Tim Spaulding

The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, I examine contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand set out to counter traditional history’s reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In Re-Forming the Past, I explore the conversations between past and present, between history and fiction, and between postmodern theory and African American literature. Although these novels share some elements with postmodern fiction written during the same period, I argue that these texts constitute a uniquely African American postmodern approach to history.
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