| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
This thesis will examine the three neo-slave narratives Flight to Canada (1976) by Ishmael Reed, Kindred (1979) by Octavia Butler, and Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison. The narratives take their inspiration from classic American slave narratives. However, written a century and more after the abolition of slavery, they differ in form, style, and content. The novels are published in the post-civil rights era, and they reflect the rise of the African American need for self-representation developed out of civil rights activism in the ‘60s. The thesis will explore how the three neo-slave narratives disrupt genre boundaries in the spirit reflected by postmodernism, and as follows these narratives manage to depict slaves and their testimonies in a new way. The thesis will argue that the novels share a common goal. In their shared aim to experiment with genre, Reed, Butler, and Morrison create hybrid forms of novel-writing and story-telling. Consequently, the thesis will examine how the disruption of genre boundaries creates fantastic hybrid novels that weaken conventions of linearity and the distinctions between past and present. Additionally, in the spirit of Lyotard and postmodernism, the authors consider the grand narrative and objective truths to be gone. This creates room for a multitude of subjective voices which stand forth as an intersubjective project that wants to present an alternative slave (hi)story.
Keywords: Genre-disruption, intertextuality, genre-hybridity, fragmentation, historical anachronism, blurring of time and space, meta-fiction, multivocality, (re)memory, trickster characters, ghosts, Neo-HooDooism, relativism of storytelling, genealogy, and the collective community. | |
