Metanarratives of Slavery

Abstract

I had to see. I needed to see how I had been taught to see. I decided to go back. —Robin Coste Lewis (“Epilogue” 146) In the late 1980s, Hortense J. Spillers observed that slavery had become “primarily discursive” (29)—known not through any sort of direct knowledge but through the “cultural units” of the stories that have attempted to describe the institution (32). Those units, as Spillers would demonstrate in her analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe, were heavily influenced by the white-supremacist imagination. Most recorded testimony from enslaved people has been mediated by the white gaze, either through the expectations of the white abolitionists who published antebellum slave narratives or the primarily white interviewers of the Federal Writers’ Project’s Slave Narrative Collection.1 Meanwhile, US popular culture has been dominated by sensational white-authored depictions of slavery, from blackface minstrelsy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1936). Mirroring the violence of official archives (Hartman, “Venus” 10), the resulting gaps and distortions in the popular imagination pose a challenge to writers and artists who wish to meaningfully grapple with enslavement. Some contemporary narratives of slavery have sought to redress the impact of white perspectives: The most famous example is Beloved (1987), which Toni Morrison has described as her attempt to “fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left” (“Site” 113) as a result of their “shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it” (110). Many contemporary depictions of slavery take a different approach, however. Instead of restoring what is missing in the record and reversing the historic influence of white expectations, these works seek to inhabit and examine that influence, creating frankly double-visioned art and literature.