From slave ship to citizenship: Re-imagined communities and the counterculture of modernity in the historical novel of slavery

This study makes the claim that novels of slavery written in the 1990s and 2000s have significantly refashioned the foundational generation of neoslave narratives published in the 1960s and 1970s by emphasizing community formation among the enslaved. Initially produced by African Americans who examined the Southern slave experience, these novels are now being produced by writers located in Canada, the Caribbean, London, and other regions of the African diaspora. Unlike traditional slave and neoslave narratives that place emphasis on the individual struggle for freedom, these newer additions to the genre contextualize the slave experience in relation to processes of nationhood, exile, migration, and diaspora. Texts such as Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Edward P. Jones The Known World, James McBride's Song Yet Sung, and Lawrence Hill's Someone Knows My Name situate their localized portrayals of community formation within a broader discourse of American nationhood to demonstrate the problematic nature of early African American entry into processes of the nation that was characterized both by resistance to and accommodation of the hegemonic discourses of the larger society.;The Caribbean novels explore the way slavery shaped the phenonema of exile, migration, and diaspora. Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise and Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon demonstrate the continuity between the contemporary migration experiences of Caribbean peoples and the historical experience of maroonage to position slavery squarely within the contexts of Empire and neo-imperialism. Nalo Hopkinson's The Salt Roads and Marlon James' The Book of Night Women explore individual and collective acts of rebellion among female slaves to demonstrate that women played an integral role in the counterculture of modernity articulated by slaves on the plantations of the New World. These texts connect the slave resistance that occurred on the plantations of the colonial Caribbean to metropolitan discourses of European modernity, demonstrate the way black female sexuality was denigrated in colonial constructions of femininity and re-constructed by black women to articulate a subjectivity of resistance to both slavery and male domination; and articulate a distinctly Caribbean aesthetic of modernity. In so doing, these novels gender the counterculture of modernity.