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This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Reclaimed Genealogies: Reconsidering the Ancestor Figure in African American Women Writers’ Neo-slave Narratives Maja Milatovic PhD in English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2014 Milatovic 2 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is entirely my own work. Ideas and passages reproduced from other sources have been properly acknowledged. The thesis has not been submitted for any other professional degree or qualification. Certain ideas and passages from Chapter Two have been published as: “(Dis)placed Bodies: Revisiting Sites of Slavery in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” The South Carolina Review. Special Issue: Locating African American Literature. Edited by Angela Naimou and Rhondda Thomas. Volume 46. Number 2, Spring 2014. 115- 126. <http://www.clemson.edu/cedp/cudp/scr/volumes/facsimiles/scr_46-2.pdf> Certain ideas and passages from Chapter Three have been published as: “Cycles of violence: ancestral subtexts in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora.” Postcolonial Text. Special Issue: Postcolonial Trauma Studies. Edited by Saadi Nikro. Volume 9. Number 2, 2014. <http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1746/1687> Certain ideas and passages from Chapter One will be published as “Fearless foremothers: matrilineal genealogies, (inter)subjectivity and survival in Margaret Walker's Jubilee”. LIMINA: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies. Vol 20.2 [forthcoming] Maja Milatovic Milatovic 3 Acknowledgements I am incredibly grateful to the diverse and inspiring individuals who have supported my work over the past three years and provided the dialogic, challenging and energising community where I was able to thrive, learn and grow. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Dr Michelle Keown for her continuous support, guidance and encouragement during the development of this thesis. I would also like to thank my secondary supervisor Dr Keith Hughes, for his constructive comments and feedback. I thank my examiners Dr Rachel van Duyvenbode and Dr Lee Spinks for their invaluable suggestions. My immense gratitude goes to all my colleagues and staff from the English Literature Department for that wonderful feeling of community and sharing which made this path incredibly dynamic and engaging. I am also grateful to my teaching mentor Dr Sarah Dunnigan for her kindness and support during my work as a teaching assistant. Many thanks to the Department administrators for all their advice and patience. I am also grateful to numerous international colleagues and scholars for enriching my perspectives on issues pertinent to my research. I also thank the Edinburgh Global Overseas Research Scholarship and the Global Supplementary Grant from the Open Society Foundation for funding my doctoral research. To my Fabulous Feminists, thank you for all those teas, cakes, chocolates and much needed amounts of feminist rants and discussions. My warmest thanks goes to all my friends, dispersed around many countries in the world, for their support, discussions and fun times. My gratitude goes out to the people who made this possible; I thank my loving family, my parents Vera and Dragan and my brother Vedran. I thank my grandparents for being my ancestral guides during this particular project and for their imaginative storytelling. I also thank my Australian family for all their kindness and support. Finally, I thank my partner Tyson James Yates for his love and encouragement during every stage of my research, for being a patient listener and for being there when I needed it the most. Thank you for all those wonderful vegetarian meals, laughs, bad horror films and amazing times which made every day an adventure. Milatovic 4 At the end, I cyclically return to the beginning and thank those whose works inspired this entire project. I thank Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Alice Walker, Sherley Anne Williams and numerous other inspiring and incredible women who wrote the fiction which moved me beyond words. Milatovic 5 Abstract This thesis examines the ancestor figure in African American women writers’ neo- slave narratives. Drawing on black feminist, critical race and whiteness studies and trauma theory, the thesis closely reads neo-slave narratives by Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Phyllis Alesia Perry. The thesis aims to reconsider the ancestor figure by extending the definition of the ancestor as predecessor to include additional figurative and literal means used to invoke the ancestral past of enslavement. The thesis argues that the diverse ancestral figures in these novels demonstrate the prevailing effects of slavery on contemporary subjects, attest to the difficulties of historicising past oppressions and challenge post-racial discourses. Chapter 1 analyses Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966), identifying it as an important prerequisite for subsequent neo-slave narratives. The chapter aims to offer a new reading of the novel by situating it within a black feminist ideological framework. Taking into account the novel’s social and political context, the chapter suggests that the ancestral figures or elderly members of the slave community function as means of resistance, access to personal and collective history and contribute to the self-constitution of the protagonist. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Walker’s novel fulfils a politically engaged function of inscribing the black female subject into discussions on the legacy of slavery and drawing attention to the particularity of black women’s experiences. Chapter 2 examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1978), featuring a contemporary black woman’s return to the antebellum past and her discovery of a white slaveholding ancestor. The chapter introduces the term “displacement” to explore the transformative effects of shifting positionalities and destabilisation of contemporary frames of reference. The chapter suggests that the novel challenges idealised portrayals of a slave community and expresses scepticism regarding its own premise of fictionally reimagining slavery. With its inconclusive ending, Kindred ultimately illustrates how whiteness and dominant versions of history prevail in the seemingly progressive present. Chapter 3 discusses Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975) and its subversion of the matrilineal model of tradition by reading the maternal ancestor’s narrative as oppressive, limiting and psychologically burdening. The chapter introduces the term “ancestral subtext” in order to identify the ways in which ancestral narratives of enslavement serve as subtexts to the descendants’ lives and constrict their subjectivities. The chapter argues that the ancestral subtexts frame contemporary practices, inform the notion of selfhood and attest to the reproduction of past violence in the present. Chapter 4 deals with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998) exploring complex ancestral figures as survivors of the Middle Passage and their connection to Africa as an affective site of identity reclamation. The chapter identifies the role the quilt, the skill of quilting and their metaphorical potential as symbolic means of communicating ancestral trauma and conveying multivoiced “ancestral articulations”. The chapter suggests that the project of healing and recovering the self in relation to ancestral enslavement are premised on re-connecting with African cultural contexts and an intergenerational exchange of the culturally specific skill of quilting. Milatovic 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration …………………………………………………………………………...2 Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………..3 Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………....5 Introduction………………………………………………………………………….9 Chapter 1 Fierce foremothers: Mapping women’s communities in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee 1.1. Oral histories: reimagining the grandmother’s slave narrative ………………...46 1.2. Survival strategies: the foremother as “access to history”……………………...53 1.3. Challenging stereotype: framing Vyry’s complexity…………………………...69 1.4. Alliances for the postbellum future……………………………………………..80 Chapter 2 (Dis)placed Bodies: Uncovering the white ancestor in Octavia Butler’s Kindred 2.1. Octavia Butler’s return to slavery………………………………………………93 2.2. Revising the matrilineal: contextualising choice and survival………………..101 2.3. White privilege as transcendent……………………………………………….110 2.4. Recreating ontologies: killing the ancestor / self……………………………...122 Chapter 3 Cycles of violence: Ancestral subtexts in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora 3.1. Breaking silence: Gayl Jones and the black female voice…………………….131 3.2. “Substitute for memory”: ancestral narrative as insidious trauma…………… 136 3.3. Beyond
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