A Study On Jubilee As Neo-slave Narrative

Margaret Walker is an important African American woman writer who is widely renowned for her representation of the struggle of black people for Civil right in her works. Being her only novel, Jubilee tries to represent the nature of history of slavery. Through the life experience of the protagonist, Walker demonstrates the panorama of slaves’ daily lives, folk culture and experiences. However, though regarded as the beginning of the neo-slave narrative, while the latter works of neo-slave narrative attracts much attention from scholars, Jubilee remains understudied and undervalued because of its realistic style.Thus, through a detailed textual analysis of the rewriting of the slave narrative in terms of theme, figures and form, this thesis attempts to explore the features of neo-slave narrative in Jubilee, aiming at contributing to the critical reevaluation of Jubilee in the broad context of the genre.Based on the analysis of the detailed comparison between Jubilee and slave narratives, this thesis manifests that Jubilee departs from the conventions of slave narratives by rewriting the theme, traditional figures and forms of slave narratives. Firstly, Jubilee represents a comprehensive history of slavery and various culture of black people. Secondly, Jubilee reshapes the figures in slave narratives by foregrounding black women as the center of its narrative, rewriting the image of tragic mulatto and mulatto race leader as well as Sambo.Thirdly, Jubilee restructures slave narrative by maneuvering the linear structure into a more complex structure, one which is interspersed with recollection and interruption, the contrast between different parts of text as well as the music mode. Given Walker’s unique representation of the slave history, her attention to varied images of ex-slaves and her restructuring of the slave narrative, this thesis concludes that Jubilee is a prototypical text of neo-slave narratives, a fresh mode of representing the enslaved past that finds its echo in many works by post-1960s African American writers.