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, a faculty member at King Saud University (KSU), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. My specialization is Arabic literature and criticism, with a focus on international travel writing. I completed my PhD in the United Kingdom, receiving my degree from the University of Leeds in 2014.
I have been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at King Saud University since 2014. My publications include:
1. My PhD dissertation, "The Image of (The Other) in Arabic Travel Writing in the 17th Century AD".

2. A published article titled: "The Arab Woman in the Mirror of the English Woman: Writings of the Travelers Anne Blunt and Freya Stark about the Arabian Peninsula".

3. "The Image of the European 'Other' in the Travelogue of Abdullah Al-Jumah - (Tales of a Saudi in Europe [Hakaya Saudi fi 'Uwruba]): A Critical Perspective".

4. I worked as head of the team that compiled the Khawlani lexicon, published in Riyadh under the auspices of the Saudi Ministry of Culture in 2025. This lexicon contains a selection of vocabulary from Faifi Language and neighboring tribes in southern Saudi Arabia.

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