In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to Keith Michael Green who argue for broader and more complex approaches to writers’ strategies for recognizing the full personhood of African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. In the last fifteen to twenty years, hospitality theory has reshaped social science research, particularly around issues of race, immigration, and citizenship. In literary studies, scholars are only now beginning to mine the ways that theorists from diverse backgrounds—including continental philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas, womanist philosopher and theologian N. Lynne Westerfield, and post-colonial writers and scholars such as Tahar Ben Jelloun—can expand the reading of nineteenth century literature by examining the discourse and practice of hospitality. When host and guest meet at the threshold they must acknowledge the full personhood of the other; the relationship of hospitality is dependent on beginning in a state of equilibrium grounded in mutual respect. In this project I argue that because of the acknowledgement of mutual humanness required in acts of hospitality, hospitality functions as a humanizing narrative across the spectrum of antebellum black experience: slave and free, male and female, uneducated and highly educated. In chapter one, “Unmasking Southern Hospitality: Discursive Passing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” I examine Stowe’s use of a black fugitive slave host who behaves like a southern gentleman to undermine the ethos of southern honor culture and to disrupt the ideology that supports chattel slavery. In chapter two, “Transformative Hospitality and Interracial Education in Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” I examine how the race-centered scenes of hospitality in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends creates educational opportunities where northern racist ideology can be uncovered and rejected by white men and women living close to, but still outside, the free black community of Philadelphia. In the final chapter, “Slavery’s Subversion of Hospitality in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” I examine how Linda Brent’s engagement in acts of hospitality (both as guest and host) bring to light the warping influence of chattel slavery on hospitality in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In conclusion, my project reframes the practices of antebellum hospitality as yet another form of nonviolent everyday resistance to racist ideology rampant in both the North and the South. This project furthers the ways that American literature scholars understand active resistance to racial oppression in the nineteenth century, putting hospitality on an equal footing with other subversive practices, such as learning to read or racial passing.

Orientador: Sidney Chalhoub / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-26T05:27:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Facanha_Dayana_M.pdf: 1731704 bytes, checksum: a584536369156703ba35c89967d232a9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: Esta dissertação explora a relação entre O tronco do ipê, romance de José de Alencar, e a experiência política do romancista como deputado e ex-ministro da Justiça. Como a obra foi publicada no início de 1871, o intento da pesquisa foi estudar a experiência parlamentar que precedeu a produção do romance, em 1870. Como metodologia de pesquisa, fez-se o cotejo entre O tronco do ipê e os anais parlamentares de 1870, que, por sua vez, foram estudados em seu veículo original de publicação, as páginas do Jornal do Commercio. Com isso, buscava-se uma relação mais densa entre os debates e sua repercussão na imprensa, a procura de um contexto amplo no qual inserir a produção literária. A dissertação analisa a forma como as discussões em torno da exoneração de José de Alencar do cargo de ministro da Justiça afetaram a produção de O tronco do ipê, dentre outras obras publicadas a partir do final de 1870, bem como a crítica à política imperial inserida no romance. Nesse contexto, formula-se uma hipótese acerca do surgimento do pseudônimo Sênio. Além disso, principalmente, a dissertação examina a relação que o romance de Alencar estabelece com os debates em torno da emancipação escrava no início da década de 1870, assim como o sentido político da representação da escravidão e das personagens escravas em O tronco do ipê / Abstract: This dissertation explores the relations between O tronco do ipê, a novel by José de Alencar, and the political experience of the novelist as a congressman and as former State Minister. As the novel was published in the beginning of the year of 1871, the intention was to study the parliamentary experience which preceded the writing of the novel, in 1870. As a research method we confronted O tronco do ipê with the 1870 parliamentary annals, which, in their turn, were studied at their original context, in the pages of Jornal do Commercio. The aim was to search for a more complex dialogue between the parliamentary discourses and its reverberation in the press, looking for a wide context in which to situate the literary production. The dissertation studies the ways in which Alencar¿s political experiences affected the writing of O tronco do ipê, as well as the political criticism inserted in the book. In this context it formulates a hypothesis about the appearing of the pseudonym Sênio. Moreover, the dissertation analyses the relation that Alencar¿s novel develops with the political debates about the slave emancipation in the beginning of 1870¿s, as well as the political meanings of the representations of slavery and slave characters in O tronco do ipê / Mestrado / Historia Social / Mestra em História

