Reviews in American History

Recent scholarship in slavery studies has pressed on the limits of archival sources for telling the stories of Black people's experiences of enslavement. Much of this recent work is steeped in an interdisciplinary Black feminist theoretical tradition—including crucial interventions by Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman—that centers Black female subjects in analyses of power and violence in slave regimes. This recent work also builds on the pathbreaking studies by scholars who scoured archives to reveal Black women's experiences under slavery. The work of Deborah Gray White, Thavolia Glymph, Brenda Stevenson, Darlene Clark Hine, Gerda Lerner, Angela Davis, Wilma King, Nell Painter, and Jennifer Morgan, among others, paved the way for contemporary challenges to the limits of the archive, especially when it comes to questions of sexual violence and the perilousness of domestic spaces for enslaved women.

Thus, works like Stephanie Smallwood's Saltwater Slavery (2008) and Sowande M. Muskateem's Slavery at Sea (2016) fill in and broaden our understandings of the parts of Black Atlantic history that have seemed most inaccessible. Stephanie Camp's Closer to Freedom (2004), Jessica Millward's Finding Charity's Folk (2015), Marisa J. Fuentes's Dispossessed Lives (2016), Erica Armstrong Dunbar's Never Caught (2017), Sasha Turner's Contested Bodies (2017), and Deirdre Cooper Owens's Medical Bondage: Rage, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, for example, each examine how Black women experienced the interconnected relationships between intimacy, violence, and resistance so foundational to slavery's machinations.

In concert with slavery scholarship, African diasporic literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic have long been concerned with telling stories otherwise suppressed or erased in official archives and dominant representations of Black subjects across time and space. Indeed, within the U.S. context, Black literary works have long been part of the teaching of African diasporic [End Page 338] histories, filling in gaping holes in dominant historiographies of the transatlantic trade, slavery, colonialism, and liberation, excavating and amplifying silenced voices in the archive.

The neo-slave narrative in particular explores the recuperative work of what Toni Morrison calls "rememory" in telling stories impossible for enslaved, fugitive, and freed Black people to tell themselves during the antebellum period. This deep literary tradition includes works by African-American, Caribbean, and Afro-Canadian writers, ranging from Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) to Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1992), Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) on through Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Maryse Conde's I, Tituba (1992) and Segu (1996), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003), Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes (2007), and Marlon James's The Book of Night Women (2009). Read alongside scholarship in slavery studies, these works at once delve deep into official archives and produce their own resistant—often speculative—critical archive that centers the perspectives of enslaved Black people. As with the scholarship indebted to a Black feminist tradition, so too are neo-slave narratives unflinching in their depiction of the centrality of sexual violence and vulnerability of girls and women to the history of slavery.

Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad situate themselves firmly at the nexus of the interlocking foundation these scholarly and literary traditions have built. Both examine themes persistent in scholarly and imaginative examinations of slavery: the limits and possibilities of agency; the sexual violence crucial to slavery's operations; the difficult work of community; and the tensions between history and memory in telling the stories of an African diaspora born from the devastation of the transatlantic slave trade. Placing these novels within a genealogy of slavery studies and neo-slave narratives helps both to underscore what makes each novel so necessary and to contemplate what the persistent erasures of Black agency, resistance, histories, memories, and consistent destruction of...