Introduction
A short introduction to the research project BIMAAR:
This interdisciplinary project studies transnational autobiographies by black authors in the Americas during the Age of Revolutions and its aftermath (1760-1860). During the period, large parts of the Americas gained their independence from the European colonial powers. Simultaneously, black-authored narrative texts emerged in the region. Among them, autobiographies played a key role in asserting black identities and agency.
The focuses on different forms of mobility black people exercised. It examines four types of black life narratives of the period in which spatial, social, and cultural mobilities played a role. They include slave narratives, Indian captivity narratives, memoirs of Christian missionaries, and memoirs-as-travelogues. As anglophone North American or Caribbean authors especially produced these text types, most texts studied here hail from these regions.
Click on the section titles below to get to the section pages:
ENTREPRENEURS’ AUTOBIOGRAPHIES