Border Crossing in Slave Songs (original) (raw)

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Abstract

Slave songs were the slaves’ traveling shoes. This traveling across conceptual and material boundaries was often managed through the direct evocation of biblical narratives, allusions, and typology, through the use of ideas that reflected both African and Western Christian philosophical and theological traditions, and through processes of conceptual integration. By these means, the slave poets were able to cross a variety of borders as a transformative and liberating response to the linguistic, physical, religious, intellectual, and cultural constraints of their lives. Slave songs were a metaphorical freedom train. They became a conceptual space where the slaves were able to build a platform of poetic liberation in response to their radically constrained circumstances by means of the Bible, creative metaphors, and a new combination of African and Western Christian views of mind and spirit.

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