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Full Description
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.
Contents
Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a slave girl, written by herself: the ur-narrative of black womanhood
Not enough of the past: Octavia E. Butler's Kindred
History, agency, and subjectivity in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose
The metaphysics of black female identity in Toni Morrison's Beloved
J. California Cooper's family: of (absent?) mothers, (motherless?) daughters, and (interracial?) relations
The economies of bondage and freedom in Lorene Cary's The price of a child