The presence of past : experimental modes of representation in neoslave narratives

The Presence of Past: Experimental Modes of Representation in Neoslave Narratives examines the formal devices and representational strategies of authors of African descent who center the experiences of bondspeople in their creative engagements with slavery. Though looking to the past, authors of neoslave narratives mediate debates about the afterlives of slavery and representations of bondspeople in a contemporary context. Through their creative engagements, the neoslave narratives under consideration are also able to demonstrate new ways of knowing the past, ways that eschew traditional historical methods that document slavery. The neoslave narrative derives its name from the slave narrative, and both genres are rooted in a literary project of counterrepresentation. Slave narratives are typically understood as the written or dictated autobiographical accounts of formerly enslaved people of African descent. A deeply rhetorical genre, eighteenth and nineteenth century slave narratives represented the earliest endeavors of Black subjects to represent themselves in writing and demonstrate their personhood to overwhelmingly white reading publics. Working through myriad obstacles, ex-slave authors interested in advancing an abolitionist cause deployed several identifiable and recurrent tropes in their writing, tropes that are revisited and revised by contemporary authors in this study. The novels under analysis emerge at the convergence of a shift in the politics of representation and in the historiography of slavery. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, historical representations of slavery in the U.S. underwent a marked shift as more historians began to account for the validity and significance of slave testimony in their work. Alongside these historiographic shifts, African American, Caribbean and Black British authors began to reflect with more specificity the multifaceted, diasporic experiences of Black subjects in their writing. I argue that these developments formed conditions of possibility for a body of literature aimed at undermining and transforming dominant regimes of representation.Englis