'The middle passage never guessed its end': Slave subjectivity and black subjectivity in contemporary African American and Anglophone Caribbean literature

This study explores the ways in which contemporary African American and Anglophone Caribbean writers have theorized the formation of black subjectivity through their representations of slavery and slave characters. I demonstrate how, in three works--Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Derek Walcott's play Dream on Monkey Mountain, and Carolivia Herron's novel Thereafter Johnnie--the authors have managed to destabilize blackness as a biological or cultural essence, while maintaining a sense of the integrity of creolized black cultures in the Americas. In the current debate on black subjectivity, these representations define a middle way between the complete reification of race on the one hand and its virtual eclipse on the other. Through their depictions of slavery and slave characters, these writers demonstrate the variety of ways in which black subjectivities are produced and contested within African American and Anglophone Caribbean cultures and communities.;This project is primarily a work of literary criticism, offering close readings of the texts under investigation and incorporating other readings of these texts. These readings are supplemented by analyses of other African American and Caribbean cultural products and practices, including folktales, the blues, calypso, Carnival, and African-based religions, because these two literatures have been influenced so profoundly by the music, folklore, and spiritualities of the cultures from which they come. I also draw upon vernacular theories of African American and Caribbean identity and cultural production. Feminist theory in general and black feminist theory in particular inform these readings, as do historical texts on black life and culture. In my discussions of identity throughout the work, I draw upon and critique several additional sources: psychoanalytic theory and literary criticism; cultural studies approaches; and critical social theory, especially the body of theory that seeks to explain how human subjects are called into being and constructed to fill certain social roles. The African American and Afro-Caribbean experiences of slavery, and the ways in which they are represented in literature, provide especially fruitful sites for examining the multiple and often contradictory processes by which human beings come to identify themselves.