Description
Book SynopsisHonorable Mention for the 2022 Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited CollectionInterrogates how artists have created new ways to imagine the past of American slaveryFrom Kara Walker's hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty's bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead's literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele's body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary artistic works that present, like musical deep cuts, some challenging alternate takes on American slavery. These artists deliberately confront and negotiate the psychic and representational legacies of slavery to imagine possibilities and change. The essays in this volume explore the conceptions of freedom and blackness that undergird these narratives, critically examining how artists growing up in the postCivil Rights era have nuanced slavery in a way that is distinctly different from the first wave of neo-slave narratives that emerged from the Civil Rights and Bl
Trade Review"[A]n academic and culturally relevant feast for the reader."
* Journal of Popular Culture *
"Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination manages to clarify and convincingly advance the discourse of post-Blackness in conversation with contemporary representations of slavery."
* American and English Studies *
"[A] formidable collection."
* Amerikastudien / American Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Ilka Saal and Bertram D. Ashe
1. The Blackest Blackness: Slavery and the Satire of Kara Walker
Derek Conrad Murray
2. Three-Fifths of a Black Life Matters Too: Four Neo-Slave novels from the Year Postracial Definitively Stopped Being a Thing
Derek C. Maus
3. Whispering Racism in a Postracial World: Slavery and Post-Blackness in Paul Beatty's the Sellout
Cameron Leader-Picone
4. Getting Graphic with Kindred:
The Neo-Slave Narrative of the Black Lives Matter Movement
Mollie Godfrey
5. "Stay Woke": Post-Black Filmmaking the Afterlife of Slavery in Jordan Peele's Get Out
Kimerly Nichele Brown
6. The Song: Living with "Dixie" and the "Coon Space" of Post-Blackness
Chenjerai Kumanyika, Jack Hitt, and Chris neary, with an introduction by Bertram D. Ashe
7. Performing Slavery at the Turn of the Millennium: Stereotypes, Affect, and Theatricality in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Neighbors and Young Jean Lee's The Shipment
Ilka saal
8. Thylias Moss's Slave Moth: Liberatory Verse Narrative and Performance Art
Malin Pereira
9. Plantation Memories: Cheryl Dunye's Representation of a Representation of American Slavery in the Watermelon Woman
Bertram D. Ashe
10. "An Audience Is a Mob on Its Butt": An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal
List of Contributors
Index
