A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Johannesburg, 2017 / Set within a revisionist and feminist context, this thesis seeks to draw parallels in the autobiographical texts of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) written by an African American ex-enslaved and Schizophrene (2011) penned by Bhanu Kapil, a British born Asian American, a descendant of a generation that live (d) through/with ‘what happened in a particular country on a particular day in August 14th 1947’ (Quaid). These literary representations will constitute the corpus of this research paper as it attempts to examine how these autobiographies draw attention to and break the notion of prevailing dominant geographies of oppression. In both texts, the authors juxtapose appropriation and hegemony with an alternative literary geographic narrative that seeks to recuperate the liminal (black) body and psyche. This research paper will seek to explore the multiple and interrelated ways in which both authors employ certain strategic mechanisms to re-appropriate tools of social power, thus exposing the frailties of their respective oppressive histories by disrupting their continued, albeit imagined stronghold on them. In employing their autobiographies as anthropological arsenals, these authors seem to demonstrate the manner in which history has attempted through its numerous sites of oppression not only to construct black victims and mere black bodies but also to un-write and evacuate its untidiness. These autobiographies will be employed to reconstruct and re-imagine the authors but symbolically the collective black body as more than objects but rather as humans with subjectivities and self-assertion. The paper further seeks to understand how these autobiographies tend to a vicious past of slavery and partition and how they translate these memories, remembering the depth of their experiences whilst also being haunted by their contemporary echoes. An accent will be given to the ambivalence, perversions and anxieties of these autobiographies. / XL2018

This thesis considers past autobiographical theory and questions whether it addresses the autobiography of the female writer. Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Margaret Sanger, and Maxine Hong Kingston are examined to reveal their polyvocality, use of the autobiographical "I", and rhetorical strategies maintained in order to create a close relationship with the reader. Particular attention is paid to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and Sidonie Smith's autobiographical "I."

It is the purpose of this thesis to present the research, planning, and actual production procedures of the play entitled Harriet, as written by Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements. This is the production which was originally done by Gilbert Miller at Henry Miller's Theatre in 1943 with Miss Helen Hayes in the title role.

in English The aim of this MA thesis is to bring new perspectives on the genre of the African-American slave narrative. Therefore, its wider historical, socio-political and gender contexts are considered and the circumstances surrounding its development and current criticism are briefly outlined. The point of departure is a discussion of definitions that vary among the scholars who select different criteria for the subject of definition. The existing diversity of the texts and voices is discussed in connection to Moses Grandy's Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America. Grandy's narrative, an account of the maritime slave life, is analyzed. Its traditional, uniform narrative structures are juxtaposed with passages where some aspects of his masculine identity, problematized by the institution of slavery, can be traced. Ultimately, the thesis attempts to show that while the conventionalized framework pre-defining the narrative outline and themes is delineated by James Olney, any generally recognized definition of the genre does not exist. As a result of that conclusion, the genre is defined in the scope of this thesis. After the major characteristics of the genre are discussed and the definition of the African- American slave narrative is put forward, more...

An exploration of Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing as viewed through the lens of performance studies and domesticity. Previous tales of fallen women, both in novels and operatic form, deprived the coquette of the agency to change her societally determined route of personal destruction as previously shown in the studies of Catherine Clément. Stowe's unique tale of a French coquette overturns the typical plot of the fallen woman, as demonstrated in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, by giving the coquette agency to redeem herself through key performative, domestic and, according to Judith Butler, transformative acts. Such treatment of this character made Stowe a forerunner in sexual equality.

This thesis seeks to document the life and work of veteran Durban trade unionist Harriet Bolton, with a particular focus on the years from 1944 to 1974. Harriet Bolton lived and worked through many of the crucial developments in South Africa’s labour history, and her personal history is closely entwined with this broader history. Her recorded memories of her years as a trade unionist offer a unique ‘way in’ to revisiting South Africa’s labour history and particularly the critical period of Durban’s early 1970s. Harriet’s testimony, gathered through a series of interviews, forms a core narrative throughout the thesis. However, archive and newspaper material provide detailed contextualisation for the interviews and opportunity to gain some perspective on questions of memory and of Harriet’s own relationship with history. Her recorded memories of these years substantially concern her experience as a trade unionist, but also as a working woman who was a wife and mother, later a widow as well as an engaged citizen of Durban society through her involvement in community organisations and welfare groups. As such, deeper insight into what it meant to be a working woman of her generation is gained. An important component of the thesis is a consideration of the history and politics of the Garment Workers Industrial Union (Natal) and its workers. The union was founded by Harriet’s husband Jimmy Bolton, and was for forty years closely associated with the name and legacy of the Boltons. I examine Harriet’s leadership of this union in the context of the shifting demographics of the union, and a changed political and economic landscape in South Africa. This thesis is also concerned with the role that the Trade Union Council of South Africa played during the period under consideration. Harriet’s relationship with TUCSA and her experience as a white woman trade unionist organising black trade unions ‘within’ the structures of this organisation provide the historian with a unique perspective on TUCSA’s somewhat under-researched history. Harriet’s role as a trade unionist during the tumultuous and critical period of the early 1970s, and a consideration of her contribution to the emerging non-racial trade union movement, is an important component of the thesis. The years both pre and post the 1973 strike wave are revisited through Harriet’s lens. Insights in to the question of women’s roles and contribution to South Africa’s labour movement are generated through gaining an understanding of Harriet’s perspectives. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010. / Directed by Mary Ellis Gibson; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jul. 14, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-253).

The aim of this thesis is to provide an introduction to the work of writer and journalist Harriet Ward, resident in the Eastern Cape from 1842 to 1848. She was a prolific correspondent to various periodicals published both in South Africa and in London. It would be true to say, to judge from the evidence, that she fulfilled a need felt by the British public for information on life and events in South Africa, and that she became the trusted guide of the middle-class reader. Her range covers reports from the frontiers of war, journalistic articles, memoirs, short stories, novels, autobiography, and editions of other writers' work. After the publication of her articles on the Seventh Frontier War (1846-7), she was recognised and respected as a commentator on the situation at the Eastern Cape, an unusual role for a woman at this time. She was also amongst the foremost victorian women writers published from the early eighteen forties until the end of the eighteen-fifties. Harriet Ward has left a vivid historical and sociological account of the Cape frontier, and her observations and judgements provide a hitherto virtually unknown perspective on an important part of South African history and letters. What makes her even more interesting, as this study seeks to show, is that she was far from conventional in her response to her new environment, both as as a woman and as a representative of a colonialist power. The record she has left of her thoughts on the people, landscape and situations of the time has the capacity to surprise the post-colonial literary critic and historian. Her struggle to find a discursive mode in which to express her consciousness of the oppression, patriarchal and colonial, of the marginalised, whether woman, indigene, Afrikaner, or creole, reveals a significantly transgressive or subversive response to the issues of the day. In re-discovering Harriet Ward, we are forced to reassess our assumptions regarding the period of colonial history to which she was a witness.

This essay examines Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl from the perspective of resistance theory. The essay uses the analytical framework created by Anna Johansson and Stellan Vinthagen in Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance': A Transdisciplinary Approach (2020) to concretize and understand different resistance methods and how black women resisted while navigating in society as slaves and as mothers. Resistance theory and methodology is a newer research area in literature studies, and this study attempts to add to that research field to broaden the understanding of Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography from a resistance perspective point of view. Johansson and Vinthagen’s analytical framework uses four different aspects to capture conceptual and situational combinations of everyday resistance and relationships existing between agents and powerholders. This study finds that motherhood and communal resistance motivate and influence Jacobs's will to continue fighting for liberty and explains how Jacobs’s everyday resistance actions create a feeling of meaning and agency in her life.