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21st Century Neo-Slave Narratives and Genre as Technology [electronic resource]

The University of Chicago. English Language and Literature.

[S.l.] : The University of Chicago. 2023 Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses , 2023

1 online resource(154 p.)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-02, Section: A.
Advisor: Brown, Adrienne;Snorton, C. Riley.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2023.

This dissertation argues that 21st century neo-slave narratives utilize genre as a tool to speculate freedom and alternative forms of black being in the present day. I consider genre not strictly as a means of categorization, but as a tool deployed by authors and filmmakers such as Octavia Butler, John Jennings, Marlon James, Kyle Baker, and Gerard Bush, to grapple with the continuing antiblackness that shapes existence in the afterlife of slavery. My use of the term "genre" is not limited to literary and filmic genres that seem to be more obvious in their overlap with the genre of neo-slave narratives, such as horror or sci-fi, but encompasses Sylvia Wynter's tracing of the shared etymological roots of "genre" and "gender" back to the word "kind". What kinds of black being are imagined through the blurring, rupture, and creation of genres within the form of the neo-slave narrative? While their predecessors, 19th century slave narratives, used narrative in attempts to define black people as American citizen-subjects, 21st century neo-slave narratives return to the site of the plantation to articulate alternative understandings of freedom and black being.Over the span of three chapters, "21st Century Neo-Slave Narratives and Genre as Technology" charts multiple uses and forms of genre by analyzing a 19th century "traditional" slave narrative as an anchor text along with two contemporary works. The first chapter examines the relationship between the neo-slave narrative and horror through readings of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the graphic novel adaptation of Kindred and the film Antebellum. I assert that a sense of claustrophobic temporality drives the terror of these narratives and the need to merge what is already ostensibly horrific content (slavery) with the horror genre. The second chapter more closely interrogates the relationship between gender and genre. Already cast out of the category of woman by what Hortense Spillers refers to as "ungendering", enslaved black women instead perform and define alternative iterations, or genres, of gender for themselves and use them to negotiate, fight for and define freedom. I examine this through depictions of enslaved black womanhood in what I refer to as the anti-sentimental novel. While sentimentalism relies on sympathy in order to appeal to an understanding of freedom based on ideals of Christian morality and respectability, the anti-sentimental provokes feelings such as disgust and irritation while putting forth a conceptualization of freedom that is not fixed and is instead shaped by the genres of womanhood that the characters in these novels inhabit. The texts discussed in this chapter include The Bondwoman's Narrative, The Book of Night Women, and The Good Lord Bird. The third and final chapter explores adaptation as a vehicle that allows neo-slave narratives to maneuver through and across genres and forms of media. More specifically, I analyze the ways that Nat Turner has been utilized as a "serial figure", described by Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer as a kind of stock, recurring character who is subject to various media changes over the course of its usage. The depictions of Turner that appear in text are not necessarily references to him as historical figure, but more so as a product of fiction. The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. as Fully and Voluntarily Made to Thomas R. Gray is considered the source text and read alongside the film The Birth of a Nation and graphic novel Nat Turner to address how adapted works about a single figure can have vastly different outcomes and articulations of revolution and freedom, even when they are adapted into the same literary genre.

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