Harriet Jacobs

That's in 1859.

1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by another African-American author, Harriet Jacobs, has the word nigga in the text 27 times, twice uttered by black characters.

And so one of the instances she says the young girl was fleeing, escaping her white pursuers, escaped, and she said, whew, this nigga was too cute for him this time.

And referring to herself.

And makes us at home with our whole lineage.

She has been doing this deep research on Harriet Jacobs and created a beautiful pilgrimage for so many of us to actually see the place that Harriet Jacobs escaped from, but also the lengths that she went to in order to create homefulness and freedom on her own terms.

Yeah.

And when I'm growing through something challenging, sometimes even Michelle is like we can call each other and, you know, tap into, you know, our spiritual superpowers.

You see this book right here? Okay.

This is Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs.

Harriet Jacobs.

Now, this is a slave narrative.

It's an antebellum slave narrative.

It falls under the category of slave narrative.

in which a former slave and escaped slave, Harriet Jacobs, describes her experiences in slavery.

Another one of my favorite books, this book here is Cultural Interpretation, Reorienting New Testament Criticism.

And so what I started looking for was a way to theorize or a set of tools that we could offer that would help people to breed the rape subject back into the text, right? And I looked for authors and artists who were doing that work.

And so it's very different when you read, you know, even someone like Fanon, right, who in The Wretch of the Earth has so many examples, right, of men who had partners who were raped or sexually assaulted, right? And we never hear, though, the stories of what that was like for those survivors, or even the fact that people like to use the metaphor, the rape of the African continent, right? And so we hear that often symbolic language when it comes to sexual violence, which is puzzling when you consider how frequently we have theorized violence in the field of Black Studies, right? So that was, you know, and it was a constant that I noted across these different context and cultures and i think that you know it was african-american literature that also helped me to see that too right harriet jacobs the life of a slave girl i think is one of the most obvious examples in terms of how the violence of slavery gets rendered in relation to sexual violence um for the first time so i think the comp so to me the combination feels very organic and um not at all you know not at all curious right i think it just i think it makes sense For me, and that's always how I teach, too.

So I teach a class called Gender and Black World Literature.

And I love teaching this class because it allows me to bring my students, you know, an author.

If you're in London, you're in New York.

If you're in Boston, why return? And John Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs' brother, really thinks hard about this.

And he has a conversation.

He was serving his master on a trip to New York.