Re/reading Violence and Resistance in Black Women’s Slave Testimonios

Abstract

Transatlantic slave trade and slavery was a common phenomenon witnessed by the world in human history which led to the subjugation and oppression of black Africans for many centuries. Black slave women were the worst sufferers of slavery as they were triply oppressed and endured violence in many forms. To study different facets and forms of violence-physical and psychological violence, social coercion, and implicit violence, and black slave women’s strategies of resistance to it, the present paper critically examines and analyses slave narratives of three black slave women as testimonios. Analysis of Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince (1831) discusses the concept of physical and psychological violence, its impact on the lives of black slave women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the West Indies, and Mary Prince’s struggle to seek freedom from her cruel slave-owner by approaching Anti-Slavery society in England. Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) depicts her life journey as a black slave girl from North Carolina from a happy childhood through disturbing girlhood to struggling motherhood and then to an activist in the light of the concept of social coercion. Critical examination of Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story: Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold (1898) seeks to uncover the struggle of Kate Drumgoold who strives to achieve a sense of ‘victorhood’ by following the path of Evangelical Christianity with a strong faith in God before and after the Civil War era in the United States of America.