Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women's Slave Narratives

By Jennifer Fleischner

Book Overview

In Mastering Slavery , Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how the slave narratives--in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction--yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal. Her study exposes the impact of the entangled relations among master, mistress, slave adults and slave children on the sense of identity of individual slave narrators. She explores the ways in which our of the social, psychological, biological--and literary--crossings and disruptions slavery engendered, these autobiographers created mixed, dynamic narrative selves.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814726534
• ISBN13: 9780814726532
• Release Date: July 1996
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Mastering Slavery is a book which has many layers of scholar

Mastering slavery is an excellent book. Jennifer Fleischner has written a truly interdisciplinary account of a subject that is too often simplified. The intensely complex relationships that existed in the plantation system are examined in this book through the lens of psychoanalysis and literary history, a unique treatment of the subject, as far as I can tell. Fleischner, a former professor of mine at SUNYA, brings to her writing the same rigor she demanded in her classroom, a space where scholarship still matters.