Looking for the Slave's voice: Dictated Slave Narratives and their Amanuenses - Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Looking for the Slave's voice: Dictated Slave Narratives and their Amanuenses

Marie-Pierre Baduel
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Résumé

There is, in the English-speaking Atlantic world, a unique literary genre unknown to any other culture: the narratives of ex-slaves. However, defining slave narratives is not easy and researchers do not necessarily agree on the corpus. On the one hand, there are texts written by the ex-slaves themselves, very few of them because not many slaves knew how to write. On the other hand, there are dictated slave narratives, whose place in this particular genre is more problematic. Since they did not know how to read and write, they asked an amanuensis to do it for them and this transcription was more or less faithful to the dictation of the slave. This is the reason why they are sometimes considered as biographies. I decided to include them in my corpus of slave narratives but by doing so, I did not put aside the thorny issue of the amanuensis's influence on the text. Amanuenses cannot have been mere recording machines but I want to see if the slave's voice can nonetheless be heard. We will never know for certain to what extent what we are reading is a reflection of what the ex-slaves said but new tools such as textometry and authorship attribution can help us demonstrate that the slave's voice is present. I am presenting here a case study of three slave narratives which are said to have been transcribed by the same man. To this end, I used the IRaMuTeQ software (created by Pierre Ratinaud, LERASS) and all its functionalities to find differences between the narratives and the text the amanuensis wrote under his own name.
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Dates et versions

hal-04367618 , version 1 (30-12-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04367618 , version 1

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Marie-Pierre Baduel. Looking for the Slave's voice: Dictated Slave Narratives and their Amanuenses. Journées Internationales d'Analyse Statistique des Données Textuelles, 2020, Toulouse, France. ⟨hal-04367618⟩

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