Master narratives, identities, and the stories of former slaves / Jonathan Clifton, University of Valenciennes, Dorien Van De Mieroop, University of Leuven.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: identity, narrative and context -- The slave narratives: a historical background -- Narratives and the historical context of the interview: heroes and villains in narratives of law and order -- Different "slave-as-animal"-identities vis-�a-vis different "historical" and current dominant discourses -- The white supremacy master narrative as an oeuvre civilisatrice: navigating identities along the sameness-difference dimension -- An emic view on intertwined counter- and master-narratives of race, obedience, and religion -- Remembering and forgetting: master narratives and memories of violence -- Truth, falsehood, and master narratives: the case of Charlie Smith and the fritter tree -- Conclusions.

"This book ... analyzes the audio-recordings of the narratives of former slaves from the American South which are now publicly available on the Library of Congress website: Voices from the days of slavery. More specifically, this book analyses the identity work of these former slaves and considers how these identities are related to master narratives. The novelty of this book is that through using such a temporally diverse and relatively large corpus, we show how master narratives change according to both the zeitgeist of the here-and-now of the interview world and the historical period that is related in the there-and-then of the story world. Moreover, focusing on the active achievement of master narratives as socially-situated co-constructed discursive accomplishments we analyze how different, inherently unstable and even contradictory versions of master narratives are enacted."--Publisher's description.

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