Full Description
Since the election of President Barack Obama, many pundits have declared that we are living in a "post-racial America," a culture where the legacy of slavery has been erased. The new essays in this collection, however, point to a resurgence of the theme of slavery in American cultural artifacts from the late twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Ranging from disciplines as diverse as African American studies, film and television, architectural studies, and science fiction, the essays provide a provocative look into how and why slavery continues to recur as a trope in American popular culture.
By exploring how authors, filmmakers, historians, and others engage and challenge the narrative of American slavery, this volume invites further study of slavery in its contemporary forms of human trafficking and forced labor and challenges the misconception that slavery is an event of the past.
Contents
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I. Reading and Writing Slavery
Meditation, Misremembering, Creativity, and Healing in Zakes Mda's Cion
SERETHA D. WILLIAMS
Black Women's Ghostly Re-visions of History
JOANNE CHASSOT
Inhabitants of Borderlands: (An)other World of Subjugation
ULA GABRIELLE GAHA
"If I Allow Myself to Listen": Slavery, Historiography, and Historical Audition in David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident
NICOLE BRITTINGHAM FURLONGE
Tricksterism, Masquerades, and the Legacy of the African Diasporic Past in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber
MARLENE D. ALLEN
Written on the Walls: Reflections of Shifting Definitions of Slavery and Self in Toni Morrison's A Mercy
EUGENIA P. BRYAN
The Laveau Folk Heroine: Contemporary Fiction Revises the Slave Narrative
TATIA JACOBSON JORDAN
Part II. Visualizing and Positioning Slavery
Hottentot Venus: Unsettling the Linear Time of History and Science
Ž ELJKA Š VRLJUGA
Hollywood's White Legal Heroes and the Legacy of Slave Codes
KATIE ROSE GUEST PRYAL
The Slave's Cabin: From the Back of the Big House to the National Register of Historic Places
ANGELITA REYES
"Commence the Great Work": The Historical Archive and Unspeakable Violence in Kyle Baker's Nat Turner
JONATHAN W. GRAY
A Comic Routine: The Place of Slavery in Identity Formation for the Twenty-First Century
LAURA MAE LINDO
The Slavery of the Machine
ALEXIS HARLEY
About the Contributors
Index
