Research Focus Group Talk: Origin Story: The Narrative of James Williams and the Formation of the African American Slave Narrative

This talk provides a material history of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s first sponsored slave narrative, The Narrative of James Williams (1838), and illuminates how its publication and the controversy that surrounded it shaped the development of the genre as a whole.

Teresa Goddu is Associate Professor of English & American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (1997) and the forthcoming book, Selling Antislavery: U.S. Abolition and the Rise of Mass Media.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Slavery, Captivity, and the Meaning of Freedom RFG and the English Department’s American Cultures in Global Contexts Center