Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

Bertram D. Ashe is professor of English and American studies at the University of Richmond and author of Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles. Ilka Saal is professor of American literature at the University of Erfurt, Germany, author of New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater, and coeditor of Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present. The other contributors are Kimberly Nichele Brown, Mollie A. Godfrey, Jack Hitt, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Cameron Leader-Picone, Derek C. Maus, Derek Conrad Murray, Chris Neary, and Malin Pereira.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Ilka Saal and Bertram D. Ashe

1. The Blackest Blackness: Slavery and the Satire of Kara Walker

Derek Conrad Murray

2. Three-Fifths of a Black Life Matters Too: Four Neo-Slave novels from the Year Postracial Definitively Stopped Being a Thing

Derek C. Maus

3. Whispering Racism in a Postracial World: Slavery and Post-Blackness in Paul Beatty's the Sellout

Cameron Leader-Picone

4. Getting Graphic with Kindred:

The Neo-Slave Narrative of the Black Lives Matter Movement

Mollie Godfrey

5. "Stay Woke": Post-Black Filmmaking the Afterlife of Slavery in Jordan Peele's Get Out

Kimerly Nichele Brown

6. The Song: Living with "Dixie" and the "Coon Space" of Post-Blackness

Chenjerai Kumanyika, Jack Hitt, and Chris neary, with an introduction by Bertram D. Ashe

7. Performing Slavery at the Turn of the Millennium: Stereotypes, Affect, and Theatricality in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Neighbors and Young Jean Lee's The Shipment

Ilka saal

8. Thylias Moss's Slave Moth: Liberatory Verse Narrative and Performance Art

Malin Pereira

9. Plantation Memories: Cheryl Dunye's Representation of a Representation of American Slavery in the Watermelon Woman

Bertram D. Ashe

10. "An Audience Is a Mob on Its Butt": An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal

List of Contributors

Index