아프리카계 미국문학의 '네오' 노예서사

The Neo-Slave Narratives of the African American Literature

This study aims to discuss the traits of the neo-slave narrative of the African American literature. The narrative approaches the institution of slavery from a myriad perspectives and embraces a variety of styles of writing, such as from realistic novels grounded in historical research to speculative fiction. The narrative illustrates the centrality of the history and the memory of slavery to our individual, racial, sexual, cultural, and national identities. The writers, such as Margarett Walker, Arma Bontemps, David Bradley, Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Louise Meriwether, Lorene Cary, Alice Randall, Margaret Mitchell, and Nancy Rawles, possess a measure of creative and rhetorical freedom unavailable to freed and fugitive slaves who wrote narrative during the antebellum period. They write from a perspective informed by the study of slave narratives, the changing historiography of slavery, the complicated history of race and power relations in America and around the world. Among them, Toni Morrison recovers the lived experience of enslavement given the paucity of available materials from the slaves' perspectives. Based on the true story of a fugitive slave, Margaret Garner, her Beloved is one of the best contemporary novels of the slave experience. Set in Cincinnati in 1873, this novel begins is about slavery. The characters, such as Sethe and Paul D, have been so deeply affected by the experience of slavery. Morrison shows these characters' experiences through their scarred bodies. Sethe's tree-patterned scars on her back and Paul D's heart like a rusted tobacco tin shows the signs of their most arduous ordeals at Sweet Home plantation. And there is the murdered daughter's scar on the neck. She was killed by her mother who decided to prevent her from being captured back to slavery. By representing the suffering of former slaves, Morrison represents trauma and traumatic memories, the legacy of slavery and other atrocities for subsequent generations, the interconnectedness of constructions of race and gender, the relationship of body to memory, the agency of the enslaved, the commodification of black bodies, and the elusive nature of freedom.