Earticle

초록

영어

With the publication in 1999 of Ashraf H. A. Rushdy’s seminal work that reads what Rushdy defines as “neo-slave narratives,” critical discourse in African American literary analysis over the past decade has turned to narratives that are fictional revisitations and recreations of slavery. Several literary scholars have identified and elaborated on the importance of the literary genre of the neo-slave narrative/contemporary narrative of slavery, in particular, the ways that the genre provides significant meditations and explorations of black subject formation in slavery and of black identity formations into the present. This paper attempts to consider the compelling literary interventions of present day narratives of slavery, specifically through a reading of the late Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose. Governed by a different political and social purpose from the original antebellum slave narratives, present day narratives of slavery are theorizations of the complex nature of black experience in enslavement that explore the subtle manifestations of black resistance and survival. My reading of Williams’ novel situates the centrality of black (heterosexual) love in black resistance and survival. I argue that in Williams’ fiction, it is through the sixteen-year-old pregnant black slave Dessa’s reliance on her memory of her beloved husband that she sustains herself in most brutal circumstances of confinement. In addition, in concentrating my reading of the novel on the first section, “The Darky,” which revolves around the visitations of the racist white writer Adam Nehemiah who attempts to “read” Dessa, I elaborate on how Williams presents black love and relations as crucial means of opposition to white domination. Dessa’s personal narrative and her memory of Kaine constitute a site of resistance, for Nehemiah fails to have control of his interview and is thereby unable to create a text about her. I thus examine how Dessa’s ability to successfully thwart and disrupt a white writer/society’s attempts at violent inscriptions of her slave body and slave experience is thematized through Dessa’s profound connection with and love for the male slave/husband Kaine.

목차

Works Cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• Min-Jung Kim

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813