Emerging Class Awareness

Abstract

Chapter 1 examines key terms pertaining to socioeconomic distinction, particularly “caste,” “status,” and “class,” as they apply to mid-century narratives. The chapter notes factors that differentiated the enslaved economically as well as socially, among them types of work, kinship, and connections to whites. It explains the importance of class awareness to the slave narrative and differentiates that awareness from standard ideas about class consciousness. Also discussed are commonalities of experience shared by most of the fifty-two African American slave narrators whose life stories are the focus of this book. Concluding the chapter is an overview of discourse involving class critique and social advancement among African Americans as articulated by black writers from David Walker to Martin R. Delany and Frederick Douglass. The widening range of class-inflected ideas expressed in mid-century narratives attests to an emerging class awareness in contemporary essays and journalism, as well as autobiography, by black Americans.