Black Sites of Speculation: A Case for Theorizing Black Childhood as a Subject in Black Adult Narratives

Abstract

Scholars studying black girls’ histories in the US have identified two particular challenges: the dearth of sources, and black girls’ exclusion from the categories of childhood and girlhood as generally defined in American historical sources. In this chapter, the author pushes back in an effort to find enslaved girlhoods through new approaches. While Owens recognizes the extreme brutality and objectification that the slave regime imposed on enslaved children, she contends that scholars must engage existing sources, especially slave narratives, critically and creatively, to read them for their evidence about black childhood and youth. Focusing on Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Owens demonstrates her method, interpreting the text as a “site of speculation.” Owens demonstrates that Jacobs humanizes enslaved black girls by illuminating three stages of enslaved girlhood. Further, Jacobs’s stages of enslaved girlhood suggest that black women understood their slave narratives as ideal sites for theorizing their own childhood in retrospect, while also situating black girls within larger discourses of abolition and women’s rights.