Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction by Venetria K. Patton, and: Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction by Philip Page, and: Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy (review)

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 32, no. 1, 2002 American Studies in Review Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction. Venetria K. Patton. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. 194. Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction. Philip Page. Jackson , MS: UP of Mississippi, 1999. Pp. 256. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Pp. 286. Each country and culture, Margaret Atwood contends, has a “unifying and informing symbol.” For white Americans, this symbol is the frontier: a symbol that represents the leaving behind of an unwanted past for a promising future. Freedom and choice characterize this symbol. For African Americans, Philip Page contends, the symbol would be “passage” – the passage from one shore to another, from one identity to another, from one reality to another. Conversely, this symbol represents loss, not least the loss of freedom and of choice.1 The past twenty years have brought a virtual renaissance of fiction published by African-American writers attempting to recover a past washed out by the waters of the Middle Passage and scarred by the horrors of slavery and racism. Authors such as David Bradley, Octavia Butler, Ernest Gaines, Charles Johnson, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Sherley Anne Williams, to name but a few, seek to find ways to come to terms with their American past, and salvage the vestiges of a distant African past. At the centre of this quest for the past lies the need to mend an unsettled sense of identity and the need to end a persistent feeling of placelessness. The history of African Americans in the New World is characterized by rupture and migration. Never quite belonging to/in this New World, and never again to feel at home in Africa, many descendants of African slaves exist, like the very hyphen separating their dual identities, between two worlds, two identities, two eras. In response to this wealth of literature about slavery, literary scholars have also produced rich and prolific works that strive to understand and appreciate these African-American texts. The critics listen to what these novels tell us about the Canadian Review of American Studies 32 (2002) 134 past as well as the present and evaluate the ways in which they are impacting our contemporary social and cultural fabric. The three critical texts that I discuss examine contemporary African-American fiction from a different thematic perspective. Together, they provide a heterogeneous view of contemporary African American writing – one that reflects the complexity and sophistication of the fiction they pay tribute to. Venetria K. Patton analyzes Harret Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, Pauline Hopkin’s Contending Forces, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. She explores the motif of motherhood in these works and connects this recurring trope in black women’s writing to a particular experience originating in slavery. Patton contends that the depictions of black womanhood in these texts – specifically through the motif of maternity – are manifestations of the legacy of slavery inasmuch as they attempt to counteract the degendering process that the institution of slavery imposed on slaves in general and females slaves in particular. Motherhood, Patton argues, is the vehicle through which certain black women writers attempted, and still attempt, to reverse the damage done by this process and reconstruct a sense of gender. The slave system, explains Patton, degendered slaves by treating them like chattel. Clearly, slave owners recognized sexual differences – they used female slaves as breeders. Yet they failed to acknowledge gender differences. This is apparent in many practices, such as work patterns and labour use. Despite occasional divisions of labour between male and female slaves, both were commonly assigned the same kind and quantity of work, particularly in the field. Even while pregnant, women slaves did not receive preferential treatment and continued to carry the same workload . Ultimately, women and men slaves were equally viewed...