MEMORY AND THE NEO-SLAVE NOVEL IN COLSON WHITEHEAD’S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD AND TA-NEHISI COATES’ THE WATER DANCER

Roberto Ferreira Junior

Resumo


This analysis investigates two recent African-American novels, namely, The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead and The Water Dancer (2019) by Ta-nehisi Coates from the configurations proposed by the literary genre known as neo-slave narratives. These narratives are postmodern fictional reinterpretations of 19th century slave narratives which had a fundamental role in the American process of abolition. First, I will provide a brief overview of neo-slave narratives, particularly with regards to the North American literary context, and proceed to investigate how the two novels can be classified as belonging to this genre. Second, I will focus on the role of memory in both novels as forgotten historical events and religious myths are revisited by the writers. As theoretical support, I will turn to authors such as Bernard Bell, Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, Toni Morrison, Valerie Smith, among others, who investigated not only the reasons for the emergence of neo-slave narratives, but also reflected on the implications that these postmodern narratives have for the memory of slavery.


Palavras-chave


Neo-slave narrative, slavery, memory, racism.

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A Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada está indexada nas seguintes bases:


Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, ISSN 0103-6963, ISSN 2596-304X (on line)

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Esta revista utiliza uma Licença Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0).

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