Neo-Slave Narratives and Afro-Diasporic Literature and Culture

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to this evolving area of academic study. The original Afro-diasporic slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (for example, those by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass) have been revisited in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century neo-slave narrative genre, which includes works of poetry, prose, drama, film, and art. Neo-slave narratives exist in various forms, including historical novels, science fiction, memoirs, and Gothic literature. This Special Issue aims to identify the political, historical, and aesthetic origins of Afro-diasporic narratives whilst considering how neo-slave narratives re-imagine the slave narrative tradition, its tropes, and its form. At the end of her own seminal neo-slave narrative Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison writes of how the history of slavery “is not a story to pass on”, famously ambivalent words that invite us to consider why the slave narrative continues to be passed on, told in ever more diverse, transnational and imaginative forms of remembrance.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• The significance of enslavement for eighteenth-century capital accumulation;
• Narratives of enslavement as being central to eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse;
• Afro-diasporic and neo-slave narratives as exemplars of a counter-discourse resistant to ideologies supporting racial capitalism;
• Neo-slave narratives as transnational, global, Black Atlantic texts;
• The way in which trauma, obscured by the original slave narrators, returns in Afro-Diasporic literature and culture, often as the return of the repressed and replayed in individual and collective re-memory;
• How the Afro-diasporic experience is articulated in language that is itself the legacy of enslavement;
• The consideration of language acquisition within the context of enforced displacement;
• Neo-slave narratives and Afro-diasporic literature as critiques of conventional historical accounts;
• Articulations of modern-day enslavements.

We hope that this Special Issue will stimulate new research in the literature, art, drama, poetry, film, and video games from an Afro-diasporic perspective. The research will deepen knowledge of Afro-diasporic experiences and their expression, and develop an understanding of the legacies of enslavement as relevant to contemporary narratives and histories of decolonization.   

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200-300 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editor, Dr. Justine Baillie (j.j.baillie@gre.ac.uk and bj90@gre.ac.uk) and CC the Assistant Editor of Literature, Ms. Joyce Xi (joyce.xi@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors to ensure a proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-anonymized peer review.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Justine Baillie
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Literature is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• African American literature
• Afro-diasporic culture and literature
• neo-slave narratives
• literatures of enslavement
• colonization
• decolonization