| This study examines the interpolation of and interaction between western and African discourses that influenced the narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet A. Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley, as well as the dialectic formed between these individual texts and their unique narrative subject-positions. Influenced by the evolution of the slave narrative tradition as it was (re)formed to meet the slave narrator's specific contexts, this project develops through a demonstration of the various ways in which Jacobs and Keckley answered and revised the liminal space and prominence of community that are foregrounded in Equiano's seminal text. In addition to voicing individual displacement and cultural rupture, these texts articulate the various mechanisms through which the authors cultivated and reintegrated with a sense of community and self. Ultimately, these "self"-defined testimonies (re)construct a figurative line of continuity and develop a community of letters through the dynamic relation between their individual texts. |
