Description
"Race, Region and Religion" explores issues of race, gender and religious identities in three African American Narratives, both fiction and non-fiction and from different historical periods, to demonstrate the contribution these narratives make to the discussion of literary representations of slavery. The narratives are, "Sketches of Slave Life" written by Virginia-born (Prince George County) Peter Randolph (1855) who was manumitted by his former master and sent with sixty-five other former slaves to Boston to begin life in freedom. The second text, Hannah Craft's 1850s autobiographical novel "The Bondwoman's Narrative" which has been recently discovered and published by African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2002), a chronicle of the story of a female slave "recently escaped from North Carolina" whose early beginnings were in Milton city in Charles City County, Virginia. Lastly, Edward P. Jones' contemporary novel, "The Known World" (2003), which has won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Set in a fictional Virginia county called "Manchester," the novel, like its predecessors, makes use of Virginia topology and history as the setting for its story of African American slaveholding in the antebellum south. All three of these texts were written or published outside of the northern abolitionist press, and thus give a more complex and multi-faceted view of slavery as an intersection of issues of race, region and religion.
