Where "Barracoon" Fits in the Long Legacy of Slave Narratives

Where "Barracoon" Fits in the Long Legacy of Slave NarrativesTop of Mind with Julie Rose • Season 1, Episode 860, Segment 3

Jul 20, 2018 • 28m

Guests: Matthew Mason, PhD, Professor of History, Brigham Young University; Kristin L. Matthews, PhD, Professor of English, Brigham Young University The new book “Barracoon” tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who was kidnapped from his village in Africa and sold into slavery in Alabama. It was written by Zora Neale Hurston – the famous ethnographer and Harlem Renaissance novelist – but has only just been published posthumously. How does “Barracoon” fit in with the other slave narratives that shape our understanding of this time period?

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Guest: Deborah G. Plant, PhD, Literary Critic, Editor of “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’” written by Zora Neale Hurston During the mid-1800s in America, memoirs written by formerly enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup were best-selling books. A new slave narrative has just been published. “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’” was written by ethnographer and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, based on her interviews with Cudjo Lewis. When they spoke in 1927, Lewis was 86 and one of the last people alive in America to have come across the Atlantic on a slave ship.