This thesis is concerned with literature connected with the abolition of slavery in British colonies. The thesis will treat the topic of the abolitionist movement from the perspective of social, cultural and literary history from the beginnings until the abolition of slavery in British colonies in the Caribbean in 1833 with the Slavery Abolition Act. The thesis will focus on the discourse of race and slavery. The chosen authors represent different opinions and perspectives as the discussion will focus on sentimental poetry, travel writings as well as slave narratives. The chief aim is to identify and define the strategies of abolitionist discourse and the rhetorical practices which it employed especially in shaping the image of Africans and how the hegemonic discourse of sentimentalism influenced their writing. The first part of the thesis is concerned with establishing a theoretical background and the establishing of the literary traditions and customs of the eighteenth century, definition of the sentimental discourse and philosophies of the Enlightenment. This will be framed by a definition of Edward Said's "Orientalism" as well as Paul Gilroy's theory of the "Black Atlantic," which will enable us to define the space between Britain, Africa and the Caribbean, where the history of slavery of...

This dissertation interprets how two antebellum American works of fiction, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Martin R. Delany’s Blake, represent the relationship between conjuring and resistance to oppression. It is unclear how we should conceive of this relationship: on the one hand, historical slave conspiracies and revolts in the Atlantic world demonstrated the unequivocal power of conjuring for assembling collectives; on the other hand, many slaves who turned to conjuring to ease their suffering later dismissed the practice as nonsense in their autobiographies. My close-readings of these two texts are supported by a wide-range of historical and cultural materials, including the vast literature on conjuring, the Peruvian discourse on the saya y manto, and the discourse on fetishism. I conclude that acts of conjuring drive plot and explain a character’s actions or inactions under circumstances in which resistance to oppression involves obtaining or preserving freedom for presently or formerly enslaved people. In addition, this dissertation provides a method for reading conjuring in Benito Cereno and interprets a form of conjuring in Blake that readers have neglected.

