John Sekora and Darwin Turner examine the content and structure of African-American slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and explain why these narratives merit scholarly and popular attention. They speak about the distribution of slave narratives, the composition of their reading audience, and their effects on readers, highlighting their novelistic qualities and suggesting that the narratives were a significant factor in swaying public opinion on the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. They note that American historians between 1870 and 1940 largely ignored slave narratives as documentation, which leads Sekora and Turner to address the idea of intentional exclusion and the consequent absence of historical awareness of the horrors of slavery.
At the time of this interview, Sekora, a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1982-83), was professor of English at North Carolina Central University. Turner, a trustee of the Center, was professor of English and chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa.
This edition of Soundings was conducted by Wayne J. Pond.
