Subtitle: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Womens Fiction
Author: Angelyn Mitchell
Subject: African American Studies/Literary Studies/Women's Studies
Paper ISBN 0-8135-3069-5
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3068-7
Pages: 192 pp.
Description: An exploration of contemporary works by African American women writers that revise our perceptions of slavery.
The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as "liberatory narratives." Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.
Angelyn Mitchell is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the editor of Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present.
Praise for The Freedom to Remember
"Angelyn Mitchells extraordinary study is rich in detail and analysis, confidently mediating our ways of re-membering the narratives of slavery as well as the ways of womenas writer and as characterbearing courageous witness. The Freedom to Remember is scholarship at its very best and will surely be one of the essential books in critical and cultural studies."Karla Holloway, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, Duke University
"A work of evocative interpretation and socially healing criticism, The Freedom to Remember reveals the liberating thematics of contemporary black womens contribution to the much-acclaimed neoslave narrative."William L. Andrews, author of To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 17601865
"Building upon the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Eleanor Traylor, and Sherley Anne Williams, Angelyn Mitchell is the first to elaborate the need for a shift in terminology used to discuss slave narratives and contemporary novels of slavery. If the only contribution of The Freedom to Remember is to popularize a change from slave narrative to emancipatory narrative and from neo-slave narrative to liberatory narrative, Angelyn Mitchell will have accomplished a great deal."Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Cant Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday
