Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Neo-slave narrative'

Il Regno Unito si presenta oggi come una realtà multiculturale in cui la diversità è apparentemente più tollerata che in passato; tuttavia, quest’ultima è ancora fortemente temuta e discriminata. Purtroppo, le tensioni e le contraddizioni che il paese presenta oggi, sono l’eredità del passato coloniale e della schiavitù transatlantica: la schiavitù rappresenta, infatti, un fenomeno centrale nella storia inglese, eppure essa sembra essere stata rimossa dalla memoria collettiva. Tale amnesia storica è stata denunciata da scrittori e storici contemporanei quali Andrea Levy, James Walvin, Herbert S. Klein, William D. Phillips e Caryl Phillips tra gli altri. Infatti, negli ultimi decenni, artisti e accademici hanno mostrato un crescente interesse nei confronti della schiavitù, come testimonia la pubblicazione di opere letterarie incentrate su tale tematica. Con l’obiettivo di prendere parte a questo nuovo dibattito e di contribuire alla rivalutazione dell’importanza storica della schiavitù, la mia tesi riflette sulla schiavitù transatlantica attraverso l’analisi di opere letterarie. In particolare, la tesi segue l’evoluzione del genere letterario delle Slave Narratives per dimostrare che questo genere letterario, che è stato a lungo considerato come esclusivamente afroamericano, ha invece un ruolo fondamentale nel contesto inglese. Inizialmente il genere letterario era utilizzato per sostenere la campagna abolizionista, infatti diffondeva importanti informazioni sulla schiavitù e, presentando la prospettiva degli schiavi, li rendeva più umani agli occhi della popolazione bianca e creava empatia nei loro confronti. Oggi, l’evoluzione di questo genere è usata per ristabilire il valore storico delle prime Slave Narratives e per creare connessioni ideali tra la schiavitù e le attuali forme di discriminazione razziale. La tesi adotta la prospettiva teorica fornita dai Trauma Studies, infatti, la schiavitù viene concepita come trauma individuale e collettivo che ha ancora necessità di essere affrontato e superato: le rappresentazioni artistiche della schiavitù possono essere lette come un metodo per affrontare tale trauma e ricontestualizzarlo nella memoria storica; così le rappresentazioni letterarie inglese della schiavitù possono essere analizzate come tentativi di superare il trauma provocato dalla schiavitù. Queste rappresentazioni non sono interessanti solamente a livello letterario, quindi, la mia tesi mira a sottolineare l’importanza delle Slave Narratives e delle Neo-Slave Narratives nel contesto della riflessione contemporanea sul razzismo e sull’eredità dell’imperialismo. Concludendo, la mia tesi evidenzia che il Regno Unito che conosciamo oggi è una conseguenza del periodo coloniale e del coinvolgimento nella tratta degli schiavi e che la situazione attuale richiede una riflessione sul passato. Attraverso l’analisi letteraria delle Slave Narratives e delle evoluzioni contemporanee, la tesi propone nuove prospettive sulla rappresentazione della schiavitù nel contesto britannico. Inoltre, attraverso l’analisi delle Neo-Slave Narratives contemporanee, la tesi rivela l’intento degli autori di condannare il pregiudizio razziale. Le conseguenze dell’eredità del periodo coloniale sono più che mai evidenti e la popolazione nera chiede con forza di trovare posto nella storia, come dimostra il movimento Black Lives Matter. In definitiva, la tesi dimostra che la letteratura e l’arte possono essere utili per ricordare il passato e affrontare il trauma della schiavitù.
Britain appears today as a multicultural nation, however, racial diversity, apparently more tolerated than in the past, is still problematic and feared; indeed, contemporary racial tensions and contradictions are the living legacy of the country’s colonial past and involvement with slavery. Clearly, slavery played a key role in British history, and yet it seems to have been largely forgotten by the collective British memory; the British amnesia is indicted by both writers and historians such as Andrea Levy, James Walvin, Herbert S. Klein, William D. Phillips and Caryl Phillips. However, this situation is slowly changing: recently scholars’ and artists’ interest in slavery has grown, as testified by the publication of literary works dealing with the subject of slavery. By reflecting on the heritage of Transatlantic Slavery, my dissertation aims to participate in the recent academic debate over slavery and in the process of reevaluation of slavery’s legacies in the contemporary period. My dissertation analyzes the literary representations of slavery, following the evolutions of the literary genre of the Slave Narrative, and my aim is to demonstrate that this literary genre, which has long been considered as an exclusively African American genre, has played a key role for Britain. This literary genre was initially used to support the abolitionist campaign by raising awareness about slavery and creating empathy towards the slaves; however, it is now used to both reestablish the historical value of the early Slave Narratives, and to metaphorically create connections between Transatlantic Slavery and the present days racial discriminations. My dissertation follows the perspective provided by the Trauma Studies, indeed, I conceive Transatlantic Slavery as both individual and collective trauma, for both the white and the black population, this trauma still needs to be tackled: artistic representations of slavery can be considered as a way to bring it to light, and find slavery’s place in human history and memory; thus, the literary representations of slavery produced in in Britain can be read as attempts to overcome the trauma of slavery. Not only the creation of literary representations of collective traumas such as the Slave Narrative, and its evolution are interesting on a literary level, but they are also considered to have the same therapeutic function as speaking about traumatic events, thus, my dissertation aims to highlight the Slave and Neo-Slave Narratives importance in the context of contemporary reflections on racism and on the legacy of imperialism. To conclude, by means of tracing back Britain’s connections with slavery, my dissertation shows that contemporary Britain has been shaped by the slave trade and its contemporary situation is urging to remember this past and reflect on it. Through the literary analysis of both British Slave and Neo-Slave Narratives the dissertation adds new perspectives on the representation of slavery in the Britain. Moreover, through the analysis of contemporary Neo-Slave Narratives, this dissertation reveals the contemporary authors’ aim to condemn the racial prejudice and structural inequalities which originates in the colonial period and is still present. The consequences of this amnesia are more than ever visible, and the black world population is asking for their repositioning in history, the recent movement Black Lives Matter is an example of that. My dissertation ultimately shows that literature and art can represent a way to remember the past, deal with the trauma of slavery, and reposition the black population in Britain.

