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

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.221

Keywords:

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

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“.

Author Biography

Paula von Gleich, University of Bremen

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.

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Published

2015-05-18

How to Cite

von Gleich, Paula. “African American Narratives of Captivity and Fugitivity: Developing Post-Slavery Questions for Angela Davis: An Autobiography”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, May 2015, doi:10.5283/copas.221.

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 1 (2015)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.