REWRITING THE HISTORY OF ENSLAVED AFRICAN-AMERICANS AND THEIR SURVIVAL IN JOHNSON’S YELLOW WIFE

Abstract

The paper critically reads Sadeqa Johnson’s masterpiece Yellow Wife (2021) as a neo-slave narrative. The neo-slave narrative is a post-World War II genre. The traditional slave narratives gave the account of a fleeing slave who opposed slavery and worked to abolish it. In an attempt to build a critical history of the Black Atlantic, the neo-slave narrative highlights the slave’s historical legacy by uncovering the past through the foregrounding of African Atlantic experiences. Johnson shows a realistic image of African-American life. She believes that many difficulties and facts of African-Americans’ lives are overlooked and neglected in slave tales. The paper is about slavery, a terrible time period in African-American history that is notorious for constant dehumanization, humiliation, racial segregation, and exploitation. The paper attempts to showcase Johnson’s unveiling of the sufferings of black slaves in the white American society and its huge influence on African-American women. The paper seeks theoretic support from the ideas of Ashraf H. A. Rushdy - the most influential source of thought about neo-slave narratives. This paper closely reads Johnson’s fictive yet intimate account of a biracial (black) woman’s survival in particular and how black women break the stereotypes created by the whites in general.