Neoslave Narratives: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Literatures

This issue aims to gather critical reflections on the persistence and reconfiguration of the legacy of slavery in contemporary literatures, with an emphasis not only on Brazilian production but also in dialogue with other literatures of the African diaspora.
Since the late twentieth century, writers have been recovering and reinventing the structure and themes of slave narratives, transforming them into spaces of reclaimed subjectivity and historical memory reconstruction. As Ashraf Rushdy (1999, p. 217) argues, “the idea of rewriting slave narratives as a palimpsest” is marked by a bi-temporal perspective in which the present is traversed by traces of a past that has been erased but remains legible. Timothy Spaulding further states that, in aesthetic terms, neo-slave narratives “seek to create a new narrative form through which to reveal the complexities embedded within the slave experience and obscured by traditional historical accounts,” thus representing “a political act of narration designed to reshape our view of slavery and its impact on our cultural condition” (2005, p. 4).
This dynamic and critical approach to the past is particularly relevant in Brazil, the last country in the Western world to officially abolish slavery, where the marks of the slave regime are still evident in structural inequalities, systemic racism, and the everyday violence directed at Black bodies. Contemporary Brazilian literature has responded to this legacy in ways that are aesthetically innovative, politically engaged, and historically grounded.
In the national context, works such as Ponciá Vicêncio (2003) by Conceição Evaristo, Um Defeito de Cor (2006) by Ana Maria Gonçalves, Torto Arado (2019) by Itamar Vieira Junior, and Água de Barrela (2015) by Eliana Alves Cruz, update and reinvent the history of slavery through narratives centered on Black, female, peripheral, and spiritual characters. These works engage in dialogue with international authors such as Octavia Butler (Kindred, 1979), Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987), Lawrence Hill (The Book of Negroes, 2007), Bernardine Evaristo (Blonde Roots, 2008), and Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad, 2016; The Nickel Boys, 2019).
We welcome articles that explore, among other themes:

• Neo-slave narratives in contemporary Brazilian literature;
• Comparative approaches between Brazilian and international texts that address slavery and its legacies;
• The role of literature in reconstructing subaltern memories;
• Slavery as trauma, post-memory, and counter-memory;
• The body as a site of memory and resistance;
• The formal hybridity of neo-slave narratives (novel, poetry, orality, music, performance);
• Queer, erotic, or intersectional representations of the experience of slavery;
• Reconfigurations of home, belonging, community, and racial identity;
• Critiques of official historiography and the use of fiction as counternarrative;

The role of religiosity and African cosmologies in rewriting the history of slavery.