Slaves of fiction: Coming to terms with the American Holocaust through representations of slavery in post -civil rights fiction and film

This dissertation discusses representations of slavery in post-civil-rights fiction and film as reflections of and influences on public policy and opinion concerning race in the United States. In particular, I examine William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Margaret Walker's Jubilee , Ernest Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alex Haley's Roots, Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and the films Jefferson in Paris, An American Scandal, and A View From the Mountain.;I use these texts and films to discuss the twentieth-century historiography of slavery, and I tie both popular culture and historical studies to important political and cultural events and trends. The goal of my study is to examine America's process of coming to terms with its past of slavery and to shed light on contemporary debates such as the debate about reparations for African-Americans or an official apology for slavery.;The reparations debate illustrates the strengths and the limitations of the selected narratives as tools for addressing the challenges of racial injustice and reconciliation. Taken together, the texts by black authors embody an understanding of slavery shared by most African-Americans. By telling the stories of slavery from various black perspectives, these works offer a significant reference point for African-American self-understanding. They do not express or transform the self-understanding of most whites, however. For that, what is needed is a tradition of self-critical "slave holder narratives" by white authors alongside a tradition of slave narratives and neo-slave narratives by black authors; a tradition for which we find a fitting analogy in the searching post-war literature of non-Jewish Germans trying to grapple with their own relation to the Holocaust.