The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction, and: Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (review)

Scholarship on literature depicting or produced by enslaved Africans in the diaspora has turned toward trauma in recent years. Angelyn Mitchell's monograph on contemporary black women's fiction that depicts both slavery and liberation continues this critical trend. Following other theorists, Mitchell recasts slave narratives as principally "liberatory." Focusing on the political and psychological agency demonstrated by female characters who escape enslavement, Mitchell displaces the labels "slave" and "neoslave," arguing that these narratives "analyze freedom" (4). She defines the slave narrative as a "contemporary novel that engages the historical period of chattel slavery in order to provide new models of liberation by problematizing the concept of freedom" (4). In discussions of Octavia Butler's Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, J. California Cooper's Family, Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, Mitchell focuses on black female agency and freedom and challenges readings that position slavery's history at the center of the black female "self."

At the heart of The Freedom to Remember is the assertion that African American women's texts posit the possibility of surviving trauma and of healing. "The liberatory narrative reminds us," Mitchell writes, "that, however traumatic, the past is memory, the past is identity, and the past is meditation" (149). The writer's nearly hidden claim is that African American women's writing focuses on healing and liberatory practices in ways that African American men's works do not. Mitchell is right to point out that a comparative study between men's and women's texts is beyond her scope here, but the claim that she does "not find the narratives by Black men to be liberatory" in the way that she defines the genre cries out for a more developed analysis of the liberatory characteristics of African American women's writing. Although Mitchell may be strategically wary of an essentialist reading of all African American women's fiction as she begins to piece together her complex argument about how African American women writers have addressed the seemingly insurmountable nature of trauma, a concise theoretical model remains slightly buried in her rigorous readings.

Mitchell sees Harriet Jacobs's narrative as an urtext that introduces key themes of the liberatory tradition, such as the relationship between individualism and communalism, the threat of violation to a vulnerable black female body, and the ways in which the sexuality of the heroine can serve as an impetus for enlightenment. From her reading of Butler's Kindred, it is clear that Mitchell sees these texts as illuminating how the history of slavery is shaped by what we choose to remember and forget about the past. Throughout, Mitchell explores how these authors warn about the possibility of being "buried by the remembrance." Some readers may desire a more explicit theoretical model to accompany this very solid and coherent volume of criticism, even though, it could be argued, such a model may lie beyond the scope of the study. Mitchell's text is nonetheless an important contribution to African American literary studies because it joins others that discuss the healing aspects of African American women's fiction, and it may inspire more work that elaborates on the evocative ideas presented in these close readings.

In contrast to Mitchell's work, Dwight McBride's Impossible Witnesses examines the slave body rather than the liberated body and spirit. His rich volume takes up the complex and strategic discourses that circulated around the truth of slave testimony. McBride's text is also actively engaged with trauma theory, exploring the idea of...