New African slavery fiction in the Americas

This dissertation studies a selection of recent fiction which takes up the subject of African slavery in the Americas. Included are Alejo Carpentier's El reino de este mundo (1949), Miguel Barnet's Biografia de un cimarron (1966), Andre (and Simone) Schwarz-Bart's La mulatresse Solitude (1972), Manuel Zapata Olivella's Chango, el gran putas (1983), Maryse Conde's Moi, Tituba, sorciere ... noire de Salem (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990). These works constitute a contemporary memory of slavery, while at the same time they question what readers elect to remember and how they fulfill their duty to do so. Although each story is set during slavery time in its respective American culture(s), these novels relocate issues of color prejudice and identity contemporaneous to their composition. In doing so they establish the continuity of conceptualizing and overcoming color prejudice. An aesthetic based on post-structuralist theory is argued as the primary means by which the writers and readers create a space where the impossible and the unspeakable may be interrogated.;The texts treated deploy postmodern ironic narrative strategies and particular structural features that provoke arguments about discourses of identity and "minority" identity aesthetics. The authors directly confront their "impossibility" of writing about experiences they have never had, while deliberately counterposing history, anecdote, legend, and myth to construct indeterminacy as a primary feature or texture of the sensibility required to question identity. Their intent is not to question personal and group identity per se; rather, they make the readers confront the terms which the readers themselves may use to construct identity and discourses of identity. Ontological concepts of essentialism and existentialism are placed in historical and cultural contexts, such that the continuity of the questioning of identity, not the continuity of any particular identity, is foregrounded.;The study concludes that paradox is endemic to language itself and thus to the human condition, and that irony is the preferred method for ushering readers to fathom truth without presenting the author or the text as having the final word.