| The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative | Ernest, John | | | | 2014 | http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199731480 | <p>The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative approaches
the history of slave testimony in three ways: by prioritizing the broad
tradition over individual authors; by representing interdisciplinary
approaches to slave narratives; and by highlighting emerging scholarship
on slave narratives, concerning both established debates over concerns
of authorship and agency, for example, and developing concerns like
ecocritical readings of slave narratives. Ultimately, the aim of the
Handbook is not to highlight the singularity of any particular account,
nor to comfortably locate slave narratives in traditional literary or
cultural history, but rather to faithfully represent a body of writing
and testimony that was designed to speak for the many, to represent the
unspeakable, and to account for the experience of enslaved and nominally
free communities. The Handbook is organized into six sections:
“Historical Fractures,” “Layered Testimonies,” “Textual Bindings,”
“Experience and Authority,” “Environments and Migrations,” and “Echoes
and Traces.” The Handbook’s contributing scholars address testimony
from a broad range of sources, including traditional archives, Works
Progress Administration (WPA), newspapers, diaries or memoirs, pension
records, and even the testimony suggested by traces in the landscape and
architecture of slave plantations. The reach of sources covered in the
Handbook is not exhaustive, but instead is intended to indicate the
broad range of sources from which testimony can be recovered. Other
chapters address matters of gender, sexuality, and community,
environmental concerns, legal contexts and implications, and
manifestations of slave testimony in visual and aural cultures. Many
essays work to locate African American slave narratives both
historically and geographically, through considerations of literary
history, through considerations of the geography covered by slave
narratives, and through hemispheric and transatlantic connections
central to understanding U.S. testimony. There are no chapters devoted
to major writers, since various resources already exist for that purpose
and since those writers emerge as central figures in many of the
essays. The purpose of all chapters in the Handbook is to account for
the conventional wisdom on the subject in the process of exploring
critical new directions for approaching these concerns. The Handbook’s
goal is to encourage research on a great number of understudied
narratives while demonstrating the rich complexity of this field of
study for those just entering it.</p> | jrernest | | |
| Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs | Ernest, John | | University of Iowa Press | Iowa City, IA | 2014 | http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2014-fall/douglass-his-own-time.htm | One of the most incredible stories in American history is that of Frederick Douglass, the man who escaped from slavery and rose to become one of the most celebrated and eloquent orators, writers, and public figures in the world. He first committed his story to writing in his 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Over the course of his life, he would expand on his story considerably, writing two other autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, as well as innumerable newspaper articles and editorials and orations.
As valuable as these writings are in illuminating the man, the story Douglass told in 1845 has become rather too easy to tell, obscuring as much as it reveals. Less a living presence than an inspiring tale, Frederick Douglass remains relatively unknown even to many of those who celebrate his achievements. Douglass in His Own Time offers an introduction to Douglass the man by those who knew him. The bookincludes a broad range of writings, some intended for public viewing and some private correspondence, all of which contend with the force of Douglass's tremendous power over the written and spoken word, his amazing presence before crowds, his ability to improvise, to entertain, to instruct, to inspire, indeed, to change lives through his eloquent appeals to righteous self-awareness and social justice. In approaching Douglass through the biographical sketches, memoirs, letters, editorials, and other articles about him, readers will encounter the complexity of a life lived on a very public stage, the story of an extraordinary black man in an insistently white world. | jrernest | | |
| My Southern Home: The South and Its People | Ernest, John | William Wells Brown | University of North Carolina Press | Chapel Hill, NC | 2011 | http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/10299.html | The culmination of William Wells Brown's long writing career, My Southern Home is the story of Brown's search for a home in a land of slavery and racism. Brown (1814-84), a prolific and celebrated abolitionist and writer often recognized as the first African American novelist for his Clotel (1853), was born enslaved in Kentucky and escaped to Ohio in 1834.
In this comprehensive edition, John Ernest acts as a surefooted guide to this seminal work, beginning with a substantial introduction placing Brown's life and work in cultural and historical context. Brown addresses from a post-emancipation vantage point his early experiences and understanding of the world of slavery and describes his travels through many southern states. The text itself is presented in its original form, while Ernest's annotations highlight its layered complexity and document the many instances in which Brown borrows from his own earlier writings and the writings of others to form an underlying dialogue. This edition sheds new light on Brown's literary craft and provides readers with the maps they need to follow Brown on his quest for home in the chaotic social landscape of American southern culture in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
| jrernest | | |
| A Nation Within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities Before the Civil War | Ernest, John | | Ivan R. Dee | Lanham, MD | 2011 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/nation-within-a-nation-john-ernest/1100219366 | John Ernest offers a comprehensive survey of the broad-ranging and influential African American organizations and networks formed in the North in the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War. He examines fraternal organizations, churches, conventions, mutual aid benefit and literary societies, educational organizations, newspapers, and magazines. Ernest argues these organizations demonstrate how African Americans self-definition was not solely determined by slavery as they tried to create organizations in the hope of creating a community. | jrernest | | |
| Hearts of Gold | Ernest, John | J. McHenry Jones | West Virginia University Press | | 2010 | http://wvupressonline.com/jones_hearts_of_gold_9781933202525 | <p>J. McHenry Jones’s <em>Hearts of Gold</em> is a gripping tale of
post–Civil War battles against racism and systemic injustice. Originally
published in 1896, this novel reveals an African American community of
individuals dedicated to education, journalism, fraternal organizations,
and tireless work serving the needs of those abandoned by the political
process of the white world. Jones challenges conventional wisdom by
addressing a range of subjects—from interracial relationships to forced
labor in coal mines—that virtually no other novelist of the time was
willing to approach. With the addition of an introduction and appendix,
this new edition reveals the difficult foundations upon which African
Americans built a platform to address injustice, generate opportunities,
and play a prominent role in American social, economic, and political
life.</p> | jrernest | | |
| Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History | Ernest, John | | University of North Carolina | Chapel Hill, NC | 2009 | http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1650 | What is African American about African American literature? Why identify it as a distinct tradition? John Ernest contends that too often scholars have relied on naïve concepts of race, superficial conceptions of African American history, and the marginalization of important strains of black scholarship. With this book, he creates a new and just retelling of African American literary history that neither ignores nor transcends racial history.
