RE-FORMING THE PAST

The slave experience was a defining one in American history and not surprisingly has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature.  In <i>Re-Forming the Past</i> A. Timothy Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation <i>and</i> traditional historiography postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed's <i>Flight to Canada</i> Octavia Butler's <i>Kindred</i> Toni Morrison's <i>Beloved</i> Charles Johnson's <i>Ox Herding Tale</i> and <i>Middle Passage</i> Jewelle Gomez's <i>The Gilda Stories</i> and Samuel Delaney's <i>Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand</i> set out to counter the usual slave narrative's reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective fantastic and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history identity and aesthetic form they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives.<br> <br> In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts <i>Re-Forming the Past</i> expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.