12 years a slave-master

Abstract

My project articulates the concept of a post-neo-slave narrative, which I define as a genre consisting of literary and visual texts that meshes conventions of postmodernity with the neo-slave narrative. Using genre analysis as a methodology and a black feminist theoretical framework, I examine representations of white and black women slave-owners to argue that their financial power is complicated by their subjugation in order to gain power in the slave system that oppresses them, women are often required to simultaneously participate in the exploitation and abuse of slaves. I argue that the plantation mistress trope, a popular American cultural stereotype typified by the character of Scarlett OHara in Gone with the Wind, is evoked and complicated by twenty-first century artists; in their representations of slavery, by portraying women as actively contributing to the financial exchange of slaves, twenty-first century musicians, writers, and filmmakers, such as Edward P. Jones, Valerie Martin, Quentin Tarantino, and Missy Elliott, are more willing to implicate women for their economic role in slavery than previous generations were. As a result, women in post-neo-slave narratives are portrayed as commodities who commodify slaves a fluid and complex characterization that is a foundational characteristic of postmodern identity. The parallels these artists draw between nineteenth century American slavery and twenty-first century America forces a re-alignment of American culture with its slavery roots through the reconceptualization of power in particular, black women function as both oppressed and oppressors simultaneously, and it is their ability to think and act like slaves that increases their aptitude for slave-ownership, which emphasizes how postmodern identity restructures the conception of slave-owners.