African American Adolescent Female Heroes

Abstract

This monograph acknowledges the history and legacy of enslavement in America at a time when it is crucial that we do so. With the second wave of Black Lives Matter, inequalities in publishing have been brought to light, resulting in an influx of Young Adult speculative fiction publications featuring African American young women. Dealing with the twenty-first century contributions along, fiction writers and academic theorists have either been excluding African American young women from speculative fiction or refuse to place these young women in the role of hero. Further, theoretical examinations appear to be concentrating on the absence of African American people from speculative fiction and stereotypical representation. The fact is that African American adolescent young women do exist in twenty-first century speculative fiction, however, in many cases they tend to be a recreation of the enslaved women from American antebellum slave narratives. Further, once #BlackGirlMagic texts come to fruition, there is a revelation of positive African American adolescent young women heroes. The application of the neo-slave narrative structure to the twenty-first-century Young Adult text is investigated in this monograph. For this study, texts from the twenty-first century have been selected, thereby ensuring that the examination is new, relevant, and necessary.