Abstract
The notion of the recreation of a past to which the historian has limited or no access informs the African American historical novels of the 1980s and subsequent decades. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), for example, considers the implications of infanticide, while Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982) dramatizes the sexual exploitation of slave men. The emphasis of the works from this period is on the heterogeneity of the experience of the enslaved self, along with the exploration of facets of that experience, which, in both slave narratives and nineteenth-century literature, remained in the realm of the unspeakable. This also reflects the historiography of American slavery from the 1970s and 1980s, which emphasizes the slave’s experience of and perspective on the peculiar institution. The historical studies of this period reflect, as Thomas C. Holt states, “a consensus that despite the harshness of the system, slaves were able to create communities beyond their master’s total control. They fashioned institutions and a cultural ethos that were functional to their needs, that enabled them to survive the rigors of slavery and bequeath a legacy of resistance to their posterity.”1
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Notes
Thomas C. Holt, African-American History (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1997), 6.
Robert Penn Warren, “The Uses of History in Fiction,” Southern Literary Journal 1, no. 2 (Spring 1969): 61.
Sherley Anne Williams, “The Lion’s History: The Ghetto Writes Back,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 76, no. 2–3 (Summer-Fall 1993): 248.
Sherley Anne Williams, “author’s note” to Dessa Rose (London: Virago, 1998), 5.
Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 179.
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 50.
Williams, “I Sing This Song for Our Mothers,” in Peacock Poems (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 79–83. In fact, in the poem, the writer already traces the story line that she will later develop in her novel.
Stephanie Sievers, “Escaping the Master(’s) Narrative? Sherley Anne Wil-liams’s Rethinking of Historical Representation in ‘Meditations on History,’” in Re-Visioning the Past: Historical Self-Reflexivity in American Short Fiction, ed. Bernd Engler and Oliver Scheiding (Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher, 1998), 366.
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantations of the South (New York: Norton, 1985), 27.
Barbara Johnson, as quoted by Sidonie Smith in “Resisting the Gaze of Embodiment: Women’s Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century,” in American Womens Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Mango Culley (Madison: University Press of Wisconsin, 1992), 34.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination (London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52.
Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery,” in Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 19, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 591.
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6.
Mary Kemp Davis, “Everybody Knows Her Name: The Recovery of the Past in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 12, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 547
Jane Mathison-Fife, “Dessa Rose: A Critique of Received History of Slavery,” Kentucky Philological Review 8 (1993): 30.
Jacquelyn A. Fox-Good, “Singing the Unsayable: Theorizing Music in Dessa Rose” in Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison, ed. Saadi A. Simawe (New York: Garland, 2000), 24.
Houston A. Baker Jr., Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 13.
Angela Y. Davis, “Black Women and Music: A Historical Legacy of Struggle,” in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990), 10.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 109.
Joanne M. Braxton, “Ancestral Presence: The Outraged Mother Figure in Contemporary Afra-American Writing,” in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990), 300.
Ann E. Trapasso, “Returning to the Site of Violence: The Restructuring of Slavery’s Legacy in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose,” in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression, ed. Deirdre Lashgari (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 223.
Shelli B. Fowler, “Marking the Body, Demarcating the Body Politic: Issues of Agency and Identity in Louisa Picquet and Dessa Rose,” College Language Association Journal 40, no. 4 (June 1997): 474.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 4.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (London: Virago, 1994), 13.
bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (London: Routledge, 1992), 338–42.
See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 315.
Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 37.
Keith Byerman, as quoted by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy in “Reading Mammy: The Subject of Relation in Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose,” African American Review 27, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 366.
Nicole R. King, “Meditations and Mediations: Issues of History and Fiction in Dessa Rose,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 76, no. 2–3 (Summer-Fall 1993): 365.
Deborah E. McDowell, “Negotiating Between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery After Freedom—Dessa Rose,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Ramp-ersad (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 151.
John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 94.
Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 166.
See Gayl Jones, interviewed by Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters 5:3, no. 16 (October 1982): 33.
Mikhail Bakhtin, as quoted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 2.
Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 166.
Gayl Jones, Corregidora (London: Camden Press, 1988), 22.
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© 2011 Ana Nunes
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Nunes, A. (2011). “The Undocumentable Inside of History”. In: African American Women Writers’ Historical Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118850_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118850_5
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