Gender, Genre, and Race in Post-Neo-Slave Narratives provides an innovative conceptual framework for describing representations of slavery in twenty-first century American cultural productions. Covering a broad range of narrative forms ranging from novels like The Known World to films like 12 Years a Slave and the music of Missy Elliott, Dana Renee Horton engages with post-neo-slave narratives, a genre she defines as literary and visual texts that mesh conventions of postmodernity with the neo-slave narrative. Focusing on the characterization of black women in these texts, Horton argues that they are portrayed as commodities who commodify enslaved people, a fluid and complex characterization that is a foundational aspect of postmodern identity and emphasizes how postmodern identity restructures the conception of slave-owners.
After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding its first appearance in the 1960s, Neo-Slave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent cultural debates that arose during the sixties."--BOOK JACKET.
This History is intended for a broad audience seeking knowledge of how novels interact with and influence their cultural landscape. Its interdisciplinary approach will appeal to those interested in novels and film, graphic novels, novels and popular culture, transatlantic blackness, and the interfacing of race, class, gender, and aesthetics.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.
The alleged affair between Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, and his slave Sally Hemings was proven as a fact by DNA analysis in 1998. While many historians continue to deny the affair, some have accepted the love affair between Jefferson and Hemings as fact, and many historical omissions regarding the affair have been revised since the 1998 DNA results. However, the identity and the dignity of the Hemings family, which were previously ignored in the official history, have been restored not only by science but also by literature. This book examines how African American writers have depicted the issues of race, gender, and identity for Sally Hemings and her descendants in modern and postmodern novels.
In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson—where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic—destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.
African Americans once passed as whites to escape the pains of racism. Today's neo-passing has pushed the old idea of passing in extraordinary new directions. A white author uses an Asian pen name; heterosexuals live "out" as gay; and, irony of ironies, whites try to pass as black. Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young present essays that explore practices, performances, and texts of neo-passing in our supposedly postracial moment. The authors move from the postracial imagery of Angry Black White Boy and the issues of sexual orientation and race in ZZ Packer's short fiction to the politics of Dave Chappelle's skits as a black President George W. Bush. Together, the works reveal that the questions raised by neo-passing—questions about performing and contesting identity in relation to social norms—remain as relevant today as in the past. Contributors: Derek Adams, Christopher M. Brown, Martha J. Cutter, Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Michele Elam, Alisha Gaines, Jennifer Glaser, Allyson Hobbs, Brandon J. Manning, Loran Marsan, Lara Narcisi, Eden Osucha, Gayle Wald, and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley
From Kara Walker’s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty’s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead’s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele’s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary artistic works that present, like musical deep cuts, some challenging “alternate takes” on American slavery. These artists deliberately confront and negotiate the psychic and representational legacies of slavery to imagine possibilities and change. The essays in this volume explore the conceptions of freedom and blackness that undergird these narratives, critically examining how artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era have nuanced slavery in a way that is distinctly different from the first wave of neo-slave narratives that emerged from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination positions post-blackness as a productive category of analysis that brings into sharp focus recent developments in black cultural productions across various media. These ten essays investigate how millennial black cultural productions trouble long-held notions of blackness by challenging limiting scripts. They interrogate political as well as formal interventions into established discourses to demonstrate how explorations of black identities frequently go hand in hand with the purposeful refiguring of slavery’s prevailing tropes, narratives, and images. A V Ethel Willis White Book
Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."
“Grand, robust, a rich and big novel.”—Alice Walker, The New York Times Book Review “In [Jane Pittman], Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure. . . . Gaines’s novel brings to mind other great works: The Odyssey, for the way his heroine’s travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn, for the clarity of [Pittman’s] voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story of it all.”—Newsweek Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.
