Re -forming the past: Aesthetics, politics, and the African American postmodern slave narrative

During the last quarter of this century, many African-American fiction writers have returned to the slave narrative, revising and reconstituting this autobiographical form from a late twentieth-century vantage point while simultaneously evoking the history of American slavery. Contemporary revisions of slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Octavia Butler's Kindred , Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, and Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose do not merely retell the slave's story from a contemporary perspective but also explore the ideological ramifications of the slave narrative form as one of our primary discourses on slavery. The impulse to revisit the slave narrative form constitutes an African-American postmodern approach to narrative discourse. This impulse is the product of larger cultural and literary politics which seek to re-form our understanding of the slave experience and its cultural legacy. In revising the slave narrative form, these writers gesture to the historical and the postmodern in a political act of narrative that forces readers to interrogate not only their views on American slavery but also slavery's enduring legacy in contemporary culture. With an approach that draws from African American literary and cultural theory, as well as current theories of postmodern aesthetics and culture, I develop a working definition of African-American postmodernism through the specificity of the contemporary slave narrative. In the process, I argue that this approach to contemporary African American fiction expands our conception of postmodernism.