UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Conjuring Freedom: Reconstructions and Revisions of Neo-Slave Narratives Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/95353216 Author Montgomery, Christine Lupo Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ CONJURING FREEDOM: RECONSTRUCTIONS AND REVISIONS OF NEO-SLAVE NARRATIVES A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by CHRISTINE LUPO MONTGOMERY JUNE 2012 The Dissertation of Christine Lupo Montgomery is approved: ___________________________________ Professor Susan Gillman, Chair ___________________________________ Professor Louis Chude-Sokei ____________________________________ Professor Norma Klahn _______________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Christine Lupo Montgomery 2012 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………........................1 CHAPTER 1 ……………………………..…………………………...................29 Arna Bontemps’ Black Thunder and the Emergence of the Neo-Slave Narrative CHAPTER 2 ………………………………………………….............................115 How is this 1976?: Time-Traveling, Slavery’s Doubles, and Comparative Freedoms in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Assata Shakur’s Assata CHAPTER 3…………………………………….................................................185 “The Tightrope of Our Hope”: Becomings in the Neo-Slave Poetics of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and Ed Roberson’s The Aerialist Narratives CHAPTER 4 ..........................………………………………………….............234 “Time Don’t Crawl and Time Don’t Fly; Time is Still”: Talking Books, Disembodiment, and Temporality in 1Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo EPILOGUE.........................................................................................................303 Visual Literacy: Neo-Slave Narratives from Aaron Douglas to Emma Amos BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………….361 iii List of Figures Figure 1: Assata Shakur’s Wanted Poster. 2007. Figure 2: Cover of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, 1st Edition. Figure 3: Cover of Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, 1st edition. Figure 4: Vévé of Papa Legba. Figure 5: Walker, Kara, Insurrection Kara Walker: My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Figure 6: Aaron Douglass. Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction. 1934. Oil on Canvas. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Figure 7: Moyo Okediji, The Dutchman, acrylic on canvas. 1995. Figure 8: Emma Amos, Equals. Acrylic on linen canvas, photo transfer, and African fabric borders, 1992. vii Abstract Christy Lupo Montgomery Conjuring Freedom: Reconstructions and Re-visions of the Neo-Slave Genre My dissertation argues for a revisionist periodization of neo-slave literature as well as a reorientation away from a US-based literary history that has been dominated by the mode of realism and toward a more comparative view defined by the geography, history, and aesthetics of the Caribbean. The canon of slave narratives was first dominated by Frederick Douglass and then “expanded” to include Harriet Jacobs, but it was always defined by the assumption both of narrative as the major and sometimes only genre of slave writing and of a linear temporality emplotting the journey from slavery to an attenuated freedom. In contrast, most twentieth-century neo-slave narratives rethink the genre from the twin standpoints of temporality and narratology: how both the “neo” and “narrative” descriptors have produced an entrenched and unnecessarily restrictive view of this evolving archive. Chapter One places Arna Bontemps’ Black Thunder (1936) at the headwaters of a new transnational neo-slave canon. In Bontemps’ complex depictions of revolt and gender and in his construction of a past and predictive temporalities, he revises the paradigm of freedom both ontologically and corporeally. Octavia Butler’s vi Kindred (1979) and Assata Shakur’s Assata (1985) comprise Chapter Two, highlighting how the enslaved and imprisoned black woman’s body becomes a cultural text on which we read symbolic, discursive, and narratological traces derived from slavery. Chapter 3 argues comparatively that two poetic works, the well-known Aimé Césaire’s Notebooks of a Return to the Native Land (1943) and Ed Roberson’s less familiar Aerialist Narratives (1994), revisit the complexities of slave experience by focusing on metaphorical transformations of the slave body. In the final chapter, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1992) and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) are paired in their differing attempts to transcend W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of “second slavery,” as each author underscores how multiple slavery-derived pasts travel and collide in the present. In comparing these diverse grouping of texts via their neo- slave topoi, I demonstrate how this emerging canon provides a space for new thinking on comparative slaveries and comparative freedoms to emerge. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the invaluable support from numerous colleagues, faculty, mentors, family, and friends. I thank, first of all, my advisors at the University of California, Santa Cruz: Susan Gillman, Norma Klahn, Louis Chude-Sokei, Nathaniel Mackey, and Angela Davis. Special thanks to Susan Gillman who has encouraged and supported me throughout this entire process and to Louis Chude-Sokei whose revisions were productive and suggestions inspiring. I am especially grateful to the sabbatical, dissertation fellowship, and travel and research grants at UCSC that allowed for the timely completion of this project and permitted me to travel to the Schomburg Library in Harlem, New York in order to do extensive research on various dissertation chapters. Throughout this project I was sustained by regular discussion with Aliyah Khan and Erik Bachman who are extraordinary colleagues and have been invaluable interlocutors and readers of this dissertation. To my brother Jeff, who edited my essays when I applied to the Ph.D. program, I am forever grateful. Ellen Caldwell and Caroline Armstrong have played immensely important roles in sustaining me intellectually and emotionally. To my parents, Paul and Kay Lupo, who made the first years of graduate school possible, and my husband, Antoine Montgomery, who made the last few years achievable. This dissertation and the degree are dedicated to them. My mom has vi been a source of constant support and her expressed faith in me has left a lasting impression. My dad’s hard work and dedication to his career and to our extended family continues to inspire me. Finally, Antoine is the person who has endured this process the best. Without his friendship, insight, hard work, and belief in me, this dissertation simply would not exist. vii vi Introduction Comparative Slaveries and Freedoms in Neo-Slave Narratives Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!” and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world is to be won and nothing to be lost. -Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be a Colored Me” (1928)1 The Harlem Renaissance had a hard time with slavery. Zora Neale Hurston provides the paradigm in her career-long encounter with the history of slavery, alternatively running from and returning to it. Hurston’s ethnographic studies of the American South and the Caribbean may be traced back to the different times and spaces of New World slavery, yet her body of work centered on contemporary rituals, lifestyles, legends, and folklore that displayed the syncretic connections between African Americans and black diasporic people. Like Hurston, “shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority,” as Alain Locke writes in his manifesto, most New Negroes engaged with American slavery, from which many of these writers and artists were only two generations removed by moving it to the background.2 For them, as Houston Baker points out, slavery was emphatically not the “point of commencement” for their stories and poems. Rather, they celebrated either the rural folk or the urban, the modern city. Whereas urban settings focus on the present, pastoral ones celebrated the African American past via African cultural 1 retentions and Africa itself, although many works, from W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Hands of Ethiopia” to Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” and Langston Hughes’ “Luani of the Jungle,” configure the continent in general, ambivalent, and nostalgic terms. Hurston’s timeline in the epigraph, constructed as a metaphoric race away from slavery, has the paradoxical effect of historicizing the main events of that history, including emancipation and Reconstruction. Similarly, as much as Hurston says in the epigraph above, that she