Since the emancipation of slavery, former slaves, and occasionally non-slave abolitionists, have written or orated their accounts of living under America’s “peculiar institution.” These accounts were christened Slave Narratives and soon became a genre within themselves. The Handbook of African American Literature by Hazel Arnett Ervin defines the slave narrative as “A subgenre of the African American autobiography, written by forer slaves, starting as early as 1760. Major themes are the inhumanity of the slave system—as experienced by the authors of the narratives—and antislavery activism” (124). According to Phillip Gould: “Early black writers were sensitive to the terms of contemporary proslavery and antislavery dates. While lacking the rhetorical sophistication of later writers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, this early writing nevertheless skillfully deploys basic Enlightenment ideas about the nature of rights and individual identity” (93). Gould states that these early writings show that black writers “were capable of challenging the identification of the human subject with material possession” and notes that the “antebellum slave narrative addresses this ethical dissonance by resorting to rhetorical techniques that heighten the absurdity of equating a person with property” (93-94).
…show more content…
Then, after the height of the civil rights movement, there was a quest to expose America’s dark history with slavery. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy writes in his book, Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, “there occurred a distinct shift in both the current social movements and in the intellectual trends in the American historical profession, signaled by the emergence of the Black Power movement and the rise of the New Left social history” (4). Rushdy relates this shift back to literature by discussing William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner and relates the reasons why many found it to problematic: Black Power intellectuals challenged Styron’s novel on a series of issues: its representation of a nonheroic slave rebel, its presumption of assuming the voice of a slave, its uninformed appropriation of African American culture, its deep, almost conservative allegiance to the traditional historiographical portrait of slavery, and its troubling political message in a time of emergent black empowerment. (4) As a result, he states that “the dialogue over Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner [constitutes] the moment of origin for the Neo-slave narrative” (5). Writers like Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, among others, began to write novels about slaves in an attempt to, as Rushdy puts it, “engage in an extended dialogue with their own moment of origins in the late sixties and early seventies” (5).When Butler enters this genre, she complicates it by adding in fantastical elements that often causes people to categorize it as science fiction. However, as Nadine Flagel notes: “While generic conventions in Kindred sometimes overlap, more often it is precisely the terms of one genre that allow Butler to interrupt and interrogate the assumptions and expectations held by the other” (217). When Octavia Butler published her novel Kindred the consensus among critics that Butler complicates the genre by blending it with science fiction. Critics such as Benjamin Robertson have discussed Butler’s choice to write a narrative about slavery from the point of view of a woman from the modern times who somehow able to time travel back to early 19th century Maryland. Robertson notes that Butler’s novels engage with American literature and history and how the science fiction aspects of the novel work to show the way that power works to control the body. In his article, rather than going into depth about how the novel utilizes the traditional Slave Narrative and the Neo-slave Narrative genres, he prefers to focus on the science fiction genre and connects it with biopolitics and the female body. He explains that “Foucault … claims this power [has] two poles of development. The first ‘centered on the body as a machine . . . . The second pole ‘focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of biological processes: propagation, births and mortality…’” (367). Robertson applies this to Kindred by explaining how Dana’s body is “the vehicle through which slavery and its history can be understood” (368). In
Then, after the height of the civil rights movement, there was a quest to expose America’s dark history with slavery. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy writes in his book, Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, “there occurred a distinct shift in both the current social movements and in the intellectual trends in the American historical profession, signaled by the emergence of the Black Power movement and the rise of the New Left social history” (4). Rushdy relates this shift back to literature by discussing William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner and relates the reasons why many found it to problematic: Black Power intellectuals challenged Styron’s novel on a series of issues: its representation of a nonheroic slave rebel, its presumption of assuming the voice of a slave, its uninformed appropriation of African American culture, its deep, almost conservative allegiance to the traditional historiographical portrait of slavery, and its troubling political message in a time of emergent black empowerment. (4) As a result, he states that “the dialogue over Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner [constitutes] the moment of origin for the Neo-slave narrative” (5). Writers like Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, among others, began to write novels about slaves in an attempt to, as Rushdy puts it, “engage in an extended dialogue with their own moment of origins in the late sixties and early seventies” (5).When Butler enters this genre, she complicates it by adding in fantastical elements that often causes people to categorize it as science fiction. However, as Nadine Flagel notes: “While generic conventions in Kindred sometimes overlap, more often it is precisely the terms of one genre that allow Butler to interrupt and interrogate the assumptions and expectations held by the other” (217). When Octavia Butler published her novel Kindred the consensus among critics that Butler complicates the genre by blending it with science fiction. Critics such as Benjamin Robertson have discussed Butler’s choice to write a narrative about slavery from the point of view of a woman from the modern times who somehow able to time travel back to early 19th century Maryland. Robertson notes that Butler’s novels engage with American literature and history and how the science fiction aspects of the novel work to show the way that power works to control the body. In his article, rather than going into depth about how the novel utilizes the traditional Slave Narrative and the Neo-slave Narrative genres, he prefers to focus on the science fiction genre and connects it with biopolitics and the female body. He explains that “Foucault … claims this power [has] two poles of development. The first ‘centered on the body as a machine . . . . The second pole ‘focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of biological processes: propagation, births and mortality…’” (367). Robertson applies this to Kindred by explaining how Dana’s body is “the vehicle through which slavery and its history can be understood” (368). In