Il Regno Unito si presenta oggi come una realtà multiculturale in cui la diversità è apparentemente più tollerata che in passato; tuttavia, quest’ultima è ancora fortemente temuta e discriminata. Purtroppo, le tensioni e le contraddizioni che il paese presenta oggi, sono l’eredità del passato coloniale e della schiavitù transatlantica: la schiavitù rappresenta, infatti, un fenomeno centrale nella storia inglese, eppure essa sembra essere stata rimossa dalla memoria collettiva. Tale amnesia storica è stata denunciata da scrittori e storici contemporanei quali Andrea Levy, James Walvin, Herbert S. Klein, William D. Phillips e Caryl Phillips tra gli altri. Infatti, negli ultimi decenni, artisti e accademici hanno mostrato un crescente interesse nei confronti della schiavitù, come testimonia la pubblicazione di opere letterarie incentrate su tale tematica. Con l’obiettivo di prendere parte a questo nuovo dibattito e di contribuire alla rivalutazione dell’importanza storica della schiavitù, la mia tesi riflette sulla schiavitù transatlantica attraverso l’analisi di opere letterarie. In particolare, la tesi segue l’evoluzione del genere letterario delle Slave Narratives per dimostrare che questo genere letterario, che è stato a lungo considerato come esclusivamente afroamericano, ha invece un ruolo fondamentale nel contesto inglese. Inizialmente il genere letterario era utilizzato per sostenere la campagna abolizionista, infatti diffondeva importanti informazioni sulla schiavitù e, presentando la prospettiva degli schiavi, li rendeva più umani agli occhi della popolazione bianca e creava empatia nei loro confronti. Oggi, l’evoluzione di questo genere è usata per ristabilire il valore storico delle prime Slave Narratives e per creare connessioni ideali tra la schiavitù e le attuali forme di discriminazione razziale. La tesi adotta la prospettiva teorica fornita dai Trauma Studies, infatti, la schiavitù viene concepita come trauma individuale e collettivo che ha ancora necessità di essere affrontato e superato: le rappresentazioni artistiche della schiavitù possono essere lette come un metodo per affrontare tale trauma e ricontestualizzarlo nella memoria storica; così le rappresentazioni letterarie inglese della schiavitù possono essere analizzate come tentativi di superare il trauma provocato dalla schiavitù. Queste rappresentazioni non sono interessanti solamente a livello letterario, quindi, la mia tesi mira a sottolineare l’importanza delle Slave Narratives e delle Neo-Slave Narratives nel contesto della riflessione contemporanea sul razzismo e sull’eredità dell’imperialismo. Concludendo, la mia tesi evidenzia che il Regno Unito che conosciamo oggi è una conseguenza del periodo coloniale e del coinvolgimento nella tratta degli schiavi e che la situazione attuale richiede una riflessione sul passato. Attraverso l’analisi letteraria delle Slave Narratives e delle evoluzioni contemporanee, la tesi propone nuove prospettive sulla rappresentazione della schiavitù nel contesto britannico. Inoltre, attraverso l’analisi delle Neo-Slave Narratives contemporanee, la tesi rivela l’intento degli autori di condannare il pregiudizio razziale. Le conseguenze dell’eredità del periodo coloniale sono più che mai evidenti e la popolazione nera chiede con forza di trovare posto nella storia, come dimostra il movimento Black Lives Matter. In definitiva, la tesi dimostra che la letteratura e l’arte possono essere utili per ricordare il passato e affrontare il trauma della schiavitù.
Britain appears today as a multicultural nation, however, racial diversity, apparently more tolerated than in the past, is still problematic and feared; indeed, contemporary racial tensions and contradictions are the living legacy of the country’s colonial past and involvement with slavery. Clearly, slavery played a key role in British history, and yet it seems to have been largely forgotten by the collective British memory; the British amnesia is indicted by both writers and historians such as Andrea Levy, James Walvin, Herbert S. Klein, William D. Phillips and Caryl Phillips. However, this situation is slowly changing: recently scholars’ and artists’ interest in slavery has grown, as testified by the publication of literary works dealing with the subject of slavery. By reflecting on the heritage of Transatlantic Slavery, my dissertation aims to participate in the recent academic debate over slavery and in the process of reevaluation of slavery’s legacies in the contemporary period. My dissertation analyzes the literary representations of slavery, following the evolutions of the literary genre of the Slave Narrative, and my aim is to demonstrate that this literary genre, which has long been considered as an exclusively African American genre, has played a key role for Britain. This literary genre was initially used to support the abolitionist campaign by raising awareness about slavery and creating empathy towards the slaves; however, it is now used to both reestablish the historical value of the early Slave Narratives, and to metaphorically create connections between Transatlantic Slavery and the present days racial discriminations. My dissertation follows the perspective provided by the Trauma Studies, indeed, I conceive Transatlantic Slavery as both individual and collective trauma, for both the white and the black population, this trauma still needs to be tackled: artistic representations of slavery can be considered as a way to bring it to light, and find slavery’s place in human history and memory; thus, the literary representations of slavery produced in in Britain can be read as attempts to overcome the trauma of slavery. Not only the creation of literary representations of collective traumas such as the Slave Narrative, and its evolution are interesting on a literary level, but they are also considered to have the same therapeutic function as speaking about traumatic events, thus, my dissertation aims to highlight the Slave and Neo-Slave Narratives importance in the context of contemporary reflections on racism and on the legacy of imperialism. To conclude, by means of tracing back Britain’s connections with slavery, my dissertation shows that contemporary Britain has been shaped by the slave trade and its contemporary situation is urging to remember this past and reflect on it. Through the literary analysis of both British Slave and Neo-Slave Narratives the dissertation adds new perspectives on the representation of slavery in the Britain. Moreover, through the analysis of contemporary Neo-Slave Narratives, this dissertation reveals the contemporary authors’ aim to condemn the racial prejudice and structural inequalities which originates in the colonial period and is still present. The consequences of this amnesia are more than ever visible, and the black world population is asking for their repositioning in history, the recent movement Black Lives Matter is an example of that. My dissertation ultimately shows that literature and art can represent a way to remember the past, deal with the trauma of slavery, and reposition the black population in Britain.

