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  • Neo-Slave Narrative Texts
  • Charles Henry Rowell

From the very beginning, when Joan Anim-Addo first asked to guest edit a special issue of Callaloo on the neo-slave narrative, I was not only impressed, I was very pleased—overjoyed is a more appropriate description—that I was not alone in realizing that there had too long been a lacuna in African Diaspora literary criticism dealing with the phenomenon of slave narratives, over one-hundred of which were created by enslaved African Americans from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. Overjoyed, too, for here is a Black British scholar, university professor, director of Caribbean Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London—Joan Anim-Addo, who is herself an impressive practicing creative writer making such a request; and, even more important, Joan had herself written a play, Imoinda—Or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2001, bilingual—English and Italian; only in English, 2003), which is informed by the slave narrative. Shortly after Joan (and Maria Helena Lima, whom Joan selected as her co-editor of this very important project) created and posted a call for papers, numerous manuscripts began to flow into our Texas-based office, and by the end of the deadline of the call, we had received our largest number of critical manuscripts on a special subject. There is no wonder that various literary critics and creative writers and other kinds of artists would turn their attention to the art of the neo-slave narrative, especially after Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved (1987), her being Nobelized in 1993, and later her own critical writings about the importance of the slave narrative and her use of the form in the production of own creative writing. Thanks to Joan Anim-Addo for her important request, which, I believe, will occasion more important writing as a result of this international interest in the art and ideas of this enslaved necessary form and its modern production, "the neo-slave narrative."

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When I first encountered Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Ernest J Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1971, Ishmael Reed's satirical Flight to Canada five years later, followed by Octavia Butler's Kindred in 1979, I was absolutely convinced that my earlier graduate school musings during the 1960s—however undeveloped—were indeed valid. That is, like Booker T. Washington's autobiographical Up from Slavery (1900, 1901), a number of modern African American novels are informed by traditions found in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century "slave narratives." As novels, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved [End Page 1] (1987), like Gaines's Miss Jane Pittman and Butler's Kindred, are indeed each "a kind of literary archeology," Morrison's own description of the neo-slave texts in which modern writers attempt to "fill in the blanks that the slave narrative left"—what for the restraints that their white readers expected of enslaved writers, which means that the authors of the slave narratives were constrained to speak a certain way to their white readers. That is, they were not allowed to speak reality as they experienced it. This does not mean that African American novelists are trying to write history books; what they create are artistic texts which demonstrate how collective domination and its accompanying instruments, such as forbidden speech and psychological violence, are vile forms of repression and dehumanization. One of the achievements of neo-slave narratives is what they tell us and generations to come about unwritten texts on bondage and servitude, about what enslaved people were not allowed to speak of or write about, "the blanks that the slave narrative left," "their interior lives," Toni Morrison tells us.

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Again, thanks to the guest editors of this Callaloo special issue (40.4, fall 2017) for providing us with selective creative texts, which are informed by the architectonics and the political and social strategies of ancestral slave narratives. What for the rising costs of printing and publishing, I had to move the creative texts to the winter 2018 issue of the journal (41.1). These selective creative texts are but a few of the various examples...

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