Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form

ISBN-13: 9780195125337 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 296 str.

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

Opis

NeoSlave Narratives is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a given literary form--the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding the first appearance of that literary form in the 1960s, NeoSlave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent the crucial cultural debates that arose during the sixties.

Recenzje

Rushdy's book tells us a great deal not just about the four novels he reads closely, but also about the American conceptions of slavery and race in the second half of the Twentieth century; we walk away from Neo Slave Narratives with a multilayered sense of what Rushdy calls the social logic of the form, a logic which demonstrates that form is not extrinsic to historical understanding but rather constitutive of it. In short, Rushdy approaches his texts as complex objects circulating in many intersecting exchanges and listens carefully for the whistling and humming around him.