Chase-Riboud: Sally Hemings: speech, writing and the resignification of the past
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22456/1983-201X.51848Keywords:
The new slave narratives, Speech versus writing, Resignification of the past, Slavery, Racial identity construction, Historical truth versus fictional truth, The myth of the heroAbstract
This article analyses the historical novel Sally Hemings by Chase-Ribaud within the African-American literary tradition. It compares the relationship between the novel and the first slave narratives, showing both their contacts and fractures. It delves into three of the main characters in the novel in terms of what each of them stands for: Langdon, writing; Sally, speech and James, the African-American culture and community. This work explores the legitimacy, historical value and veracity of the written discourse. It also dismantles the binary opposition of ‘fictional reality vs. historical reality’, destabilization that is carried out to denounce the way in which the historiography of the whites presents the marginalized people. It finally grapples with the harm that writing has produced in Sally and the way in which, through memory and oral reconstruction, she erases the master’s gaze with respect to her own identity and the place she occupies in the black community. The result is a construction of a new voice which attains a new subject position, which re-signifies the past while revisiting it.
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References
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