Institution Of Slavery

1. How do African American authors challenge the institution of slavery in various genres? What aspects of enslavement do they most consistently challenge and why? How do these different genres (like oratory, poetry, memoir, and fiction) differently approach the institution of slavery and critique it? How do African American critiques of slavery differ when considering the author’s gender? How do the African American critiques of slavery compare to the white critiques of slavery? For this essay use the following texts: Frederick Douglass’s “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July” and “The Heroic Slave,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Bury Me in a Free Land,” Harriet Jacobs’s selections from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Slave Singing at Midnight.”