Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction

Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone, a parodic revision of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, has been billed as a work of revisionist history that challenges familiar notions about life on plantations. Yet its use of a fictive source and its therapeutic ethos suggest that it may be more accurately described as an example of what Teresa L. Ebert has called "ludic" postmodernism—a mode of thinking whose privileging of difference and performativity offers psychological satisfactions at the expense of a truer and more transformative history.