Remembering Generations

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

"Slavery is America's family secret, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era." "Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Ashraf Rushdy begins by situating these works in their cultural moment of production and highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family, which assumed new levels of importance in the 1970s with the waning of the Black Power movement and the release of the Moynihan Report. He then shows how each novel, in its own way, traces the historical origins of race to the practices of American slavery; comments on how racialized slavery causes deviations in the treatment of such traditional literary themes as desire, death, and kinship; and constructs new ways of conceiving of the interrelationship of race and family in America. Following the evolution of this literary form into the 1990s, Rushdy looks at such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998) and Macky Alston's Family Name (1997), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors." "Remembering Generations examines the questions of how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility - of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society."--Jacket.