The Literature that Slave Labor Made: Methods of Slave Labor's Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This project explores scenes in American literary texts of the nineteenth century when the manual labor activity of slaves is represented or described, and examines the intellectual methodologies authors used to both perceive and represent the black slave laborer. I engage with texts by Solomon Northup, Frederick Law Olmsted, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and others to argue that the somewhat rare moments of slaves' manual labor activity in the archive are important opportunities to examine the textual practices that circulate, interpret, but also obscure the laboring slave. The project aims to collate and explore moments when slaves' manual labor activity is represented, and perform a meta-analysis of the particular intellectual methods and beliefs that created those representations.;The project begins with a critique of Elaine Scarry's scholarship on work and nineteenth-century literary methodology, informed by critical race theory and recent slavery scholarship. The project then turns to slave labor scenes in four key genres of the period: the slavery novel, slavery journalism, the slave narrative, and slave work songs. These genres employ particular conventions in their representations of slave manual labor activity, and the authors combine these conventions with other methods and intellectual beliefs to shape their representations of slave labor activity and experience. Thus, the project explores the relationship between method and representation in the context of slave labor activity or experience, while also exploring the relationship between slave labor and American literary production.