“I Felt So Tall Within”: Anthropology in Slave Narratives

“What does it mean to be human in the face of slavery?” I will examine three autobiographical documents from African-American slaves of the 18th/19th century (Sojourner Truth, Victoria Albert, and Frederick Douglass) and ask: do they allow for new insight into anthropology? Slaves are able to be human in the face of physical and ideological denial of their humanity. Humans can separate their bodily conditions from themselves. Deprivations of all kinds show, paradoxically, what is essential to human beings: in this study, religion, name, and resistance. I will also show to what extent René Girard’s anthropology applies to the structure of slavery.