Despite the ubiquity of a canonizing narrative posing both the slave and neo-slave narrative as quintessentially American genres (Olney 1985; Aljoe 2006; Sayre 2010), their history betrays a more complicated origin. The slave narrative, formed in abolitionist circuits across the Atlantic world and deployed in the consolidation of broader abolitionist cultures, was a profoundly transnational genre (Gould 2007). While the neo-slave narrative, formally innovated within an African-American cultural tradition, may, on surface, possess a greater claim to a uniquely American character, the national specificity of this genre also unravels upon closer scrutiny, with works by Black diasporic authors from across North America, South America, Europe, and Africa.

“(Dis)Locating Antiblackness” is united by a shared interest in deprovincializing the (neo-)slave narrative’s assumed Americanity. Rather than attempting to delineate the contours of a singular, global neo-slave narrative genre, each of the papers picks up a different work and geography to consider the possibility for a comparative (neo-)slave narrative studies. The gambit of such an enterprise is that in illuminating the (dis)continuities, similarities, and differences across these forms, comparative study will contribute to a broader consideration of the global architectures of antiblackness as constituted by particular racialized geo-histories. To this end, this panel will consist of four fourteen-minute papers followed by approximately twenty minutes of unstructured discussion.

Chloé Samala Faux’s paper, “The Lonely Ones Have Been Born,” routes the neo-slave narrative through the African postcolonial novel. By pursuing a comparative analysis between Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds, Faux examines how the structural predicaments of the postcolonial Black are isomorphic with the structural predicaments of the racial slave. While comparative literary studies has reified a distinction between the cultural traditions borne from colonialism and slavery, Faux’s comparative reading argues that both symptomatically refract homologous conceptual dilemmas. In so doing, she troubles the tacit distinction between slavery and colonialism, posing African colonialism as racial slavery’s uncanny double.

Kevin Ah-Sen’s paper, “Reading Olivier Le Jeune: Slavery and the Brutal Fiction of Children’s Literature,” interrogates Le grain de sable. Published in 2019, Le grain de sable is regarded as Quebec’s first children’s book about slavery and the first to center the story of the earliest documented enslaved person in 17th-century New France: a child by the name of Olivier Le Jeune. In his paper, Ah-Sen proposes that Le grain de sable, as children’s literature, can represent racial slavery only by virtue of its mystification. Tracking the figure of Olivier Le Jeune across historical and literary texts, Ah-Sen interrogates how the book’s sanitized narrative is conscripted into the work of producing a historical past that disavows the violence of racial slavery and consolidate Quebec’s national imaginary.

Sheba Abena Wiafe’s paper, “Grappling with Nothing in Ponciá Vicencio” examines Conceição Evaristo’s 2003 debut novel Ponciá Vicencio. Following an Afro-Brazilian family whose children leave their home to travel to a metropole, Ponciá Vicencio narrates Ponciá’s desire to leave as fueled by her “fear of going backwards,” “repeating her family’s story” (31). But Evaristo’s narrative reveals how Ponciá’s movements only ever reinscribe her within this genealogical story. Mobilizing Black critical theory, Wiafe traces the novel’s deployment of a rhetoric of nothingness to theorize slavery as a psychic inheritance structured by a dispossessive relation to home and land. In analyzing Evaristo’s exploration of ontological absence, Wiafe stages a conversation between Evaristo’s literary work, non-being, and Blackness’s non-geography.

Devon Clifton’s paper, “Blackness, the Hold, and Letting Go” thinks through the slave narrative as a response to an unthinkable psychic negation. In the paper, Clifton uses psychoanalytic object relations to chart how neo-slave narrative, slave narrative, and criticism thereof evidence a transformed orientation towards and political goal for writing, arguing that scholarly and literary “melancholia” has given rise to a Winnicottian “valuable depression.” The resurgence of neo-slave narratives and the turn to fabulatory scholarship demonstrate how writing is repurposed towards this acceptance of, rather than resistance to, the unknowability of these losses. She contends that the enormous negation constituted by the transatlantic slave trade has become the “nothing” out of which African diasporic thinkers make something; writing is the medium of this alchemy.

This panel is composed entirely of scholars working in Black diasporic literatures and critical Black studies at varying levels including doctoral candidates and scholars at the professor and postdoctoral rank; three of the panelists are Black women. Multiple nationalities are reflected in the panel including: Ghanaian-German, South African, Chinese-Canadian, Canadian, and American.