Bonus: Listening Hard for Their Voices
Henry Louis Gates discusses slave narratives—what they’ve taught us and why scholars used to ignore them.
Listen & Subscribe
Choose your preferred player:
Apple Podcasts
Get Your Slate Plus Podcast
If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support.
Listen on your computer:
Apple Podcasts will only work on MacOS operating systems since Catalina. We do not support Android apps on desktop at this time.
Listen on your device:RECOMMENDED
These links will only work if you're on the device you listen to podcasts on.
Set up manually:
Episode Notes
In this bonus edition of the History of American Slavery, special guest Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. joins hosts Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion to discuss slave narratives. Dr.
Gates recounts his own experience as a graduate student in the 1970s, when many historians were only beginning to accept the veracity and legitimacy of firsthand accounts of slavery. He also talks about how slave narratives influenced contemporary black literature and about whether using the accounts of exceptional individuals might distort our understanding of what an average enslaved person experienced.
Our guest this episode:
Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an Alphonse Fletcher university professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
