This article examines how slave narratives construct and interrogate white authority, arguing that these texts represent domination not primarily as individual cruelty or moral failure but as a structural and institutional system of power. Through comparative close reading of narratives by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, the study demonstrates that white figures consistently appear as masters, traders, religious authorities, legal officials, and agents of the state whose power is legitimized through law, capitalism, Christianity, and governance. White authority emerges as routinized, procedural, and morally normalized rather than exceptional or aberrant. The article further argues that this structural critique is inseparable from narrative strategy. Writing under conditions of surveillance, mediation, and rhetorical constraint, enslaved and formerly enslaved authors deploy restraint, irony, documentation, silence, and selective confrontation to expose domination without forfeiting credibility. Narrative form thus functions as an analytical and political intervention rather than a neutral vehicle of testimony. Finally, the article situates slave narratives within a broader critique of Western modernity, showing how capitalism, legal neutrality, moral discourse, and state power function as afterlives of white authority beyond formal emancipation. By reading slave narratives as analytical texts rather than solely autobiographical accounts, the study repositions them as central contributions to the intellectual history of power, modernity, and racial hierarchy.

Authors:
Hasan Alfaify, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Hasan Alfaify is a faculty member at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His specialization is Arabic literature and criticism, with a focus on international travel writing. He received his PhD in 2014 from the University of Leeds, UK.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hasan-alfaify-2b235355/

Additional website of interest
https://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/ar/halfaify/blogs

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