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In a 2013 interview with Vulture, screenwriter John Ridley ruminates on the most difficult scene he has ever written, which is the exchange between slaves Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Patsey (Lupito Nyong'o), and Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodard), a black woman who ascended the plantation hierarchy by becoming a slave owner. Although Mistress Shaw is a minor character in the original Twelve Years a Slave narrative, with only a few lines devoted to her, Ridley expands her representation in the film version of 12 Years a Slave (2014) with the purpose of educating the audience about different roles women could occupy on the plantation. He states, a "lot of folks may have been completely unfamiliar with the concept of the woman of color in that era being able to elevate herself to a degree, or the notion that a white master may have felt secure enough not just to have a black mistress but one that he could have a relationship with openly on that level" (qtd. in Buchanan).
Ridley's decision to pull Mistress Shaw out of the original narrative and expand her characterization represents a postmodern creative intervention - he uses twenty-first century conceptions of black womanhood as a way of reimagining black female subjectivity in the nineteenth century. The moments of the film that deviate from the original narrative illuminate black female characters, which demonstrates the influence the twenty-first century cultural and political climate has on the filmmakers. I argue that representations of slavery in the twenty-first century look different from previous iterations, and we need to adapt new language to describe these representations. Although some scholars have described 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained (2012) as neo-slave narratives, this term does not encompass the temporal aesthetic that embodies twenty-first century creative productions, nor does it account for the interconnectedness of contemporary genres. Neo-slave narratives were a response to the renewal of interest in slavery depictions during the Civil Rights Era, and I argue that these films are a response to the twenty first century's cultural climate. To account for this shift, I classify Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave as "post-neo-slave narratives."
To reconcile postmodernity, as a temporal, aesthetic, and genre convention, with the neo-slave narrative, I articulate post-neo-slave narratives as...