The classic slave narrative recounted a fugitive slave’s personal story condemning slavery and hence working towards abolition. The neo-slave narrative underlines the slave’s historical legacy by unveiling the past through foregrounding African Atlantic experiences in an attempt to create a critical historiography of the Black Atlantic. The neo-slave narrative is a genre that emerged following World War II and presents us with a dialogue combining the history of 1970 - 2000. In this thesis I seek to explore how the contemporary counter-part of the classic slave narrative draws, reflects or diverges from the general conventions of its predecessor. I argue that by scrutinizing our notion of truth, the neo-slave narrative remains a relevant, important witness to the history of slavery as well as to today’s still racialized society. The historiographic metafiction of the neo-slave narrative rewrites history with the goal of digesting the past and ultimately leading to future reconciliation.

Toni Morrison chose to revisit the neo-slave narrative genre twenty-five years after the publication of Beloved with A Mercy in 2008. With these two texts, Morrison offers her readers one story that shows the descent into slavery and one that shows progression towards freedom. The purpose of this thesis is to place Morrison’s two neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy, next to one another in order to better understand the journey to freedom through self-love. This work examines the concept of self-love and the necessary components—maternal nurturance, ancestral connection, and communal interaction—that must come together to help Morrison’s characters learn to love and see themselves as their “own best thing.” The repercussions that self-love’s absence has for both individual characters and their larger communities is also discussed and illustrated by the struggles of Florens in A Mercy and Sethe in Beloved.

This dissertation explores the unhomely nature of the slave system as experienced by fugitive and captive slaves within slave and neo-slave narratives. The purpose of this project is to broaden the discourse of migration narratives set during the antebellum period. I argue that the unhomely manifests through corporeal, psychological, historical, and geographical descriptions found within each narrative and it is through these manifestations that a broader discourse of identity can be generated. I turn to four slave and neo-slave narratives for this dissertation: Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

In this paper, Kait Spong examines alternative practices of mothering that are strategic nature, heavily analyzing Patricia Hill Collins’ concepts of “othermothering” and “preservative love” as applied to Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved and Harriet Jacob’s 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Using literary analysis as a vehicle, Spong then applies these West African notions of motherhood to a modern context by evaluating contemporary social movements such as Black Lives Matter where black mothers have played a prominent role in making public statements against systemic issues such as police brutality, heightened surveillance, and the prison industrial complex.

"(Un)Conventional Coupling" initiates a more expansive critical conversation on the contemporary neo-slave narrative. The dissertation's central argument is that authors of neo-slave narratives rely on the politicized theme of interracial coupling to both reimagine history and explore the possibility of social transformation. to establish a framework for my particular focus on interracial intimacy, this study extends the boundaries of the genre by adopting Paul Gilroy's theory of the black Atlantic. This theoretical paradigm serves as a provisional framework for both accommodating and analyzing the complexity of authorship, nationality, and influence within this large body of work.;This dissertation interprets neo-slave narratives' preoccupation with interracial sex and intimacy as a compelling reason to situate the critical analysis of the genre within a more expansive context. The prevalence of discourses and representations of interracial desire, sexuality, and intimacy within the genre reveals a preoccupation with cross-cultural connection. Additionally, authors of neo-slave narratives rely on black-white coupling to explore the concepts and realities of "race." Indeed, interracial intimacy provides an effective mechanism for this literature to invigorate a dialogue