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Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 286 pp. $45.00. Many African-American novels have a political subtext, however veiled it may be, and this is especially true of neo-slave narratives, which seek to re-articulate the community's historical memory. Ashraf Rushdy concentrates on the political subtexts of four novels-Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, and Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage-and upon the political discourses that make up "the field of cultural production" in which a revival of the genre of the slave narrative was possible. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements are from the outset identified as conducive to this revival, the first examples of the genre appearing in the late '60s. The social conditions for the emergence of the literary form are mapped in admirable detail, comparable perhaps to the method of Georg Lucacs, who is mentioned in the introduction. Rushdy can show how all four neo-slave narratives engage in a dialogue with Black Power, a dialogue which focuses on the various strategies available for the formation of political subjects and directed against neo-conservative tendencies of later critics of Black Power and of the Reagan era in general.
Rushdy begins his argument with a master text of the '60s, William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, which, along with Elkins's ideas regarding the interdependence of slavery and personality formation, triggered great controversy. Styron and Elkins on...