The freedom to remember: narrative, slavery, and gender in contemporary black women's fiction

Abstract

Mitchell's extraordinary study is rich in detail and analysis, confidently mediating our ways of re-membering the narratives of slavery as well as the ways of women--as writer and as character--bearing courageous witness. The Freedom to Remember is scholarship at its very best and will surely be one of the essential books in critical and cultural studies. --Karla Holloway, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, Duke University The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as narratives. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation. Angelyn Mitchell is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the editor of Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present.