Contemporary Narratives of US Slavery

The antebellum African American slave narrative inaugurated Black self-representation in print. Characterized by scholars as neo-slave narratives and, later, post-neo slave narratives, contemporary fictions of US slavery deploy the formal features and thematic concerns of the slave narrative to reveal Black freedom dreams of later periods. Examining recent literary, filmic, and televisual representations of US slavery, this course foregrounds racial slavery in the establishment of longstanding socioeconomic and political asymmetries across race, gender, and class in the US. And it analyzes the ways in which imaginative depictions of racial slavery seek to address and ameliorate such asymmetries. Our class will pay particular attention to how contemporary Black writers and filmmakers thematize labor, love, gender, power, pleasure, community, and resistance among the enslaved and their descendants.