Contextualizing Escape in the Neo-slave Narratives of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

Abstract

Analyzing how interracial relationships, violence, and notions of refuge are depicted in the neo-slave narratives of Butler’s Kindred and Williams’s Dessa Rose, Francis makes a case for why neo-slave narratives can explore and exploit the slave’s escape in ways that fugitive slave narratives could not. Exploring how the languages of feeling and judgment are used by the characters in Butler’s and Williams’s novels to complicate the meaning of escape for enslaved black women, Francis demonstrates that the neo-slave narratives by Butler and Williams are less concerned with examining the journey to freedom than with offering us fictional analyses of enslaved black women’s feelings and reactions to freedom.