Finally, it reviews the cinematic representation of slavery and racial stereotypes through several representative slavery films – D.W. Highlighting the correlation between the novels' postmodern narrative strategies and their attempt to engage in historical revisionism and convey the authentic reality of the slave experience, it argues that both Williams and Butler successfully de/re-construct and re-write/right the dominant narrative of African American history by depicting a black woman's first-hand experience of the past and inscribing the physical wounds of slavery into the present. Using William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) as the paradigmatic text, which initiated a critical debate over its authenticity, as well as subsequent intertextual deconstructions of its historical bigotry, the paper juxtaposes Styron's text to two postmodern neo-slave narratives – Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose (1986) and Octavia E. It pays special attention to the emergence of this genre as a continuation of nineteenth-century slave narratives and a response to pro-slavery writing, which appropriated African American history to encourage prejudice, stereotyping, and cultural misrepresentation. This paper traces the evolution of the postmodern slave narrative.
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