Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction

The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction

Mitchell, Angelyn

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0813530695
ISBN13: 9780813530697
Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr
Published: Mar 1 2002
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.68
Height: 0.62 Width: 6.08 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison's Beloved, J. California Cooper's Family, and Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child.

Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as liberatory narratives. These works create a space to problematize the slavery/freedom dichotomy from which contemporary black women writers have the safe vantage point to reveal aspects of enslavement that their ancestors could not examine. The nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, by contrast, was written to aid the cause of abolition by revealing the unspeakable realitiesof slavery. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.

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