African American Adolescent Female Heroes: The Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Neo-Slave Narrative

INTRODUCTION

VISIBILITY AND INCLUSIVITY

In 2018, Afrofuturism came to the forefront of mainstream popular culture with the release of Marvel’s Black Panther film.¹ The film industry continues to be extensively criticized for its lack of Black actors and characters, for its too few films including issues pertaining to Black American audiences. In its publication the Hollywood Diversity Report, UCLA has documented that there has been an increase in Black actors in film, albeit a small one in 2020 and a more notable one in 2021.² The improvement in casting has been recent: the 2021 report identifies what is termed proportionate representation, meaning that there have been increases for people of color and women in lead actor casting and casting overall (5). It is troubling, however, that, as UCLA shows, although on television there has been a marked improvement in diversity over time, women and people of color have been marginally represented in casting until recently.³ It is also troubling that women have been continuously vying for a prominent place in film but do not appear to be obtaining one behind the scenes.⁴ By March 2022, three women had won the Oscar for Best Director,⁵ and only seven had been nominated. None of these directors are Black women.⁶ With the 2017 release of Wonder Woman (as with Black Panther), moviegoers were exposed to a strong lead (and a female director, Patty Jenkins) that defies Hollywood’s construct of what a popular protagonist and film entails.⁷ It took two films, both falling into the science fiction genre and featuring superheroes (Marvel/Disney and DC Comics) and both popular culture areas with a diehard fanbase for films with female leads, female directors, and Black people for Hollywood to pay attention to what viewers want—and need.

My reasoning behind offering this cinematic commentary at the start of a book about young adult (YA) literature is that the fields of young adult science fiction and speculative fiction face many similar challenges as the film industry. As someone who examines African American women’s writings and science fiction, I was noticeably concerned when it came to my attention in 2014 while completing research for the book’s initial chapter that few science fiction and speculative works feature African American female adolescent protagonists and the number of additions to these subgenres has been barely perceptible since then. As readers, we are aware that, during the twentieth century, while African American male writers’ texts received critical attention, African American women’s overwhelmingly did not. It was not until the 1970s that they received critical consideration (thanks to Toni Morrison for her editorial role at Random House and for her release of The Bluest Eye in 1970, both of which ensured that African American women’s writing had the recognition it deserved).⁸

My first chapter, "Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans and Karen Sandler’s Tankborn: The Female Leader, the Neo-Slave Narrative, and Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Afrofuturism," started out as a journal article before being revised for publication in this book. Here, I examine Smith’s standalone dystopic novel Orleans, in which Smith envisions a segregated future for African Americans. Sandler in Tankborn (a trilogy) also creates a society where its members are forcibly separated from one another; however, in this case it is discriminatory actions toward the technologically created rather than marginalization solely based on ethnicity. While completing the research for this essay, which I started in 2014, I discovered few contributions to YA Afrofuturism featuring a female protagonist. What I primarily found was a few articles, including readers’ blog entries, mainly written by African American mothers that lamented the lack of works in this field. I was and continue to be intrigued as to why there are numerous YA dystopic texts with Caucasian protagonists, mostly male, but very few with African American female characters (major or minor). The YA dystopic novel has been a niche market, one with limited access for people of color; in the second decade of the twenty-first century this fact appears to be changing.

With the release of the third Maze Runner film, David Sims from The Atlantic declares, "And yet as the final act succumbed to dull, apocalyptic formula, I saw an entire sub-genre slip away with it: The Death Cure is a grim, half-hearted farewell to this wave of young-adult dystopias." Sims is correct in his assertion, as the decline in the cinematic field has been perceptible, but this is not necessarily a desired outcome by the viewing audience. On 10 February 2018, Eli Glasner from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) published an article online in which he discusses Afrofuturism and its reflection in (at the time) upcoming films, namely Black Panther, A Wrinkle in Time, and Brown Girl Begins (2017), two of which are in the children’s/YA fields. Caribbean-Canadian Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), upon which Canadian director Sharon Lewis based her film, is a notable example of young adult Afrofuturism.⁹ In order to save Toronto from corruption, Ti-Jeanne must defeat her grandfather, Rudy; as she does so, Ti-Jeanne learns to value her cultural heritage. The development of Hopkinson’s novel into a film, albeit in the smaller Canadian market, shows that there is interest in the young adult Afrofuturism and speculative literature fields, so this book is a timely one.

