Paper short abstract:

This texts examines some expressions of Black, Afro-Atlantic female bodies, stemming from the narratives by enslaved women or by daughters of slaves, who used them as means of self-representation: Mary Prince, Harriet A. Jocobs, Esperança Garcia and particularly Sojourner Truth and Maria Firminia dos Reis.

Paper long abstract:

The preset text aims at examining the expressions of women who were excluded from history and from the literary field, particularly those produced between the XVIII and the XIX century, through theoretical tools that combine Literary Studies, Atlantic History Studies and Cultural Studies. The main focus of this research is the discourse by women coming from the African diaspora and by their descendants, starting with a closer look to the expression of Black female bodies such as Mary Prince, Harriet A. Jocobs, Esperança Garcia and particularly Sojourner Truth and Maria Firminia dos Reis – enslaved women or daughters of slaves who learned to read and write, and found, through this, a means of self-representation. To this effect, I seek to reflect on subaltern subjects stemming from their narratives, having as referential the two levels of expression mentioned by Gayatri Spivak: the expression through symbolic/artistic products, and the political expression. Through a laborious process of self-representation, these Black women re-invent themselves and stir the discussion on themes such as new subjectivities, movements of plural bodies, power and violence within the strategies of representation and self-representation. Hence, the intention is to trigger a debate about the practices and expressions that are handled from a certain space, that of the Black enslaved woman, offering an overview on the negotiations carried out around their rights, through narratives that circulate in different languages and in different areas of the Black Atlantic, also highlighting the features that they share according to a rule that transcends borders, societies and the specificities of cultures.