| This dissertation explores how survivor figures are elicited through fictional narratives of new world slavery. Secondly, if in the fiction of slavery the protagonists are often presented as if they are literally working to survive, then what are the ramifications of their labor as it pertains to ensuring their survival? The following four novels: Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Maryse Conde's Moi Tituba Sorciere Noire de Salem (1986), J. California Cooper's Family (1991), and Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts (1997) shall be used to explore the above-mentioned questions. As the survivor figures in these novels attempt to make sense of lives plagued by scrupulous former masters and mistresses, lost children, and the loss of their own sense of natality, it becomes even clearer that their manumission is far from complete.; The first type of survivor figure identified as trying to overcome her imperfect manumission is the historical survivor, characters who must survive their tenures within such suffocating spaces as the hold of a slave ship or a colonial American jail cell. Meanwhile, the novels explored in the second half of the dissertation feature examples of survivor figures identified as future survivors, they are either emblematic of, or set the stage for the life to come for the other enslaved characters. And throughout the dissertation I argue that the survivor figure in fiction of slavery is a character who may not know what survival means, but yet paradoxically exists as a beacon of survival. |
