Genre Experiments: Thylias Moss's Slave Moth and the Poetic Neo-Slave Narrative

The practice of American chattel slavery frequently involved experimenting on the enslaved through physical and psychological manipulation that treated "the entire captive community" as "a living laboratory" (Spillers 68). Physically, slaveholders "measured, used, and abused" black bodies, viewed as mere "producing machines," to "transfer white pseudo-theories into practice" (Kelly 15). Evidence of this can be found in extensive print discourse providing data about yield and advice on slave management, such as Thomas Affleck's best-selling 1847 Cotton Plantation Record and Account.¹ Such manuals advocated "careful management of reproduction" (Owens 70) due to "masters' economic stake in bonded women's fertility" (Roberts, Killing 4), which also produced experiments on enslaved women in the field of medicine.² Psychologically, those in bondage were subjected to insidious experiments probing their intellectual capacities, aimed at determining or disproving racial difference. All such experiments reflected the supposedly rational epistemology and methods of Western science.

A similar epistemology indirectly shapes the representations of the "slavery cultural industry" (Crawford 74), a proliferation of historical and fictional texts that has produced calcified expectations for writings about slavery. These expectations arise from prevailing teleological views of history and so assume affiliated texts will meet two parameters: form rooted in Western linear time and plot invested in teleological development. Many texts about enslavement, from those by historians to those by white novelists, center "genealogies, linear histories, and progressions in time" (Posmentier 136) in ways that reflect these expectations. Yet Sonya Posmentier, alongside other scholars, argues that emplotment imposes problematic imperatives on representations of slavery; as such, linear narrative can further relegate African Americans to the status of mere objects of investigation.³

To combat that problem, many neo-slave narratives highlight in plot the history of experimentation on the enslaved and its affiliated epistemologies and tools.⁴ Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019) describes "instruments of science and discovery" "[a]ll over the house" used "for party tricks" (40). Many also represent the associated print discourse: Sherley Anne Williams's protagonist in Dessa Rose (1986) is interviewed for a book on slave rebellions, and Schoolteacher in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) taxonomizes characteristics of the enslaved, encapsulating both the experimental impulse and the desire to document it in the racist language of science.

Supplementing these plot depictions, authors of these texts often perform their own experiments in form. All neo-slave texts to some degree experiment in form, aiming to "undermine conventions of linearity and distinctions between past and present" (Spaulding 5) and the epistemologies they buttress. Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016), which he deems in an interview "not really a historical novel at all" ("Colson"), exemplifies this. The novel's plot depicts experimentation on fugitive slaves, but his characters are subjected to experiments that did not all actually unfold pre-abolition. Whitehead thus defies readers' expectations for both the form and the content of a novel about slavery: he violates formal demands by situating twentieth-century eugenics and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment against an antebellum backdrop, and he violates plot norms by failing to depict his protagonist attaining freedom, typically the teleological endpoint expected in neo-slave texts. Whitehead's novel interrogates literary critical expectations imposed on neo-slave narratives in prose. Thylias Moss's Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse (2004), which depicts psychological experimentation on the enslaved, also subverts assumptions about poetry.

I argue that the formal innovations of Slave Moth demonstrate how the epistemology that produced such historical experiments indirectly shapes criticism on lyric in particular. Many scholars assume that verse by black authors is "naively lyrical" (White 268) or "unmediated witnessing" (Huang 102). As a result, critics rarely read such poetry "with attention to what its forms, not just its words have to say" (Wang 92).⁵ These incomplete interpretations are rooted in beliefs that parallel those of science and that similarly yield ongoing disparate treatment of those of African descent, albeit in literary rather than physical modes.⁶ Moss counters readers' inability "to imagine history" outside of those "popular constructs" (Moss, "Thylias" 142) of form that are "configured...