THE PURPOSE OF THE STUDY, THE SLAVE NARRATIVE, AND THE NEO-SLAVE NARRATIVE

This study investigates the application of the neo-slave narrative structure to the twenty-first-century young adult text. Before delving any further into the field of the neo-slave narrative, some elaboration may be in order. The slave narrative was published as an act of abolition during the antebellum period. While there are famed slave narratives that document the European slave trade (The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. Written by Herself [1831] or The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself [1789]), it is the textual descendants of the American slave narrative that will be the focal point of this investigation. A slave narrative is an autobiographical self-told story, one that centers on the traumatic experiences of a formerly enslaved person. Since many enslaved people were forced to be illiterate, they did not write their stories themselves, instead reciting their account to a White abolitionist for transcription. The purpose of the slave narrative is to illustrate in great, personal detail the trauma and inhuman treatment faced by enslaved people at the hands of the enslaver, to familiarize people in the North—who may be disconnected from the South—with the atrocities that unfolded toward Black people in the antebellum South.¹⁰

In addition to the narrative, the autobiographical events are framed with letters from White abolitionists attesting to the validity of the enslavement. Kerry Sinanan discusses pro- and antiabolitionist publications, citing that abolitionist discourse and literature offered representations of slaves and black people, combined with antislavery opinions and views, which became interwoven in the fabric of slave narratives (61). The slave narrative became more than a purely autobiographical account of a formerly enslaved person’s life; it became the vehicle upon which the hopes for slavery’s abolition were pinned. The burden of being a figurehead, an activist for a movement that would eventually free people from bondage, must have been immense. It becomes the formerly enslaved person’s duty to not only persuade the reader that enslavement must be abolished but also, so that the former may be accomplished, the formerly enslaved person must convince readers of the humanity of the enslaved. The readers must be convinced that the enslaved are human beings, not property. If this is accomplished and if those in the North can be convinced enslavement needs to end, then the formerly enslaved person still must battle for equality and societal positioning as a free person.

Connecting the slave narrative to the YA neo-slave narrative, like with the formerly enslaved, the responsibility of telling their story falls on the African American female adolescent much like their predecessors have had to do; now though, the placement of power alters. Again, it is critical to the comprehension of the slave narrative, the neo-slave narrative, and this study that the reader be cognizant of the fact that for Black American women, experiences in enslavement drastically differ from those by men. Elaborating on varied states of imprisonment for Black Americans historically, Patricia Hill Collins writes:

But just as gender, age, skin color, and class affect the contours of oppression itself, these very same categories shape strategies of resistance. As African American women’s slave narratives point out, men and young people could more easily break out by running away than women, mothers, and older people. Then as now, African American women are often reluctant to leave their families, and many sacrifice their own personal freedom in order to stay behind and care for children and for others who depend on them. (93)

Hill Collins identifies the clear demarcation between the treatment of female and male enslaved people. While completing research for this book, I have encountered a small number of scholars who have attempted to argue the gender fluidity of enslaved women, arguments clearly problematic as gender constructs are societal and during the American antebellum period and Reconstruction overwhelmingly determined by White, male Americans. Enslaved women’s lives were distinct because not only were they marked in accordance with sex but by gender construct.¹¹ Their gender identities were forced on them, determining their place in slaveholding America; in other words, enslaved women, young women, and girls were categorized so that monetary value, societal placement (duties in the slaveholding space), and discriminatory treatment could be assigned.

As Sinanan, Dickson D. Bruce Jr., and I have observed, the slave narrative has been completed as a political tool, one destined to depersonalize the formerly enslaved person, launching them into activist status. For formerly enslaved (freed) and enslaved women especially, the slave narrative continues to be a site of Othering, of marginalization. As formerly enslaved women take control of their stories, White voices (whether at the time of publication or later as theorists) try to dominate by infusing doubt and depersonalization. The Black women of these stories are then reduced to bodies, to degrading stereotypes, to entities with no choices available. Hill Collins’s celebration of African American women is key to the formerly enslaved women’s actuality. The neo-slave narrative of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries provides a platform for a reclamation of the real and a refutation of the false. Xiomara Santamaria documents an issue inherent to slave narratives written by women, namely the creation of stereotypes regarding their sexuality and their sexual vulnerability that were created during the antebellum period (232). Both Hill Collins and Santamaria call attention to the formerly enslaved and enslaved women’s reality during the antebellum period, one that reaches well into contemporary analyses of African American female characters as well as actual African American women’s and girls’ realities. Analyzing the genderless construct forced upon enclaved women, Santamaria offers, De-gendered in the eyes of middle-class readers because they performed field and manual labor (where they were often in the majority), yet also viewed as oversexed because of their sexual vulnerability, slave women faced especially contradictory circumstances when they entered the spheres of antislavery publicity (232). Here, the physical objectification of the African American woman during the antebellum period and its overreaching effects are visible, that whichever way she turned, she continued to be confined by the system that enslaved her. Readers and writers must be careful to not further victimize formerly enslaved women by casting them into the role of object, as only the body. Further, the notion from Santamaria shows the problematic nature of categorizing enslaved women as genderless: the enslaved person was classified as needed, whether as woman (for purposes mentioned previously) or identity-less property, ergo not a person. So, the question remains: can an enslaved woman be genderless when their lives revolve around their classification as enslaved woman? It remains that gender identity was assigned when needed to enslave women in an oppressive societal space. Some African American free women and women like Sojourner Truth (formerly enslaved) became activists, voices of a generation, were not cast into constructs (Santamaria 234). Santamaria considers Truth’s age as a factor in why she was not constructed as a sexual object (235). It is not just formerly enslaved women that obtain their subjectivity in the neo-slave narrative; free women, gay women, women of a certain age,¹² adolescents, and girls are also made visible for readers in this genre: Black womanhood is celebrated, not diminished, in the neo-slave narrative’s communal womanhood.

