Özet:

The article describes the “double passage” of millions of African people from freedom to America, and from America to freedom. Focusing on the role of sound in slave narrative, and in particular in slave narrative for performance (drama and music), the article will try to reach an understanding of the importance of sound in the construction of meaning, and in the fight for freedom in slave narrative. If slaves have in fact seen their freedom vanish through writing, it is often through the spoken word and through music that they have acquired a right to speak out and obtain freedom. The corpus analyzed includes Dion Boucicault's melodrama The Octoroon; or Life in Louisiana (1861), LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's play Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (1967), and Hannibal Lokumbe's oratorio African Portraits (1990), as well as Ouladah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), Octavia Butler's novel Kindred (1979), and Clarence Major's poem The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage (1994).

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