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In 1841, Solomon Northup was kidnapped by slave traders, and shipped to New Orleans where he was sold to a planter in Louisiana. He was held in the Red River region of Louisiana by several different owners for 12 years, mostly in Avoyelles Parish, and eventually regained his freedom on January 3, 1853. Returning to his family in New York, he became active in abolitionism. He published an account of his experiences in Twelve Years a Slave in his first year of freedom. He lectured on behalf of the abolitionist movement, giving more than two dozen speeches throughout New England, to build momentum against slavery. He disappeared in 1857. The details of his death have never been documented (Net 1).
Twelve Years a Slave is a book of memoir.Twelve Years a Slave is unusual not because it is considered as a well-balanced explanation of slavery, narrating many of its horrors but also discussing aspects of plantation life that made slavery more tolerable. The narrative is noted most often for its value of detail parts, many of which were easily verified by public records and eyewitness accounts. Northup's memoir was adapted and produced as the 1984 PBS television movie Solomon Northup's Odyssey, and the 2013 feature film twelve Years a Slave. The latter won an Academy Award in 2014 for Best Picture.
Northup was one of the few free black people to regain freedom after being sold into slavery. His observation supported his analysis of Southern life and critique of slavery. This consideration enabled a public response to the narrative as an anti-slavery document of great historical worth. Because Northup's experiences were both sensational and true, the narrative enjoyed an immediate commercial and critical success. Its initial release and subsequent reprints sold over thirty thousand copies, and the narrative was favorably compared with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin by critics and reviewers.
Northup's full and descriptive account has been used by numerous historians researching slavery. His description of the “Yellow House” (also known as “The Williams Slave Pen”), in view of the Capitol, has helped researchers document the history of slavery in the District of Columbia ( Washington Times, October 20, 2013).
Although Northup was educated, Twelve Years a Slave was written with David Wilson serving as Northup's amanuensis. The prose style of Northup's account is attributed to Wilson, but the narrative is considered to be Northup's own experience. However, some scholars queries that the memoir does not fit the standard format of the narrative genre. Because Northup was assisted in the writing by David Wilson, some believed he would have biased the material.
What attracts the public in this novel most is Northup’s vivid descriptions of nineteenth-century cotton production and sugar manufacturing, which can be seen as amazingly detailed historical gifts to scholars of the antebellum era, and they provide revealing texture to the brutal and onerous labor involved on Southern plantations. Northup’s narrative is generally considered an outstanding historical reminiscences surpassing many other materials in the role of reflecting the true history, and it is no less an account of the physical horror beyond the bloodstained gate of Southern slavery than others in the genre.
In China, more and more scholars begin to focus on the racial problem and the relationship between the white and the black. From their views, we can get an impression from different aspects. This essay aims to analyze how the mighty white culture invades the vulnerable black culture under the theory of postcolonialism, which surely helps us understand Solomon Northup and his touching experience. The analysis will mainly develop in terms of culture inferiority, mental distortion and victimization of black woman.
2 Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline featuring methods of intellectual discourse that analyze, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism, to the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers for the economic exploitation of the native people and their land. Drawing from postmodern schools of thought, postcolonial studies analyze the politics of knowledge (creation, control, and distribution) by analyzing the functional relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism — the how and the why of an imperial regime's representations (social, political, cultural) of the imperial colonizer and of the colonized people (Net 2).