Slave narratives were one of the main forms of expression used by former African American slaves for denouncing the cruel nature of slavery. A key objective of these narratives was to elicit empathy from 19th-century readers, moving them emotionally and encouraging them to defend the plight of slaves. Despite being written centuries ago, our study investigates the impact that reading slave narratives can have on the empathy of contemporary readers, notably students at Université Joseph KI-ZERBO. This study draws simultaneously on Oatley et al. 's (2002; 2006; 2008;2013) theory of empathy as well as on Green et al.’s (2000) and Bal et al.’s (2013) theories of emotional transportation. The current research endeavors to discover whether readers become more inclined to empathy when reading about the atrocities depicted by Douglass in his 1845 slave narrative. An
excerpt from this narrative containing scenes of violence against slaves is read by a sample of 50 students. The tool used to measure results before and after reading is Davis’s Empathic Concern Scale. The students’ degree of emotional absorption in the chosen narrative is measured using Green et al.’s emotional absorption scale. The
analysis of the data provided allows our study to discover that reading Douglass’s slave narrative has a significant positive effect on the empathy of the readers studied. Readers’ engagement with slave narratives is therefore relevant in the present day, as it has great potential to stimulate empathy.
Keywords: Emotion, Empathy, Narratives, Slaves, Transportation.

Emotion, Empathy, Narratives, Slaves, Transportation