| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative. By Michael A. Chaney. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. xiv, 254 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-253-34944-6.)

Popular representations of slaves among both abolitionists and apologists evoked a tangle of conflicting identifications for ex-slave authors. The widespread emblems of the supplicant slave, the ragtag runaway, and the abused slave woman suggested a closed set of choices for antebellum identity: either as white/–master/abuser/father/voyeur/reader or as black/slave/victim/mother/object/brute. Michael A. Chaney argues that as ex-slave authors tenuously inhabited both of those contrary positions, they found them intolerable and engineered ways of disembodying and disconnecting the conventions. Through tiny narrative shocks, they revealed to their audience its own expectations and thereby worked to undo the mass of stereotypes informing those expectations.

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