Ein afro-amerikanisches Literaturgenre? Versuch einer historischen Neuinterpretation
The author takes as a starting point Eugene D. Genovese's thesis that up until the middle of the last century, two different and opposite social systems had formed in the United States. The unavoidable, violent collision which resulted between the capitalistically dominated Northern industrial class, and the pre-capitalistic agricultural system of the South, was substantially accelerated via the militant anti-slavery agitation of the (primarily white) abolitionists. The abolitionists had a double historical function: they served as the spear head of Northern capital interests in pre-civil war days, and secondly, they bound the blacks with the Northern goal, "promoting" them from the plantation slave system to the capitalistic wage exploitation system. This latter process occured due to the abolitionists´ success in enlisting the available and developing Northern black leadership elite in its cause.
The result was an unequal, since unbalanced, coalition of interests between a ruling and an oppressed class, against another ruling class. It is at exactly this point of intersection where "Slave Narratives" finds its place in the literary genre.
From the beginning, this literary genre of political advertising propaganda for the black-white situation was used to produce a calculated effect in the white middle class. White is therefore also the style of "Slave Narratives". The Narratives entirely fulfill the ruling white middle class norms of average taste, which occasionally appear grotesque to the modern reader. In contrast to Janheinz Jahn, however, the author expresses the viewpoint, that it is not a case of censorship and malicious suppression of African stylistic elements. Due to the historical circumstances, a forced attention to the reading public and its norms resulted, and was readily accepted by black story tellers and authors, because they strove in this very direction.