Ernest revisits the work of nineteenth-century writers and activists such as Henry "Box" Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, and Sojourner Truth, demonstrating that their concepts of justice were far more radical than those imagined by most white sympathizers. He sheds light on the process of reading, publishing, studying, and historicizing this work during the twentieth century. Looking ahead to the future of the field, Ernest offers new principles of justice that grant fragmented histories, partial recoveries, and still-unprinted texts the same value as canonized works. His proposal is both a historically informed critique of the field and an invigorating challenge to present and future scholars. | jrernest | | |
| Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, 1st ed. | Ernest, John | | University of North Carolina Press | Chapel Hill, NC | 2008 | http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1560 | It is the most celebrated escape in the history of American slavery. Henry Brown had himself sealed in a three-foot-by-two-foot box and shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, a twenty-seven-hour journey to freedom. In Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, Brown not only tells the story of his famed escape, but also recounts his later life as a black man making his way through white American and British culture. Most important, he paints a revealing portrait of the reality of slavery, of the wife and children sold away from him, the home to which he could not return, and his rejection of the slaveholders' religion--painful episodes that fueled his desire for freedom.
This edition comprises the most complete and faithful representation of Brown's life, fully annotated for the first time. John Ernest also provides an insightful introduction that places Brown's life in its historical setting and illuminates the challenges Brown faced in an often threatening world, both before and after his legendary escape. | jrernest | | |
| Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 | Ernest, John | | University of North Carolina Press | Chapel Hill, NC | 2004 | http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1295 | As the story of the United States was recorded in pages written by white historians, early-nineteenth-century African American writers faced the task of piecing together a counterhistory: an approach to history that would present both the necessity of and the means for the liberation of the oppressed. In Liberation Historiography, John Ernest demonstrates that African Americans created a body of writing in which the spiritual, the historical, and the political are inextricably connected. Their literature serves not only as historical recovery but also as historical intervention.
Ernest studies various cultural forms including orations, books, pamphlets, autobiographical narratives, and black press articles. He shows how writers such as Martin R. Delany, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs crafted their texts in order to resituate their readers in a newly envisioned community of faith and moral duty. Antebellum African American historical representation, Ernest concludes, was both a reading of source material on black lives and an unreading of white nationalist history through an act of moral imagination. | jrernest | | |
| The Escape; A Leap for Freedom | Ernest, John | William Wells Brown | University of Tennessee Press | | 2001 | http://utpress.org/title/the-escape/ | <p>A well-known
nineteenth-century abolitionist and former slave, William Wells Brown
was a prolific writer and lecturer who captivated audiences with
readings of his drama <em>The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom</em> (1858). The first published play by an African American writer, <em>The Escape</em>
explored the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions
between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. This
new volume presents the first-edition text of Brown’s play and features
an extensive introduction that establishes the work’s continuing
significance.</p><p><em>The Escape</em> centers on the attempted sexual violation of a
slave and involves many characters of mixed race, through which Brown
commented on such themes as moral decay, white racism, and black
self-determination. Rich in action and faithful in dialect, it raises
issues relating not only to race but also to gender by including
concepts of black and white masculinity and the culture of southern
white and enslaved women. It portrays a world in which slavery provided a
convenient means of distinguishing between the white North and the
white South, allowing northerners to express moral sentiments without
recognizing or addressing the racial prejudice pervasive among whites in
both regions.</p><p>John Ernest’s introductory essay balances the play’s historical and
literary contexts, including information on Brown and his career, as
well as on slavery, abolitionism, and sectional politics. It also
discusses the legends and realities of the Underground Railroad,
examines the role of antebellum performance art—including blackface
minstrelsy and stage versions of <em>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</em>—in the construction of race and national identity, and provides an introduction to theories of identity as performance.</p><p>A century and a half after its initial appearance, <em>The Escape</em>
remains essential reading for students of African American literature.
Ernest’s keen analysis of this classic play will enrich readers’
appreciation of both the drama itself and the era in which it appeared.</p><p>The Editor: John Ernest is an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and author of <em>Resistance
and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature:
Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper.</em></p> | jrernest | | |
| Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper | Ernest, John | | University Press of Mississippi | | 1995 | https://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Reformation-Nineteenth-Century-African-American-Literature/dp/1617034738/ref=dp_ob_title_bk | An examination of how six prominent African-American writers of the nineteenth century reconfigured a threatening world.<br> | jrernest | | |