To elaborate, the responsibility of telling the African American woman’s story in the neo-slave narrative is in the hands of the writer and the identifying characters. Make no mistake, this is not the disempowering moment that has been well documented on social media during the second wave of Black Lives Matter (2020): these literary contributions are not a means to explain racism to non-Black people. Unlike the slave narrative, where the abolitionists and political motivations attached to abolition influence the formerly enslaved person’s narrative, the neo-slave narrative writer has subjectivity, has a voice of their own choosing. Yogita Goyal analyzes the neo-slave narrative, opening the genre up to non-African American contributions. Referencing late twentieth-century contributions to this genre, on the one hand Goyal acknowledges their ongoing rhetorical and political power, while on the other hand asserts that much of this literature is in fact animated by a desire to turn to unspeakable figures—whether they are black slave owners, an African father guilty of selling his children, or a fugitive mother who would rather kill her children than have them returned to slavery (19). While I disagree with much of what Goyal states about the neo-slave narrative,¹³ there is value in this idea of the unspeakable.

In brief, to define a neo-slave narrative a reader must revisit enslavement and the structure of the slave narrative. The goal of the neo-slave narrative is to reclaim the past, one in which Black Americans may have been powerless. I do not wish to assume that all African Americans have the same past experiences during the antebellum period as this is not so; however, there is a complex, shared history for African Americans that the American neo-slave narrative eloquently captures. Goyal alludes to uncovering the past (19–20), that the neo-slave narrative is more than the recovery of the lost past, or an affirmation of an undifferentiated notion of a black community (20). Citing Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the integral illustration of this genre (19), Goyal looks at Margaret Garner’s influence on this novel, continuing to affirm that at the center of many of the most acclaimed of these novels is moral ambiguity, or even the suggestion that no clear ethical choice avails, let alone a redemptive account of history (20). Morrison’s text is important due to her integration of the neo-slave narrative with magical realism¹⁴ and historical fact. Butler’s Kindred (1979), however, is the ideal example of the neo-slave narrative, the author envisioning how the past affects those in the present, showing the generational scars while doing so. While Goyal sees Garner’s reenvisioned story as bringing attention to the unspeakable, I see the consideration being placed on the agency of the female characters. Neo-slave narratives give African American women a voice in a system where they are continuously faced with racism, misogyny, classism, and age discrimination. The structure and content of neo-slave narratives offer writers a space in which oppressive constructs may not only be challenged but controlled and subsequently obliterated. Many twenty-first-century young adult writers utilizing the neo-slave narrative genre grasp this opportunity to rework the genre, making changes that their readers want to see, namely those that offer inclusion. I posit that the young adult female-led neo-slave narrative can and should show African American young women as the heroes they are in the face of adversity. Successful characters and their creators are activists because they enable young women to see positive, powerful versions of themselves and their ancestors.

The texts I have chosen for this book each feature a female, adolescent protagonist of color. I examine the role of adolescent females of African descent in YA Afrofuturism and YA speculative fiction. As has been oft quoted, Mark Dery offered readers the following delineation of the subgenre: Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’ (180). What I wish to report through my research are responses to the following questions. Are the roles for the African American adolescent female character in speculative fiction changing, or are they re-creations of traditional slave narrative roles for females (the enslaved mother figure that creates a community so to save future generations)? Do these writers portray a healing journey for the protagonists? Do they become activists, thereby altering the structure of their societies? When I selected the novels for this study, I endeavored to choose contemporary novels that may reflect issues relevant to adolescents currently. In other words, I wanted to analyze textual contributions that may be relatable to their adolescent audience members. For example, as I discuss in chapter 4, "The Biracial Female Protagonist, Trauma, and Memory in A. J. Hartley’s Steeplejack," Hartley creates a series in which his female protagonist, Ang, is biracial and exists virtually unseen on the fringes of society. Ang, who is Lani, is ostracized by both Black and Caucasian societal members; Hartley calls attention to a relatable issue for biracial readers, the feeling as belonging to the in-between space, of not being accepted by either racial group. Rejection due to skin tone (colorism) is not a new subject for exploration in African American literature; however, Hartley ventures into territory not often explored by writers, specifically how adolescents react to this rejection.

Unlike the American slave narrative, which primarily delineates the experiences of enslaved people born into enslavement, the British slave narrative (see Prince and Equiano’s works) concentrates on enslaved people who have most likely