Revisiting Slave Narratives II

Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves II

Judith Misrahi-Barak

• Publisher: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
• Year: 2007
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9782367813974
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection offers a follow up to the first collection of essays Revisiting Slave Narratives / Les Avatars des récits d'esclaves (2005), whose purpose was to bring together African-merican and Caribbean neo-slave novels. In 2007, the year of the bicentennial anniversary of the official abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the British colonial Empire, the memorialisation and commemoration events should not obliterate the fact that, through the prison of slave narratives and neo-slave novels, it is our present that is at stake. In order to show how our societies and minds still need to be manumitted, the essays in this collection examine books of fiction by André Brink, Octavia Butler, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Cristina Garcia, Edward P. Jones, Paule Marshall, Phyllis Perry, Susan Straight, and books of non-fiction by Malcom X or John Edgar Wideman ; as well as works by poets like Fred D'Aguiar or Marilyn Nelson, by playwrights like Robbie Mc Cauley, Derek Walcott or August Wilson, and by visual artists like David Boxer, Christopher Cozier, Glenn Ligon, or Kara Walker.

Table of contents

• Introductory pages
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Narrating Slavery, Narrating America: freedom as conversion in The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• The Island: Martinique: a Narrative of the long Shadow of Slavery
• Postmemories of Slavery In Fred D’Aguiar’s Bloodlines
• The Remains of the Slave Narrative in Marilyn Nelson’s Fortune’s Bones: A Manumission Requiem
• Contemporary Ownership: The Master, the Slave, and the Self in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World
• A Chain of Voices: a “masters and slaves” Narrative
• Rituals of “rememory” in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
• The Science/Fiction Carnival in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus
• From the Fantastic to Magic Realism: The Spectral Presence in Phyllis Perry’s Stigmata
• Racial Alliances in a White Neo-Slave Narrative: Susan Straight’s A Million Nightingales
• Multiple Trajectories of Slavery: Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting as a Transnational Neo-Slave Narrative
• Antebellum Revisitations: Insurrectionary Interventions in kindred and Sally’s Rape
• Legacies of Enslavement and Emancipation: American Slave Narratives and August Wilson’s Plays
• Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain: Crossroads, Crosswords and Cross-purposes, or the Impossible Straight Line into Freedom
• “Save the Trauma for your Mama”: Kara Walker, the Art World’s Beloved
• Postmodern Caribbean Image-Text Correspondences: Visual Constructions from David Boxer and Christopher Cozier
• Selected bibliography
• Contributors
• Abstracts