Abstract
In their quest for repossessing and perpetuating black Americans’ memory of their long-standing dispossession from slavery to post￾slavery America, slave narratives made a powerful depiction of this bitter experience. The current study highlights the basic features of such a dispossession as depicted in these slave narratives and deciphers the ways in which they have contributed to the writing of genuine black American memory. In this respect, Louis Rosenblatt’s
transactional reader-response theory has been used as a reading grid to address dispossession through slave narratives, which reveals Blacks’ dispossession took on religious, socio-emotional and intellectual features, and that slave narratives were efficient ramparts against the effacement of this painful event from black American collective
memory.

Slave narratives, dispossession, memory, repossession