Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the [American] Civil War".
The Wind Done Gone (2001) is the first novel written by Alice Randall. It is a historical novel that tells an alternative account of the story in the American novel Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell. While the story of Gone with the Wind focuses on the life of the daughter of a wealthy slave owner, Scarlett O'Hara, The Wind Done Gone tells the story of the life of slaves, Cynara, an enslaved woman during the same time period and events.
A quilombo ; from the Kimbundu word kilombo, lit. 'war camp') is a Brazilian hinterland settlement founded by people of African origin, and others sometimes called Carabali. Most of the inhabitants of quilombos, called quilombolas, were maroons, a term for escaped slaves.
Zumbi, also known as Zumbi dos Palmares, was a Brazilian quilombola leader and one of the pioneers of resistance to slavery of Africans by the Portuguese in colonial Brazil. He was also the last of the kings of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who liberated themselves from enslavement in the present-day state of Alagoas, Brazil. He is revered in Afro-Brazilian culture as a symbol of African freedom.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Escrava Isaura is a 1976 Brazilian telenovela produced by TV Globo, originally broadcast between 11 October 1976 and 5 February 1977. Based on the 1865 novel of the same name by 19th century abolitionist writer Bernardo Guimarães, it tells the story of the struggles of Isaura, a white-skinned slave, to find happiness during the Brazilian Empire. It starred Lucélia Santos in the title role and Rubens de Falco as slave owner Leôncio Almeida, the main antagonist. It was adapted by Gilberto Braga and directed by Herval Rossano and Milton Gonçalves, running 100 episodes.
Nganga Nzumba was the first leader of the massive runaway slave settlement of Quilombo dos Palmares, or Angola Janga, in the present-day state of Alagoas, Brazil. Zumba was enslaved and escaped bondage on a sugar plantation and eventually rose to the position of highest authority within the kingdom of Palmares, and the corresponding title of Ganga Zumba.
Aunt Phillis's Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is by Mary Henderson Eastman is a plantation fiction novel, and is perhaps the most read anti-Tom novel in American literature. It was published by Lippincott, Grambo & Co. of Philadelphia in 1852 as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published earlier that year. The novel sold 20,000–30,000 copies, far fewer than Stowe's novel, but still a strong commercial success and bestseller. Based on her growing up in Warrenton, Virginia, of an elite planter family, Eastman portrays plantation owners and slaves as mutually respectful, kind, and happy beings.
Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses.
Jubilee (1966) is a historical novel written by Margaret Walker, which focuses on the story of a biracial slave during the American Civil War. It is set in Georgia and later in various parts of Alabama in the mid-19th century before, during, and after the Civil War.
Dandara was an Afro-Brazilian warrior of the colonial period of Brazil and was part of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who freed themselves from enslavement, in the present-day state of Alagoas. After being arrested on February 6, 1694, she committed suicide, refusing to return to a life of slavery. She is a mysterious figure today, because not much is known about her life. Most of the stories about her are varied and disconnected. She and her husband Zumbi dos Palmares, the last king of the Quilombo dos Palmares, had three children.
Slavery in Brazil began long before the first Portuguese settlement. Later, colonists were heavily dependent on indigenous labor during the initial phases of settlement to maintain the subsistence economy, and natives were often captured by expeditions of bandeirantes. The importation of African slaves began midway through the 16th century, but the enslavement of indigenous peoples continued well into the 17th and 18th centuries. Europeans and Chinese were also enslaved.
Gayl Carolyn Jones is an American writer from Lexington, Kentucky. She is recognized as a key figure in 20th-century African-American literature.
The Salt Roads is a novel by Canadian-Jamaican writer Nalo Hopkinson, published in 2003. It has been categorized as historical fiction, speculative fiction, science fiction, and magical realism.
Maria Firmina dos Reis was a Brazilian author. She is considered Brazil's first black female novelist. In 1859, she published her first book Úrsula, which is considered the first Brazilian abolitionist novel. The book tells the story of a love triangle, in which the system of slavery is put into question.
Slavery in Latin America was an economic and social institution that existed in Latin America before the colonial era until its legal abolition in the newly independent states during the 19th century. However, it continued illegally in some regions into the 20th century. Slavery in Latin America began in the pre-colonial period when indigenous civilizations, including the Maya and Aztec, enslaved captives taken in war. After the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese, of the nearly 12 million slaves that were shipped across the Atlantic, over 4 million enslaved Africans were brought to Latin America. Roughly 3.5 million of those slaves were brought to Brazil.
Corregidora (1975) is a fiction novel written by Gayl Jones set in Kentucky in the late 1940s. The novel centers around Ursa Corregidora, who was recently hospitalized after an accident involving a flight of stairs. The first three sections of the novel follow Ursa through her recovery, her changing relationships, and her profession as a blues singer. The final two sections of Corregidora flash forward to 1969 when Mutt returns. Jones uses a fragmented style of writing to incorporate the Corregidora family history of trauma into Ursa's present narrative. Overall, Corregidora considers difficult themes of generational trauma, preservation of memory, domestic and sexual violence, and womanhood and motherhood. Literary critics have highly regarded Jones' writing in this novel.
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South is a nonfiction history book by Stephanie Jones-Rogers. They Were Her Property is "the first extensive study of the role of Southern white women in the plantation economy and slave-market system" and disputes conventional wisdom that white women played a passive or minimal role in slaveholding. It was published by Yale University Press and released on February 19, 2019. For the book Jones-Rogers received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians.
Yara Rodrigues Fowler is a British novelist of Brazilian origin. She was nominated for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award, and she was also named by the Financial Times as one of “the planet’s 30 most exciting young people”. In 2023, she was named by Granta Magazine in their decennial list of best young British novelists.
