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When Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation of African American slaves on January 1, 1863, he legally abolished the peculiar institution of slavery that had shaped the lives of many Americans ever since its introduction to what is now the U.S.A. in 1619. While slavery had characterized European American relations ever since the New World’s "discovery" by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the seventeenth century witnessed the beginning of a systematic expansion and exploitation of the triangular trade, including the slave trade. In this proseminar, we will look at some examples of early slavery in Central and North America and will then focus on late eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century voices representing slavery in poetry, slave narratives, autobiographies, and novels. With some of these voices, we will travel on the Underground Railroad all the way into Canada. We will discuss key issues and techniques (such as genre conventions) in literary, autobiographical, and historiographical depictions of slavery and their contribution to the creation of a collective as well as cultural memory.
Additional material will be available through the e-learning platform ILIAS at the beginning of the semester.
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