„I will recover my Voice as soon as I am able“ – Alteritätskonstruktionen und diskursive Grenzüberschreitungen in karibischen Slave narratives des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts

• Maximilian Herford

As a configuration of literary self-expression and/or historical source material so-called Slave narratives have largely been analysed as autobiographical works composed by more or less authoritative subjects. This limited approach excludes a whole body of texts that, due to their somewhat precarious epistemological status, do not fit in this often invoked outline. In contrast, it is argued here that the investigation of overtly fabricated or at least highly mediated first-person accounts, too, can produce valuable insights relating to contemporary perceptions of both the transatlantic slave trade and the cultural conditioning of slaves. Based on exemplary readings of three Caribbean testimonies of the early 1700s, this article focuses on the rhetorical strategies employed within such ventriloquized Slave narratives. By establishing pro-slavery and abolitionist instru men - talisations of slave voices these complex textual arrangements not only signify ideological and identity-political attempts to purport an ‚Other‘ but also stage various discursive transgressions and polyphonic ambivalences, which sporadically indicate ‚vocal‘ forms of subversive reappropriations.