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Black narratives (Language (Though British imperialism resulted in the…

- - - - but these cultural forms were relatively class bound and were inaccessible to most Victorians who had neither the means nor the education to read such material. Mass advertising and consumerism by contrast, could package, market and distribute evolutionary racism on a hitherto unimaginable scale. No form of organised racism had ever before been able to reach so large and so differentiated a mass of the population. (McLintock 2002)
- - - - With critics like Gates and Andrews at the forefront, This impulse sought to trace out the presence of a “real” slave voice occupying an insurgent position within slave narratives. Critics became adept at tracing out the elisions, gaps, silences, and absent presences of the slave within the compromised genre of the slave narrative in order to find an authentic slave presence suppressed within the text (Banner 2013)
        
        However – there is a critical tendency to believe that we, as literary scholars of the twenty-first century, can apprehend the truth of a former slave’s existence by investigating the slave narrative, probing underneath its surface for the “real” slave’s voice. (Banner 2013)
        
        In trying to uncover a hidden truth – contemporary critics are just as at risk of imposing a white narrative onto this black history as the white editors of the 19th C.
        
        Readings like this see Mary Prince as an entity “embedded” in the text who can only be archaeologically recovered (Banner 2013)
        
        RATHER - Banner 2013 argues for a surface reading of the texts. . A surface reading of the text wrenches Mary back into the foreground alongside Pringle and Strickland; all of them are performing the narrative and all of them are competing for authority.
        
        The repetitions are also, crucially, a simultaneous demand for the return of the History's story to the province of the performer – e.g. repetitions of ‘work, work, work’ or the whip’s ‘lick, lick’. Rather than trying to do cultural archaeology and uncover what she’s not saying – need to pay attention to what is there and the kind’s of experience she evokes through these literary devices
      - The paratextual material—prefaces, introductions, and codas—that “framed” a slave narrative most often functioned as an authoritative white verification of a black author’s intellectual abilities and good moral character (Banner 2013)
        
        These proceedings exemplify the Enlightenment era practice of deploying white, male tribunals to verify the mental capabilities of African authors (Banner 2013)
      - Thomas Pringle, a Scottish abolitionist activist, is known for his overbearing presence throughout The History of Mary Prince (1831). (Banner 2013)
        
        Baumgartner points out that “Prince’s control over her own voice and body, even within the context of her personal narrative, does not go uncontested” due to Thomas Pringle’s editorial infiltration of the text. (Banner 2013)
        
        Slave texts were distorted and fragmented by white authorial voices who ultimately served to suppress and undermine the slave narrative
        These white editors were constantly at fault of editorial blindness – claiming that their only hand in shaping the narratives was to provide a more orderly structure, or prune excess/unnecessary details.
- - - - British abolition narratives tend to depict black slaves, in particular female black slaves, as passive and accepting victims, whilst the white abolitionist is their kind saviour (Midgley, 1993)
        
        WOMEN: In the written memoirs of these men, women tend to appear as helpful and inspirational wives, mothers and daughters rather than as activists in their own right. (Midgley 1993)
        
        The ladies anti-slavery associations set up from 1825 onwards have, quite wrongly, been dismissed as small in scale and as auxiliary to local men’s societies (exeter referred to as auxiliary in documents). In fact, ladies’ anti-slavery associations were frequently large and autonomous organisations.
        It becomes clear that women, despite their exclusion from positions of formal power in the national anti-slavery movement in Britain, were an integral part of the movement and played distinctive and at times leading roles in the successive stages of the anti-slavery campaign.
        When historians ignore the activities of ladies’ anti-slavery associations, half the story of provincial anti-slavery organisation and the generation of popular support for the movement on a nationwide basis is lost.
        (Midgley 1993)
        
        Women activists in Britain and America saw their struggles as interlinked. They worked together giving support and advice and a transatlantic sisterhood of abolitionists developed. (Midgley 1993)
      - In the British imagination, black abolitionists were an exotic spectacle – objectified. Undermines their involvement in the abolition movement. (Fisch 2000)
        
        English desires to see and hear all about American slavery were nearly insatiable, and African-Americans found themselves constructed as just so much more abolitionist ‘product’, consumed by English audiences who could not get their fill of ‘Uncle Tom’, no matter what shape or form he assumed. (Fisch 2000)