about "race" and why it still matters in the twenty-first century.;Adopting the term (un)conventional coupling to destabilize racialized ideologies of sexuality and desire, this project reads black-white coupling as a trope that represents a complex and conflicted sense of transracial intimacy in these novels. This study analyzes the representation of transracial intimacy in three different novels: Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, and Valerie Martin's Property. Each chapter demonstrates the different ways in which these authors rely on the trope of black-white coupling to construct the double-edged critique of black Atlantic political culture. First, this trope exposes a hidden history in order to reveal a more comprehensive and nuanced version of slavery and its myriad legacies. Secondly, representations of interracial intimacy allow authors to posit utopian possibilities out of relations of difference by creating a space for transformative acts of social reinvention.

This thesis examines the ancestor figure in African American women writers’ neoslave narratives. Drawing on black feminist, critical race and whiteness studies and trauma theory, the thesis closely reads neo-slave narratives by Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Phyllis Alesia Perry. The thesis aims to reconsider the ancestor figure by extending the definition of the ancestor as predecessor to include additional figurative and literal means used to invoke the ancestral past of enslavement. The thesis argues that the diverse ancestral figures in these novels demonstrate the prevailing effects of slavery on contemporary subjects, attest to the difficulties of historicising past oppressions and challenge post-racial discourses. Chapter 1 analyses Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966), identifying it as an important prerequisite for subsequent neo-slave narratives. The chapter aims to offer a new reading of the novel by situating it within a black feminist ideological framework. Taking into account the novel’s social and political context, the chapter suggests that the ancestral figures or elderly members of the slave community function as means of resistance, access to personal and collective history and contribute to the self-constitution of the protagonist. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Walker’s novel fulfils a politically engaged function of inscribing the black female subject into discussions on the legacy of slavery and drawing attention to the particularity of black women’s experiences. Chapter 2 examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1978), featuring a contemporary black woman’s return to the antebellum past and her discovery of a white slaveholding ancestor. The chapter introduces the term “displacement” to explore the transformative effects of shifting positionalities and destabilisation of contemporary frames of reference. The chapter suggests that the novel challenges idealised portrayals of a slave community and expresses scepticism regarding its own premise of fictionally reimagining slavery. With its inconclusive ending, Kindred ultimately illustrates how whiteness and dominant versions of history prevail in the seemingly progressive present. Chapter 3 discusses Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975) and its subversion of the matrilineal model of tradition by reading the maternal ancestor’s narrative as oppressive, limiting and psychologically burdening. The chapter introduces the term “ancestral subtext” in order to identify the ways in which ancestral narratives of enslavement serve as subtexts to the descendants’ lives and constrict their subjectivities. The chapter argues that the ancestral subtexts frame contemporary practices, inform the notion of selfhood and attest to the reproduction of past violence in the present. Chapter 4 deals with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998) exploring complex ancestral figures as survivors of the Middle Passage and their connection to Africa as an affective site of identity reclamation. The chapter identifies the role the quilt, the skill of quilting and their metaphorical potential as symbolic means of communicating ancestral trauma and conveying multivoiced “ancestral articulations”. The chapter suggests that the project of healing and recovering the self in relation to ancestral enslavement are premised on re-connecting with African cultural contexts and an intergenerational exchange of the culturally specific skill of quilting.

