Transnational black dialogues : : re-imagining slavery in the twenty-first century / / Markus Nehl.

• Funder: Knowledge Unlatched - KU Select 2017: Backlist Collection
• VerfasserIn: Nehl, Markus
• Author: Knowledge Unlatched - KU Select 2017: Backlist Collection
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Postcolonial studies ; Volume 28.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (213 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Markus Nehl focuses on black authors who, from a 21st-century perspective, revisit slavery in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa, Canada and Jamaica. Nehl's provocative readings of Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother, Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes and Marlon James' The Book of Night Women delineate how these texts engage in a fruitful dialogue with African diaspora theory about the complex relation between the local and transnational and the enduring effects of slavery. Reflecting on the ethics of narration, this study is particularly attentive to the risks of representing anti-black violence and to the intricacies involved in (re-)appropriating slavery's archive.

»An important contribution to the study of this new generation of neo-slave narratives that continues to develop with no end in sight as it engages the history and afterlife of chattel slavery on a transnational level, recasting the African Atlantic at the beginning of a still young century from nuanced postslavery perspectives.« Paula von Gleich, Amerikastudien, 62/4 (2018)

Table of Contents

Frontmatter 1 Contents 5 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction: Slavery - An "Unmentionable" Past? 9 1. The Concept of the African Diaspora and the Notion of Difference 39 2. From Human Bondage to Racial Slavery: Toni Morrison's A Mercy (2008) 55 3. Rethinking the African Diaspora: Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother (2007) 79 4. "Hertseer:" Re-Imagining Cape Slaver y in Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed (2006) 109 5. Transnational Diasporic Journeys in Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007) 135 6. A Vicious Circle of Violence: Revisiting Jamaican Slavery in Marlon James's The Book of Night Women (2009) 161 Epilogue: The Past of Slavery and "the Incomplete Project of Freedom" 191 Works Cited 197