Abstract
Neo-slave narratives emerged on the American literary scene with the publication of Jubilee, by Margaret Walker (1966), but only had effective recognition in the 1980s, with the release of Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987)MORRISON, Toni. Beloved. Nova York: Knof, 1997.. Conceived as “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions and take on the first-person voice of antebellum slave narrative” (RUSHDY, 1997), according to Judith Misrahi-Barak (2014), they were gradually distancing themselves from this model and today they can be considered transnational and global, as well as dialogic, polyphonic and transgenic. In this perspective and with the support of Cultural Studies and the postmodern concept of historiographic metafiction, this work proposes the analysis of the representation of the diasporic subject in The Book of Negroes, by the Canadian author Lawrence Hill (2014), which has as its theme the trajectory of slaves during the validity of the slave system. By shifting the narrative voice to the oppressed, Hill challenges the discourse of history, brushing it against the grain.
Keywords
Diasporic subject; Contemporary Neo-slave narratives;
The book of negroes