This literary/historical novel details the life of African-American Deputy US Marshal Bass Reeves between the years 1838-1862 and 1883-1884. One plotline depicts Reeves’s youth as a slave, including his service as a body servant to a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War. Another plotline depicts him years later, after Emancipation, at the height of his deputy career, when he has become the most feared, most successful lawman in Indian Territory, the largest federal jurisdiction in American history and the most dangerous part of the Old West. A preface explores the uniqueness of this project’s historical relevance and literary positioning as a neo-slave narrative, and addresses a few liberties that I take with the historical record.

This study argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Since their emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary narratives of slavery have challenged the traditional historiography of American slavery, radically revising how we remember that "peculiar institution." These fictional works disrupt the form and content of slave autobiography, suggesting that the conventions of Enlightenment rationalism to which antebellum texts were bound could not adequately represent the experience of enslavement. Scholarship on the genre has thus tended to focus on the way it undermines the rationalizing impulse of Enlightenment discourse, which in the U.S. as well as in Europe was determined by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. But while the scholarly attention to Protestantism has yielded valuable insights regarding the contemporary slave narrative’s critique of the "unreason" of slavery, it cannot account for the striking presence of the Catholic themes and images at the margins of these texts that this dissertation uncovers, nor for the way that the religion is imaginatively linked to radical moments of historical revision. I argue that Catholicism undergirds the imaginative ways the genre expresses the inexpressible horror of enslavement and the legacy of those horrors in the present day. Because of its historical association with irrationality, superstition, and an aberrant supernaturalism, Catholicism is thus marshaled—with justified political hesitation—in the contemporary slave narrative as an oppositional category of discourse through which African American authors break with the historiographical methods of the Enlightenment and, in particular, with the rationalization of slavery characterizing the period. Chapter One analyzes two novels by Toni Morrison, Beloved and A Mercy, and her concept of "rememory." In Chapter Two, I examine the trope of spirit possession in Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Leon Forrest’s Two Wings to Veil My Face. My final two chapters address temporal disjuncture in contemporary narratives of slavery: Chapter Three comprises readings of Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, while in Chapter Four I focus on Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.
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This dissertation is a study of how slave rebellions continue to exert a profound political, affective and cultural influence on postcolonial writers. These writers claim histories and memories of such rebellions as strategic allegories, which enable both articulations of contemporary concerns about neocolonial and neoliberal forms of governmentality, as well as the resistances to such. Through an examination of texts by Ghanaian playwright Mohammed Ben Abdallah, Haitian poet and novelist Évelyne Trouillot, Canadian-Caribbean writer Dionne Brand, and Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, I argue that these narratives demonstrate that our present moment of globalized capital and its accompanying forms of expropriation, though seemingly disembodied and all-pervasive, bear suggestive resemblances to the ethical and political questions raised by the global machinery of slavery. Memories of slave rebellions operate as vital forms of oppositional narratives in these texts, providing writers with an imaginary of a foundational class struggle which threatens the existing status quo. While such narrativizations remobilize the cultural memories of earlier radicalisms, they also point out the failures of such radical imaginaries to move beyond a privileging of certain forms of heroic and heteronormative revolutionary black masculinity. By foregrounding women within the spaces of the slave rebellions, these texts de-masculinize the dominant masculinisms of slave rebellion narratives of previous eras. In doing so, they complicate the notion of racialized class struggles as theaters of supremacy between two classes of men, and challenges the reduction of enslaved women into passive allegories of family, community and nation.
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