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

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.

Author: Angelyn Mitchell
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 03/01/2002
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.08w x 0.62d
ISBN: 9780813530697

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2002 pg. 470

About the Author
Angelyn Mitchell is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the editor of Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present.