Decentring the Black Atlantic : marginalised subjectivities in the neo-slave narrative

Abstract

The neo-slave narrative explores the transnationality of the experience of the enslaved. This dissertation focuses on three primary texts, Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Hundred Wells of Salaga (2019), Robert Jones Jr’s The Prophets (2021), and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), showing how they reframe the slave narrative tradition through their preoccupation with representing the experiences of marginalised subjectivities that exist within these communities as they are located in the US-American South and in West Africa. My research aims to show how these texts call for an expanded conceptualisation of the African diaspora while simultaneously complicating the hegemonised US-American heteropatriarchal experience as the dominant narrative in the neo-slave narrative tradition. This study also shows that these texts foreground the overlooks subjectivities of women and queer men and their experience of slavery and its transgenerational effects, underlining the multiplicity of black identities, their complexities, and their intersectionalities with gender, sexuality, and socio-political status.