Professional historians, schools, colleges and universities are not alone in shaping higher-order understanding of history. The central thesis of this book is the belief historical fiction in text and film shape attitudes towards an understanding of history as it moves the focus from slavery to the enslaved—from the institution to the personal, families and feminist accounts. In a broader sense, this contributes to a public history. In part, using the quickly growing corpus of neo-slave counterfactual narratives, this book examines the notion of the emerging slavery public history, and the extent to which this is defined by literature, film and other forms of artistic expression, rather than non-fiction—popular or scholarly—and education in history in the school systems. Inter alia, this book looks to the validity of historical fiction in print or in film as a way of understanding history. A focal point of this book is the hypothesis that neo-slave narratives—supported by selective triangulated readings and viewings of scholarly works and non-fiction—have assisted greatly in re-shaping the historiography of antebellum slavery, and scholarly historians followed in the wake of these developments. Essentially, this has meant a re-shaping of the historiography with a focus from slavery to that of the enslaved. Moreover, it has opened new vistas for a public history, devoid of top-down authoritative scholarship. An important and provocative read for students and scholars interested in understanding the history of slavery, its harrowing effects and how it was culturally defined.

NeoSlave Narratives is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a given literary form--the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding the first appearance of that literary form in the 1960s, NeoSlave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent the crucial cultural debates that arose during the sixties.

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Wuppertal, course: Black British Neo-Slave Narratives, language: English, abstract: This paper focuses on the importance of remembering the slave trade in all his cruel facets. Therefore, the genre of the original slave narrative and the genre of the neo-slave narrative is introduced. The second part of the paper provides an analysis of the novel 'Blonde Roots', by Bernardine Evaristo (2009). The colonial era and the legacy of slavery left a serious mark on the whole world; Especially present-day Great Britain has to face the consequences of its role in colonialism ever since. Between 1500 and 1900, nearly 12 million African slaves were brought from their homeland to America and to Europe. Via the Transatlantic Slave Trade, British ships sent rare cargoes, like rum, cotton wool and gunpowder to Africa, in exchange for potential slaves. When the slave ships arrived in the 'New World'2, African slaves were forced brutally to harvest coffee, sugar and tobacco on plantations. Eventually, the British ships, filled with the plantation yield, settled to their home ports in Europe.

In this comprehensive, groundbreaking study, Tim A. Ryan explores how American novelists since World War I have imagined the institution of slavery and the experience of those involved in it. Complicating the common assumption that authentic black-authored fiction about slavery is starkly opposed to the traditional, racist fiction (and history) created by whites, Ryan suggests that discourses about American slavery are -- and have always been -- defined by connections rather than disjunctions. Ryan contends that African American writers didn't merely reject and move beyond traditional portrayals of the black past but rather actively engaged in a dynamic dialogue with white-authored versions of slavery and existing historiographical debates. The result is an ongoing cultural conversation that transcends both racial and disciplinary boundaries and is akin to the call-and-response style of African American gospel music. Ryan addresses in detail more than a dozen major American novels of slavery, from the first significant modern fiction about the institution -- Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (both published in 1936) -- to recent noteworthy novels on the topic -- Edward P. Jones's The Known World and Valerie Martin's Property (both published in 2003). His insistence upon the necessity of interpreting novels about the past directly in relation to specific historical scholarship makes Calls and Responses especially compelling. He reads Toni Morrison's Beloved not in opposition to a monolithic orthodoxy about slavery but in relation to specific arguments of controversial historian Stanley Elkins. Similarly, he analyzes William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner in terms of its rhetorical echoes of Frederick Douglass's famous autobiographical narrative. Ryan shows throughout Calls and Responses how a variety of novelists -- including Alex Haley, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, Margaret Walker, and Frances Gaither -- engage in a dynamic debate with each other and with such historians as Herbert Aptheker, Charles Joyner, Eugene and Elizabeth Genovese, and many others. A substantially new account of the development of American slavery fiction in the last century, Calls and Responses goes beyond merely exalting the expression of black voices and experiences and actually reconfigures the existing view of the American novel of slavery.

Though declared a piece of property by the US Supreme Court, Dred Scott insisted on telling his own story, on speaking freely. That was his freedom, and he didn't require a court to help him find it. Speak Right On explores the story of Dred Scott and the history of slavery that has changed our cultural landscape. From the eastern coast of Virginia to the farthest reaches of the US frontier, from house slave to field hand to surgeon's assistant, from boy to man, from young love to family life, from enslavement to freedom, this is an epic story of dignity and determination. "He who does his best for his own time, lives for all times." (Igbo proverb)

This edited collection is the first volume solely dedicated to research on Johann Gottfried Herder’s understanding of history, time, and temporalities. Although his ideas on time mark an important transition period that advanced the emergence of the modern world, scholars have rarely addressed Herder’s temporalities. In eight chapters, the volume examines and illuminates Herder’s conception of human freedom in connection with time; the importance of the concept of forces (Kräfte) for a dynamic ontology; human beings’ sensuous experience of inner and external temporality; Herder’s conception of Bildung, speculations on extra-terrestrial beings and on different perceptions of time; the mythological figure Nemesis and Herder’s view of the past and the future; the temporal dimension in Herder’s aesthetics; and Herder’s biblical studies in relationship to divine infinitude and human temporality. The volume concludes by outlining the influence of Herder’s understanding of time on following generations of thinkers. Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder is ideal for scholars, graduates, and postgraduates interested in Herder’s metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of history, as well as any scholar concerned with eighteenth-century concepts of time and the emergence of the modern world at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

This book examines two venerable cultures, art and technology, and uses the young "interdiscipline" of cognitive history combined with case studies of both ancient and modern artifacts to explore, and unveil, some of the bridges by which this reconciliation of two seemingly distant and oppositional cultures can be effected. Art and technology are commonly regarded as oppositional. While both are concerned with made things – artifacts – and both have their origins in pre-literate antiquity, the primary purposes they are intended for are quite distinct: the artifacts of technology serve utilitarian purposes while those of art serve affective needs. This opposition between art and technology, notably argued by such scholars as Lewis Mumford and George Kubler is challenged in this book. For, when we consider art and technology as creative phenomena, then many significant, interesting, and often subtle commonalities emerge whereby a reconciliation – a unity – of these two great cultures seems possible. This book utilizes case studies of both ancient and modern artifacts – ranging from the Nataraja sculpture of ancient India, a great astronomical clock of ancient China, and Japanese Samurai swordmaking, through Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance paintings of Europe to English Elizabethan machinery to the French Impressionists to modernist concrete structures and paintings in both East and West. This book will be of interest to students and professional scholars interested in the histories of art and technology, cultural history, and creativity studies.