– Please consider Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Girl. Critically think about this narrative as a historical text and consider what it teaches us about slavery, engendering slavery, violence against women, and abolition of slavery. Please be sure to give specific examples from the Narrative. Please use Saidiya Hartman’s “Seduction…”, and recall Davis’ “Black Women Role…” essay, to consider Jacob’s work please.

– Here are some questions to consider: How did slave codes and slave law effect Harriet Jacob’s opinions and choices? How does Hartman define and consider rape and the threat of rape under slavery?How do these definitions and considerations specifically affect Harriet Jacobs? How does Harman de fine “seduction,” in the context of slavery and slave law, and the legal cases she reviews? How does Hartman consider the ways in which Harriet Jacobs subverts the slaveholders meaning of seduction? What does Jacobs mean by the “loophole of retreat”? What is she describing as that which is “akin to freedom?” How does Jacob assert had own agency? How she re-define virtue from the slave woman’s point of view?What do you think of the choices Jacobs made? What do you see as the double binds of her choices? How does she help her readers at the time to develop a broader, deeper understanding of slavery? and the ownership of human beings? Who do you think she considered her major audience? How is her narrative a call for the abolition of slavery.?

*The questions above are some questions you can think/write about! You do not need to finish every single questions!

*Connect some Saidiya Hartman’s work and Angela Davis’s ideas to Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Girl!

Thank you