Written from the late 18th to the late 19th century in the United States, slave narratives recounted the harrowing story from slavery to freedom, the escape from the South to the North, and the intellectual journey towards literacy and public speaking. Interestingly, even though 95% of the enslaved Africans deported to the Americas did not land in the United States but in the Latin American continent (with a concentration in the Caribbean), the slave narratives genre did not flourish in Latin America the way it did in North America. Indeed, in the Spanish-speaking Americas, only two slave narratives made their way to us and are therefore viewed as crucial documents to get a better understanding of the lives of enslaved people from African descent in the Latin American continent. This course examines some famous representatives of this genre as well as fictional writings of such narratives. In the first weeks, we will analyze what roles literacy and rhetoric played in the popular Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by the Cuban Juan Francisco Manzano and Esteban Montejo’s Biografía de un cimarrón (1968).
