| comment |
In writing of the autobiographical acts of southern slaves, Houston A. Baker, Jr. described a process in which slaves began to talk and to write about themselves not as property but as human. The process is one of creating a self out of "nothingness" as Baker characterized it. Slaves could neither talk nor write about themselves except as it was done by the slaveowner. And in that sense, slaves did not exist. Existence, or being, came about only when slaves could begin to imagine for themselves a separate being from the one created for them by the slaveowner and to find the words to talk about themselves in this new way.
|
