Introduction
Introduction
The Genres of Slavery
The introduction explores the revival of slavery in contemporary culture, ranging over examples of trauma from literature, culture, and politics. It assesses the valence of analogy as an analytic for racial and comparative critique. It lays out the key features of the slave narrative (by Frederick Douglass, for example) and examines the principal concerns of the neo-slave narrative by writers like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Charles Johnson. It then traces the shift from Atlantic to global as the slave narrative frames experiences of human rights violations across the Global South. Then, the introduction considers the uses of genre for thinking about race, showing how race and form have always been entangled.
Keywords: analogy, genre, slave narrative, neo-slave narrative, postcolonial, Global South, human rights, refugees, trauma, Frederick Douglass
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