Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (review)

Abstract

If Ashraf Rushdy's Neo-slave Narratives was composed simply of his close readings of four Neo-slave narratives--Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale, and Johnson's Middle Passage--it would probably stand alone as a worthwhile book. But Rushdy builds far beyond Bernard Bell's original use of the title term as "residually oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom"; his nuanced and thoughtful examination of these four "contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and [End Page 541] take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative" offers a clear delineation of the form without ever forgetting that form's multiple functions and locations. Rushdy also usefully places the form in dialogue with the politics of Black Power, arguing that the novels "negotiate the two historical moments from which they emerge and in which they circulate--the Black Power movement of the late sixties and the neoconservative and right-wing backlash to it in the seventies and eighties." Thus, Rushdy tells us, these novels insist on a kind of intersubjectivity that questions the cultural politics both of literary individualism and of received and often (mis)appropriated histories of race and slavery at different points in the second half of the twentieth century.