ABSTRACT
Slave narratives hold the status as literature and history. As a collective genre, these texts narrate the expansion and experience of slave trade and slave communities in the Americas. Slavery (→ I/18), in fact, proves to be one of the bases of colonial domination of the whole hemisphere (→ Colonial Rule, I/5), interrelating heterogeneous regions by trade networks and the disastrous shared experiences of exploitation, racism, and dehumanization (→ Race, I/39). Because the bondage of the autochthonous people (→ Indigenous Peoples, I/11) proved insufficient for European colonists, the deportation of enslaved Africans to the Americas began, and from the cono sur of South America up to Canada, colonial regimes were not willing to renounce the unpaid work of people of African origin and descent for many generations. From 1550 on, four predominant regions of slavocracy emerged in the Americas: the urban centers of the vast Spanish Empire, the plantation zones in Brazil and the Guyanas, the Caribbean islands, and the British colonies in the north (Flaig 2011, 179). Slavery, in other words, constitutes not only a transregional entanglement but also a transtemporal one as, in many cases, it outlasted colonization and left behind traumatic legacies that endure up to the present. In consequence, slave narratives appear to be crucial testimonies in which formerly enslaved people, usually runaways, reflect the violence of the colonial and postcolonial practice of domination through autobiographical life writing (→ III/11) and inscribe it into collective memory (→ Memory Politics, I/34).
