Conjuring freedom: Reconstructions and revisions of neo-slave narratives
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- URL:
- http://search.proquest.com/docview/1035149288/fulltextPDF/AF9F63A46EC646AFPQ/1?accountid=14553
- Published:
- California: University of California, Santa Cruz
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Subject Term:
- Caribbean area, Blacks, Literature, African Americans, Gender, Slave narratives, Temporality, Bontemps, Arna, 1902-1973
- Notes:
- 391 p., Argues for a revisionist periodization of neo-slave literature as well as a reorientation away from a US-based literary history that has been dominated by the mode of realism and toward a more comparative view defined by the geography, history, and aesthetics of the Caribbean. The canon of slave narratives was first dominated by the assumption both of narrative as the major and sometimes only genre of slave writing and of a linear temporality emplotting the journey from slavery to an attenuated freedom. In contrast, most twentieth-century neo-slave narratives rethink the genre from the twin standpoints of temporality and narratology: how both the "neo" and "narrative" descriptors have produced an entrenched and unnecessarily restrictive view of this evolving archive.
