In:A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Madeleine Dobie, Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI] 2024
► pp. 307–323
Chapter 17The blood-stained-gate
An archive of emotion and authenticity in the new slave narrative
Published online: 12 December 2024
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxvi.17mur
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxvi.17mur
Abstract
This chapter suggests that the slave narrative employs metonymy as an archive of memory when authors are
unwilling or unable to articulate the experience of trauma explicitly. Drawing on Frederick Douglass’s use of the “blood-stained gate”
metaphor as a repository for his emotional suffering, it describes how blood serves as a metonymic vehicle for communicating
authenticity in narratives in which affective descriptions run counter to the ambitions of the genre. Ismael Beah’s A Long Way
Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) and Emmanuel Jal’s War Child (2008) present contrasting cases of blood’s capacity to serve as a repository for the emotional content of war. The trope of
blood is then is used a lens for understanding why audiences respond skeptically to slave narratives and suggests a less suspicious
reading practice among scholars and activists.
Article outline
- Aunt Hester’s blood
- Blood as metonymic archive for emotions
- The blood that binds
- The doubleness of blood for victim-perpetrators
- Convention and doubt
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