? I had rather see you dead than to see you as you now are. ” She tore 32 SPEAKING POWER from my fingers my mother’s wedding-ring and her silver thimble. ” (56–57; emphasis added) In her outrage, the grandmother invokes the image of Linda’s “dead mother,” who has previously been characterized as “noble and womanly,” and strips Linda of the traditional symbols of domesticity (wedding-ring, silver thimble, and house). Because she must challenge racist assumptions of African American women’s promiscuity, it is important for Jacobs to have the audience believe the grandmother would not condone Brent’s actions.
These experiences were passed on to Truth by her parents through oral transmission. In her biography of Truth, Nell Irvin Painter identifies this oral history as a source of pain and terror for Truth (then Isabella Bomefree). Painter asserts, “Seared by frequent, detailed tellings of these losses, Isabella’s earliest years lay in the shadow of her parents’ chronic depression and her own guilt as a survivor” (12). Truth relates how, through SPEAK SISTERS, SPEAK 33 oral history, her parents perpetuated the memories of her siblings who were sold to slave traders.
In his analysis of Stuckey’s work, David Roediger maintains, “In the tales they tell each other, the slaves reveal a Fanonesque willingness to contemplate revolutionary violence as a cathartic agent and as an equalizer of master and slave” (691). While slaves were forced to suppress their opposition, Jacobs’s narrative demonstrates the use of oral traditions to address the racial dynamics inherent in texts by Black authors addressed to white audiences. THE MATRIX OF BLACK FEMINIST ORALITY The oral traditions exhibited in African American women’s narratives demonstrate a combination of theory and practice commonly identified in 16 SPEAKING POWER Black women’s work.
