Harriet Tubman: A Narrative of African Agency from Enslavement to the National Association for Colored Women

Abstract

The aim of this critical interpretive work is to demonstrate the leadership, guidance, and guardianship of Harriet Tubman as factual productions of historical memory as a soldier, Underground Railroad conductor, organization founder, and Women’s rights campaigner. Thus, this study is a meta-interpretation and historical narrative account based on a montage of common facts about Tubman’s life as re-examined in an Africological frame. By surveying the historical and social data related to Tubman’s life this work lays the ground for an authentic account of the role Harriet Tubman played as an agent, in the Afrocentric sense, as she carried forward her self-given obligations to liberate her people. Using many of the commonly known experiences of Tubman’s life I applied cosmological, epistemological, aesthetics, and axiological canons to reveal the critical core of an interpretive memorial narrative of Tubman as a social movement leader.