The traditional black slave narrative was a political tool used to document the experience of being subjugated and commodified in early America. A revised literature has appeared in the contemporary, post-Civil Rights moment that takes on the pretense of the slave narrative: the neo-slave narrative. Unlike traditional slave narratives, neo-slave narratives’ potency does not hinge on veracity--each neo-slave narrative is a synthesis of oral history and the author's imagination. In this presentation, I investigate how narratives go so far as to rerender history, and transform the image of the brutalized slave to a determinist, autonomous figure in exceptional situations using humor. I will close read two neo-slave narratives: Flight to Canada (1976) by Ishmael Reed and Oxherding Tale (1982) by Charles Johnson. Of particular interest to this literary investigation are the novels’ respective protagonists who, between them, bear atypical Western educations, cosmopolitan friends, and traverse the landscape of the Antebellum South with wit and manner. I highlight how Johnson and Reed cater to contemporary readers' premonitions of what ought to happen in a treacherous slave narrative by creating comical encounters between the subjected and the empowered. I also discuss how Johnson invokes explicit Western and Eastern philosophical concepts to lend an air of consciousness to slavery's absurdity, and how Reed places deeply stereotyped characters in an anachronistic setting--a time structure that often conflates the events of the Civil Rights moment with the early 19th century--in order to track how black political progress has and has not changed in the intermediate time. Ultimately, I unearth how the two authors use neo-slave narrative humor as a tool to subvert notions of the slave as a stagnant, brutalized subject and foster discussions of black agency between the signposts of enslavement, emancipation, and progressivism in the black experience through American history.

My research aims to counter the notion that women do not mind the silencing, sexualization, and objectification of their bodies by providing a platform whereby the often unseen and unheard female body can voice a resounding reply that, on the contrary, she does mind, and very much so. My research examines works of contemporary historical fiction, like Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, in order to explore the silencing of particular women in critical moments of capitalist transformation within and beyond the United States: the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and imperialism, and the subsequent 20th century proliferation of neoliberalism, nation-building, and imperialism. It highlights this silencing by tracing traumas the female body endures. And does this specifically by defining the different female body parts that function as primary shock-absorbers as women who are coping with the effects of dislocation, displacement, and diaspora are not only gendered and sexualized in these labor markets but are also raced – a key component of representation and sexual exploitation. Vehemently criticizing the phallocratic order responsible for these various states of uprootedness is Luce Irigaray, whose essay “This Sex Which Is Not One” is concerned with the search for and implementation of a uniquely feminine language. My research interrogates the possibility of such a language existing and the significance it would bear in breaking the univocal shroud restricting the expressions and movements of the female body. This analysis utilizes a Marxist reading of the commodification of woman and her sex, as well as Irigaray’s conception of mimesis as it pertains to the recognition and viewing of the female. The injuries of being sexualized, gendered, and raced, unfortunately restrict the feminine discourse that female bodies could potentially produce by dehumanizing the female and rendering her nothing but a voiceless soft slip of flesh.

In this essay and presentation, I examine historical accounts of the civil rights movement to see how these narratives have perpetuated heterosexist domination that allowed male leadership and women's subordination to be normalized.  Furthermore, I examine the ways in which heteronormative forms of masculinity are performed by male leaders through the oppression of women and gays and lesbians. I read these instances of sexism and homophobia as attempts to avenge the alleged emasculation of black men by systems of white supremacy and patriarchy. These historiograhical gaps and obfuscations, I argue, are operations of power, but they also provide possible sites of resistance.