The Power of Neo-Slave Fiction and Public History
From Slavery to the Enslaved
Grant Rodwell
- 220 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
The Power of Neo-Slave Fiction and Public History
From Slavery to the Enslaved
Grant Rodwell
About This Book
Professional historians, schools, colleges and universities are not alone in shaping higher-order understanding of history. The central thesis of this book is the belief historical fiction in text and film shape attitudes towards an understanding of history as it moves the focus from slavery to the enslavedâfrom the institution to the personal, families and feminist accounts.
In a broader sense, this contributes to a public history. In part, using the quickly growing corpus of neo-slave counterfactual narratives, this book examines the notion of the emerging slavery public history, and the extent to which this is defined by literature, film and other forms of artistic expression, rather than non-fictionâpopular or scholarlyâand education in history in the school systems. Inter alia, this book looks to the validity of historical fiction in print or in film as a way of understanding history. A focal point of this book is the hypothesis that neo-slave narrativesâsupported by selective triangulated readings and viewings of scholarly works and non-fictionâhave assisted greatly in re-shaping the historiography of antebellum slavery, and scholarly historians followed in the wake of these developments. Essentially, this has meant a re-shaping of the historiography with a focus from slavery to that of the enslaved. Moreover, it has opened new vistas for a public history, devoid of top-down authoritative scholarship.
An important and provocative read for students and scholars interested in understanding the history of slavery, its harrowing effects and how it was culturally defined.