A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery

The second volume of A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond explores literary memory of enslavement in post-slavery societies on four continents (North- and South America, Africa and Europe). The twenty-two contributors to this volume relate the memory work of literature to central questions of cultural memory, testimony, and the formation of archives. Literature here, as in the other volumes of this series, is understood in the broadest sense as textual, visual, auditory, cinematic, and performative genres. The volume asks: What are the central metaphors, storylines and topoi of literary representations of slavery? What kind of identities and political realities are created or enabled by the texts? What are the performative effects of literary language? Post-slavery literature is caught in a double endeavor: vivifying the past, making identification possible while acknowledging the moral distance, and the difficulties of remembering that past. The volume is divided into six sections that take up different aspects and problems of literary memory of slavery: counter-memories/memories of resistance, the body as material archive, fictionality of history writing, the bricolage of history, authorship/authenticity, and the necessity of creative approaches to a history that is troublesome and full of accumulated erasures. A previous volume, Vol. 1, explored slavery and the emotions. The next volume, Vol. 3, will explore authorship and literary culture in relation to slavery.