Reading Slavery’s Afterlife: On the Twenty-First-Century Neo–Slave Narrative

Fletcher, Marcelle-Anne; Fletcher, Marcelle-Anne

This panel takes as its central object the neo-slave narrative’s 21^st century re-emergence. While attention to neo-slave narratives is de rigeur in the analysis of Black American expressive traditions (Aljoe 2006; Sharpe 2009; Levy-Hussen 2016; Goyal 2019; Glover 2021), in its conceptual redeployment as prefigured genre, its political contexts of contemporary articulation have often been under thought. This absence is peculiar given that in Ashraf Rushdy’s pioneering work, he argues that the genre emerged within “two historical moments... the Black Power movement of the late sixties and the neoconservative and right-wing backlash to it in the seventies and eighties” (1999, 230). Despite this new historicist reading of formal emergence, minimal scholarship has attended to the shifting terrain of racial-cultural politics refracted and symptomatized in the permutations of neo-slave narratives’ genre forms.

“Reading Slavery’s Afterlife” queries the neo-slave narrative in the 21st century, particularly, but not exclusively, following two historical moments: the rise of the putatively post-racial Obama era and its replacement with Trumpian neo-fascism. During the latter period, there has been a proliferation of works embedded within the neo-slave narrative tradition, the new neo-slave narrative, which make use of novel aesthetic and narrative strategies to confront the representation of racial slavery and its afterlives. Travelling through a variety of forms, this panel will consist of four fourteen-minute papers that each focalize a single neo-slave narrative work (Slaveroad, The Underground Railroad, Slave Play, and Slave Moth) followed by approximately twenty minutes of unstructured discussion to pursue an inquiry into the new analytic and conceptual tools necessary for apprehending their formal, political, and cultural contours.

Jordan Taliha McDonald’s paper, “Experimental Forms, Critical Fabulation, and Slavery’s Afterlife in Sexual Transgression” places John Edgar Wideman’s 2024 Slaveroad into conversation with Saidiya Hartman’s theory of “critical fabulation.” With an eye toward the figure of the slave descendant as a key component of the 21st century’s expansion of the neo-slave-narrative, McDonald explores how Wideman narrates his ‘slaveroad.’ She focuses on the author’s treatment of sexuality and desire as problems for thought and form. Close reading Wideman’s accounts of sexual transgression—adultery, teacher-student fantasies, and sexual violence—her paper theorizes the advantages and limitations of Wideman’s literary approach to a kind of critical fabulation.

James Bliss’s paper, “Beyond Redemption: Representing Slavery in the Afterlife of Democracy,” explores the question of formal adaptation in Black historical fiction through readings of Barry Jenkins’ 2021 adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad. Bliss reads Jenkins’ cinematic practice in conversation with recent work by Stephen Best, who critiques the desire to redeem the Black past through speculative history, and Patrice Douglass, who critiques the desire to redeem the Black present by confusing historical for ontological distance. Bliss’s paper thereby explores what contemporary Black aesthetic and critical practices offer in the present, beyond redemption.

Marcelle-Anne Fletcher’s paper, “Myopic as Tragedy, then as Farce,” explores the formal questions of spectatorship, production, and reception at work in Slave Play. Reading against liberal defenses and criticisms of the work alike, Fletcher excavates how Slave Play’s staged performance of the antiblackness structural to the interracial relation covertly reinscribes a racial myopia in focusing exclusively on interraciality. In so doing, Fletcher argues that the play repeats the moral dramas of the slave narrative by recasting slavery’s psychic purchase in the terms of a disavowed sentimentalism. This portrayal redoubles Blackness’s assumed evacuation from the sociogenic formation of subjectivity, obscuring the complicated ways racial violence structures all forms of relation—including Black intramural couplings.

Patrick Teed’s paper, “The Ends of Slave Narrative,” complicates the discontinuity between slave and neo-slave narrative through a close reading of Thylia Moss’s Slave Moth.Drawing attention to the psychopolitically compromised contours of interiority, Teed explores the protagonist’s experienced non-coincidence between literacy, authorship, and freedom. He theorizes how the neo-slave narrative as a separable form often pivots on the assumed psychic integrity of a Black author- and reader-ship. Challenging this norm, Teed reads Slave Moth as revealing how Blackness names a violent condition of psychic openness, wherein any attempt to disarticulate Black cultural production from the problem of coerced speech is untenable. Teed provocatively argues that this coercion illuminates a structural homology across (neo-)slave narratives.

This panel is composed entirely of scholars working in African-American literature and critical Black studies; half of the panelists are Black women. The panel is composed of scholars at varying levels, including doctoral candidates and scholars at the professor and postdoctoral rank.

523 Reading Slavery’s Afterlife: On the Twenty-First-Century Neo–Slave Narrative: Calls for Papers