Reaching into the Present, Growing Out of the Past: The Neo-Slave Narrative’s Innovation on Historical Slave Narratives and Contemporary Black Consciousness

Abstract

My thesis, “Reaching into the Present, Growing into the Past: The Neo-Slave Narrative’s Innovation on Historical Slave Narratives and Contemporary Black Consciousness,” approaches the neo-slave narrative genre as an innovative genre that both reinterprets the historical record to create a long history of slavery and show how the socioeconomic issues that slavery perpetuate through time and affect individuals in the contemporary moment. To accomplish this task, I have deployed an aesthetic study of the neo-slave narrative and how those aesthetics are in conversation with the historical record. After establishing common aesthetic features in the neo-slave narrative, I then shift my study to show how a neo-slave narrative can use its literary features to dismantle and deconstruct power structures in the contemporary era by focusing on the comedic slave narrative. While the comedic slave narratives use humor across their texts, the use of comedy is more interrogative in nature and gives its protagonists observational powers that are a critical feature in comedies to criticize and question extant power structures. The comedic slave narrative is reliant on postcolonial and Marxist theories, and the thesis makes uses of Althusser’s theories on interpellation and Fanon’s establishment of internalized racism to understand the forces that continue to colonize the black political consciousness in post-slavery life. However, comedy as an interrogative tool dismantles these structures to show how individuals can resist and grow in a social structure that is hostile to black independence.