earticle

영어

This paper intends to join the recent debate in African American literary scholarship regarding contemporary narratives’ “historical turn” to the slave past by situating the critical dialogue within a larger context of Black (in)humanity. Questioning the literary modes through which slavery is represented, scholars have examined psychological and aesthetic investment in the traumatic slave past as a means of forging contemporary African Americans’ relationship to Black subjectivity. This paper shifts the analytical focus in approaching the historical turn debate by examining two early neo-slave narratives-Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora-as emphasizing individual agency and selfhood of the post-slavery generations. While many scholars have criticized neo-slave narratives’ melancholic historicism as pessimistically overdetermining the Black political future in the United States, I create a rupture in the existing scholarship by examining subtle moments of Black subject formation in narratives of slavery. By engaging with theories of memory and trauma, I argue that Morrison and Jones warn against the dangers of ancestors’ collective trauma devouring the present lives of post-slavery African Americans.