African American Narratives of Captivity and Fugitivity: Developing Post-Slavery Questions for Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Paula von Gleich is a PhD candidate at the department of English Speaking Cultures at the University of Bremen and recipient of a PhD scholarship by the Evangelisches Studienwerk. The working title of her dissertation project is “The Black Border: Border Concepts in African American Narratives of Captivity and Fugitivity.” Paula is member of the ‘Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies’ and founding member as well as current spokesperson of the doctoral network ‘Postcolonial and Black Studies Perspectives in Cultural Analysis’ both at the University of Bremen. She studied the Bachelor program English-Speaking Cultures and Kulturwissenschaft and the master program Transnationale Literaturwissenschaft: Literatur, Theater und Film (transnational literary studies) in Bremen. Her broader research interests include African American and black diasporic literatures, critical race studies, and postcolonial and transnational literary studies.

African American Narratives of Captivity and Fugitivity: Developing Post-Slavery Questions for Angela Davis: An Autobiography

Paula von Gleich

Abstract

The paper raises theoretical questions for a ‘post-slavery’ approach to African American narratives of captivity and fugitivity out of an engagement with Black Studies perspectives on enslavement, confinement, and flight which theorize the structural position of Blacks as ‘captives,’ ‘fugitives,' and ‘slaves’ in—or rather outside of—U.S. American society. The questions are confronted with close readings of two passages from Angela Davis: An Autobiography.

Keywords

African American literature, afro-pessimism, Angela Davis, anti-blackness, flight, prison narrative

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5283/copas.221

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Postgraduate American Studies

ISSN: 1861-6127