Date of Award
Fall 12-2012
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Program
History
Department
History
Major Professor
Mary Niall Mitchell
Second Advisor
Andrea Mosterman
Third Advisor
Michael Mizell-Nelson
Abstract
In 1936, Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) employees began interviewing formerly enslaved men and women, allowing them to speak publicly of their experiences under slavery. Defying racism and the repressions of Jim Crow, ex-slaves discussed intimate details of their lives. Many researchers considered these interviews unreliable, but if viewed through the lens of gender and analyzed using recent scholarship on slavery and sexuality, FWP interviews offer new insights into the lives of enslaved men and women. Using a small number of ex-slave interviews, most of them drawn from Louisiana, this thesis demonstrates the value of these oral histories for understanding the sexual lives of enslaved men and women. These interviews expose what we would otherwise have little access to: the centrality of struggles over enslaved people’s sexuality and reproduction to the experience of enslavement and the long-term effects of these struggles on the attitudes of slavery’s survivors.
Recommended Citation
Wartberg, Lynn Cowles, "“'They was Things Past the Tellin’: A Reconsideration of Sexuality and Memory in the Ex-Slave Narratives of the Federal Writers’ Project"" (2012). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 1575.
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1575
Rights
The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.