Analysis of the Racial Discourse and Gender Oppression in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

This study examines the discourse of race and slavery in a seminal work by Harriet Jacobs entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, focusing on how the text critiques the intersections of race, gender, and power in nineteenth-century American society. Through an African-American analysis of Harriet Jacobs’s personal narrative, the present study highlights the racial and gendered oppression that African-American women endured under slavery. Themes such as sexual exploitation, social humiliation, and the disintegration of family structures are emphasized within the context of the slave system. By analyzing Jacobs’s resistance to inhumane systems of racial and sexual domination, the current study demonstrates how her narrative contests racist and sexist ideologies. Furthermore, the text foregrounds motherhood as both a locus of suffering and a site of resistance for enslaved women. In doing so, it situates Jacobs’s work as a vital intervention in both abolitionist discourse and early feminist thought.

کلیدواژه ها:

Female Resistance ، Racism ، Female Authority ، Slave Narrative ، Harriet Jacobs ، Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl