Reworking literary conventions and rethinking linearity in contemporary African American literature

Abstract

This thesis examines contemporary African American authors’ reworkings of white-dominated literary conventions to portray particular African American experiences in order to explore different perceptions of time and history. Combining the lenses of memory and trauma studies, critical race theory, and the postcolonial concept of the re-periodization of history, it analyzes selected contemporary works of fiction from seven authors: David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer (2015), N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), and Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021). To explore the authors’ dialogues with white-dominated literary genres in association with related social and political contexts, the selected texts are categorized into five genres: historiographic metafiction, trauma fiction, science fiction, the Gothic, and autofiction. The study demonstrates Black authors’ appropriations of the genres to criticize the mainstream history and historiography of slavery and anti-Blackness, particularly focusing on a shared critique of how linearity and chronology perpetuate white hegemony that transcends the gaps between these varied genres. Also, the analyses show that their presentations of non-linear time can liberate the history of slavery and anti-Blackness from the Eurocentric historical consciousness and open up our perception toward the traumatic past that is still ongoing and affecting lives of African Americans today.