Literary scholars have been examining and recreating the experiences of “bonded” female characters within Toni Morrison’s novels for decades. However, the distinct experiences of these enslaved women, that are also mothers have not been astutely examined by scholars and deserves more attention. My thesis fleshes out the characterization of several of Morrison’s bonded-mothers and identifies them as a part of a developing controlling image and theory, called the bondmother. Situating these characters within this category allows readers to trace their journeys towards freedom and personal redemption. This character tracing will occur by examining the following Toni Morrison novels: Beloved (1987) and Paradise (1997). In order to fully examine the experiences of these characters it will be necessary for me to expand the definition of bondage and mother. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Esta dissertação analisa as construções discursivas do trabalho livre e escravo na pela Mãe de José de Alencar publicada em 1860. A pesquisa foi predominantemente exploratória quanto ao seu objetivo, utilizou o método bibliográfico buscando nos textos de Marx, Engels, Freyre, Freitas, Fausto, Gorender, Costa, Ianni e outros autores o surgimento do trabalhador assalariado e indícios que levassem à compreensão sobre como se deu a passagem do trabalho escravo para o livre no Brasil do século XIX. A análise tem como corpus a pela Mãe, de José de Alencar, procurando levantar como o autor representa as relações de trabalho na segunda metade do século XIX e as possíveis inferências dessa representação. A partir da Análise Dialógica do Discurso (ADD), de Baktin e o Círculo, buscou-se compreender como são representadas no discurso literário teatral as relações entre senhores e escravos urbanos e entre as classes sociais que se reorganizam e os trabalhadores livres. Como resultado a pesquisa revelou como o autor inova ao trazer como protagonista uma escravizada durante a vigência da escravidão no país, mostrando que esta pode se colocar como uma trabalhadora livre, em suas falas, apesar de sua condição de escrava na pele e expõe no microcosmo da obra, como se constitui o trabalho escravo e livre na época. Mostra ainda o espanto diante da necessidade de mulheres pertencentes a estratos sociais mais favorecidos trabalharem. Alencar buscou construir em suas obras uma identidade para o país que se constituía, e denunciou as mazelas da escravidão em obras como Mãe e O Demônio Familiar (1857). Entretanto, a despeito de ter levado ao palco a escravidão, a invisibilidade dos escravos e seus descendentes permanece, ainda hoje, nos milhões de brasileiros negros e mulatos alijados de seus direitos. A pesquisa aponta a importância da redescoberta de obras como Mãe que mantém viva a memória da escravidão e que passados 129 anos de seu término oficial, seus efeitos ainda se fazem sentir, cabendo a cada brasileiro fazer uso de suas capacidades para escrever uma nova história para o trabalho neste país: trabalho livre e digno para cada habitante desta terra, independente da cor de sua pele ou condição social. / This dissertation analyses the discursive constructions of the free and enslaved work on José de Alencar’s play Mãe, published in 1860. The research was mainly exploratory when it came to its objectives and utilized the bibliographic method, searching on the texts of Marx, Engels, Freyre, Freitas, Fausto, Gorender, Costa, Ianni and other authors for the emergence of the salaried work and indications that led to comprehending how the transition from enslaved work to free work happened in Brazil in the XIX century. The analysis has as a corpus José de Alencar’s play Mãe, and it tries to raise how the author represents the work relations in the second half of the XIX century and the possible inferences of such representation. From Bakhtin and the Circle’s Dialogical Discourse Analysis (DDA), it is attempted to comprehend on the theatrical literary speech how it is represented the relations between master and slave and between the social classes that restructured themselves and the free workers. As a result, the research revealed how the author innovates by bringing as the main character a female slave, during the existence of slavery in the country, showing that she can be a free worker, in her lines, despite her condition of a slave on her skin and exposes on the work’s microcosm how it is constituted the free and enslaved work at the time. It also shows the astonishment before the need of higher-stratum-belonging women to work. Alencar attempted to build on his works an identity for the constituting country, and despite denouncing the badness of slavery on works such as Mãe e Demônio Familiar (1857), the invisibility of the slaves and their descendants remains in millions of black and mulatto Brazilians depleted from their rights. The research pointed out the importance of rediscovering works such as Mãe that do not allow us to forget that slavery happened and that 129 years since its official end, its effects are still felt, making it fitting that every Brazilian, making use of their own capacity, write a new history for work in this country: free and dignified work for every inhabitant in this land, independent of color of skin or social condition.

Dans l’Amérique et les Caraïbes des XIXe et XXe siècles, l’œuvre du poète national est au cœur d’un trafic d’images qui nourrit un lien social fragile dans un temps où les collectivités reposent moins sur un lien direct entre leurs membres que sur un lien imaginé. Prenant ses distances vis-à-vis des représentations en circulation à son époque, comme les représentations exotiques de la nature, le poète offre une vision démocratique ambitieuse pour l’avenir de la communauté à travers des images nouvelles du territoire, du peuple, de l’esclavage et de l’histoire. L’ethos auctorial encourage l’appropriation de ce discours par le lecteur en désignant le poète comme figure de référence. Mais c’est surtout à travers son procédé d’écriture qui met à mal les normes littéraires de son temps que celui-ci est à même d’influer sur la société. Plutôt qu’ils ne parviennent à saisir l’esprit de leur peuple, Whitman, Martí et Césaire participent par leur travail sur le fragment, les formes populaires ou le tremblement du sens à la création d’un devenir collectif. / In 19th and 20th centuries America and West Indies, the national poet’s works lay at the centre of a traffic of images. This traffic feeds the fragile social ties of young collectivities, at a time when communities are bound by imagination rather than by direct contact between their members. Distancing themselves from the representations of the community circulating at that time, like the exotic images of the New World’s nature, the poet offers an ambitious democratic vision for the future which is channeled through images of the territory, the people, slavery and history. The poet’s ethos encourages the reader to appropriate this discourse by presenting the author as a role model. However, it is mainly thanks to his style, at odds with the literary norms of his time, that the poet is able to act upon society. Whitman, Martí and Césaire do not so much contrive to capture their people’s spirit, as they participate through their work on the fragment, on popular poetical forms or on the destabilizing of meaning, in the creation of a common devenir.