Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South

• Published in: The Southern literary journal Vol. 40; no. 2; pp. 267 - 283
• Main Author: Donaldson, Susan V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill Dept. of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 22.03.2008; The University of North Carolina Press; University of North Carolina Press
• Subjects: African American culture; African American literature; African Americans; Allison, Dorothy; American literature; Civil rights; Colombian literature; Comparative literature; Criticism and interpretation; Eco, Umberto (1932-2016); Ellison, Ralph (1914-1994); Garcia Marquez, Gabriel (1927-2014); Historic preservation; Italian literature; Jones, Edward P; Literary postmodernism; Martin, Valerie; Morrison, Toni (1931-2019); Narratives; Novels; Oral tradition; Plantations; Political systems; Portrayals; Postmodern literature; Postmodernism; Postmodernism (Literature); Silence; Slave narratives; Slave ownership; Slavery; Slaves; Styron, William (1925-2006); United States history; Walker, Alice (1944- ); White supremacy; United States
• ISSN: 0038-4291; 1534-1461; 2470-9506; 1534-1461; 2474-8102
• DOI: 10.1353/slj.0.0003

Central to those debates, first of all, is the issue of breaking the long silence of official histories on slavery, a silence imposed first by the antebellum white Souths systematic blockade of abolitionist literature, then by charges of fraud and imposture by proslavery apologists, and finally by what art historian Kirk Savage calls "the erasure of slavery" in public history-in Confederate monuments, museums, and sites of historic preservation (129). For if all of our current debates on slavety reparations, Confederate flags, and historical monuments tell us anything, it is that the white South and white America, for that matter, have been suffering a crisis of authority and legitimacy ever since the civil rights revolution, a crisis that has seen the demise of master narratives that justified and acquiesced to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy and rendered African Americans virtually silent and invisible.