Postmodern Tales of Slavery in the Americas: From Alejo Carpentier to Charles Johnson

by Cox,Timothy J.

• ISBN13: 9780815338536
• ISBN10: 0815338538
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-11-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Unlike 19th century slave narratives, many recent novel-like texts about slavery deploy ironic narrative strategies, innovative structural features, and playful cruelty. This study analyzes the postmodern aesthetics common to seven tales of slavery from the United States, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, Cuba, abd Colombia from authors including Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Barnet, Toni Morrison, and Charles Johnson.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction. New Slavery Novels: Nation--ness and Imagination in the New World Context	ix
Using American Slavery to Construct Black Aesthetics	1	(30)
A New Time in the New World	1	(4)
Can You Dig? Identity through Archeology, Rhizomes, and Relation	5	(10)
All Together Now; No Longer the Chain--gang of Theory	15	(8)
Memory vs. History (and Myth)	23	(8)
Dissembling History: Postmodern Irony as Narrative Strategy	31	(42)
Irony and the Impossibility of Writing	33	(3)
The Logic of Double Negatives	36	(31)
Moi, Tituba, sorciere...noire de Salem: Contradiction on Her Own Terms	36	(8)
Irony as Alternative to Dialectic in La mulatresse Solitude	44	(13)
Enriching ``National'' Identity and Historical Consciousness	57	(2)
Fictionalized History, Historical Fiction in El reino de este mundo	59	(8)
Overcoming Order	67	(6)
Re(-)fusing the New World in Accounts of the Middle Passage	73	(34)
Whence Sympathy for the Africans?	73	(4)
Going Alone on a Misguided Quest with Solitude and Tituba	77	(11)
Chango, el gran putas: African in Name, American in Form, Universal in Character	88	(5)
Caricature of a Non-existent Essence (A True Philosophical Conundrum) in Middle Passage	93	(8)
The Sign of the Crossing	101	(6)
Oscillatory Structures, Running Away, and (Dis)Locating the Self	107	(22)
What Running Away Means	109	(14)
The Wandering Perpective in Biografia de un cimarron	109	(10)
Running Away and Coming Home in Beloved	119	(4)
To Stop	123	(1)
Between Implied Reader and Actual Reader	123	(4)
Oscillatory Identities	127	(2)
Conclusion. Problematics of the Questioning of Identity	129	(12)
Folk Agency and Aesthetic Continuity	130	(4)
The Necessity of Irony for Making Sense in Self--referential Novels	134	(3)
What's in a Word	137	(4)
Works Cited	141	(6)
Index	147