| This project investigates the complicated practice of writing history within a postmodern context, writing imaginative histories, and suggests a new condition of privilege for the contemporary historical novel that expands the possibilities for ways of knowing the past. By establishing the legitimacy of alternate ways of knowing the past, the authors discussed in this project create an imaginative space where histories become fragmentary, multiple, and fluid. The foregrounding of setting, manifested in the literature as placelessness, communicates the dislocation caused by the experiences of war and bondage. While disrupting place, these imaginative histories have a problematic relationship with subjectivity, demanding the formulation of alternate subjectivities, a process that can only successfully take place within a critical theoretical context.;The ways in which we remember our stories, our past, says a great deal about our intellectual traditions and our willingness to find a myriad of ways to get at the truth. Thus, we may understand something of the past through literary texts which, at times, complement official histories and, at other times, create counter epistemologies that disrupt traditional ways of knowing. Ultimately this project is not meant to compare or equate the experiences of soldiers and slaves. Instead, it is an analysis of the ways in which they tell these stories, a telling that rests outside of History but within narrative, a telling that is often contestatory and oppositional, but always designed to promote a better understanding of self and culture. |
