Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2017
Published In
African American Review
Abstract
This essay examines the musical score included at the end of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), a setting of a song called “Roaring River” that Northup earlier recounted enslaved people singing as they patted juba. I argue that “Roaring River” stages questions that the narrative itself cannot ask about how to represent the experience of slavery once one is outside of it. In particular, it asks how to love what’s made in the shadow of slavery—the intimacies forged, and especially the music borne of them.
Recommended Citation
Lara Langer Cohen.
(2017).
"Solomon Northup’s Singing Book".
African American Review.
Volume 50,
Issue 3.
259-272.
DOI: 10.1353/afa.2017.0032
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit/334
Comments
This work is freely available courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Press.