Post-Black Satire

This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.

Sentimental Globalism

This chapter argues that neo-abolitionism uses sentimentalism to dehistoricize contemporary atrocities, viewing them as revivals of a superseded Atlantic past. Modern slave narratives, explicitly written to abolish modern slavery across the globe (ranging across Sudan, Haiti, and Sierra Leone, promoted by various neo-abolitionist organizations), enshrine the language of sentimentalism as the most effective weapon in the human rights arsenal, defining a global relation between us and them solely as a matter of sentiment. Survivors outline an idyllic childhood, abduction and captivity, a life of servitude, until the moment of humanitarian rescue and a new life in America. Reading Francis Bok’s memoir Escape from Slavery (2003) alongside Dave Eggers’s neoliberal novel What Is the What (2006), I trace how the formal exchanges among subject, author, and amanuensis generate a seemingly new way for Americans to imagine themselves as global citizens, constituting themselves as global via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity.

Epilogue

The epilogue turns to current surveys of the cultural landscape of slavery, concluding that even as widespread ignorance about the history of the institution continues, many readers express fatigue with the subject of trauma. Considering the scene of the classroom alongside persistent analogies to slavery in media coverage of Central American refugees seeking asylum in the United States in 2018, the epilogue urges a new comparative literacy that allows us to understand convergences with the global present alongside differences from the Atlantic past.

We Need New Diasporas

This chapter examines recent celebrated fictions from the new African diaspora that remake American conceptions of race by placing them in relation to the history of the postcolonial state and its own itineraries of hope and despair, migration and return. Writers like Chris Abani, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, and Dinaw Mengestu appropriate various genres—the great American novel, the reverse imperial romance, the black Atlantic travel narrative, the ethnic bildungsroman—to delineate new conceptions of diaspora, beyond the assimilation mandated by the conventional immigrant plot or the melancholy sounded by critics nostalgic for simpler moments of opposition between Africa and the West. Often termed Afropolitan, these writers resist received notions of what constitutes African literature, even as they open up numerous critical possibilities for the study of diaspora, expanding previous geographies and weaving together race and class with location.

Introduction

The introduction explores the revival of slavery in contemporary culture, ranging over examples of trauma from literature, culture, and politics. It assesses the valence of analogy as an analytic for racial and comparative critique. It lays out the key features of the slave narrative (by Frederick Douglass, for example) and examines the principal concerns of the neo-slave narrative by writers like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Charles Johnson. It then traces the shift from Atlantic to global as the slave narrative frames experiences of human rights violations across the Global South. Then, the introduction considers the uses of genre for thinking about race, showing how race and form have always been entangled.

Talking Books (Talking Back)

This chapter takes up questions of literary ventriloquism and surrogate authorship that always plagued the slave narrative and are imaginatively reinvented by such black Atlantic writers as Toni Morrison and Caryl Phillips in their revisiting of Shakespeare’s Othello. To do so, they return to the founding scene of the “Talking Book” of the Atlantic slave narrative, where the slave worries that the master’s book will not speak to him or her. Staging a range of responses to analogy, these writers place slavery next to colonialism and the Holocaust, renovating but also complicating a classic postcolonial project of writing back to the empire in order to decolonize the mind. Their explorations return us to the meaning of slavery itself, its singularity, its relation to narrative, and to modern conceptions of racial formation. Such efforts transform the classic project of writing back to the text of Western authority, evenly negotiating the pull of influence, intertextuality, and adaptation.

The Gothic Child

Chapter 2 focuses on the figure of the child as soldier. Reading expansively across memoirs and novels about war, I show how the figure of the child shuttles between sentimental and gothic modes, the former universalizing, the latter calling attention to history, often repeating debates about American and Atlantic gothic. Best-selling narratives by Ishmael Beah, Susan Minot, and Uzodinma Iweala replicate the logic of humanitarian spectacles like Kony 2012 (condemning Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony) and the movement to #BringBackOurGirls (focusing on the Chibok girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria). Tracing how and why the African child soldier appears as the afterlife of the Atlantic slave, the chapter unravels the assumptions about race in translation and travel at work. Lingering in gothic terror, refusing closure or redemption, novels by Chris Abani and Ahmadou Kourouma unearth repressed histories in order to challenge the absolute innocence demanded by human rights advocates.