Creole Testimonies

This original study analyses the relationships among the socio-historical contexts, generic forms, and rhetorical strategies of British West Indian slave narratives (all of which are dictated, rather than self-written texts). Grounded by the syncretic theories of creolization and testimonio, as well as more flexible understandings of slave voice and slave narrative form, Nicole N. Aljoe breaks new ground by reading these dictated and often fragmentary narratives on their own terms as examples of 'creole testimony'. In addition to revealing the complex patterns of representation that developed out of the discontinuities and disjunctures that were inherent to British West Indian culture during the slave era, these 'creole testimonies' of slave life in the British West Indies illuminate the crucial hybrid foundations of the slave narrative genre and highlight the generic complexity of slave narratives circulating across the Black Atlantic.

Nicole N. Aljoe is an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University. Her research centers on eighteenth and nineteenth-century Black Atlantic literatures with a particular focus on the Caribbean.