Telling Teens about Slavery

Slavery has become a transnational site of memory, a dialogic battlefield that is relevant not only for the descendants of the enslaved and African diasporans in general but also for the descendants of slavers and for all those countries which have benefited from the slave trade. Because of black activism in literature and the visual arts, as well as popular culture and political circles, the dialogue on slavery, though far from expressing a unified collective memory, has become prominent in the Western public sphere and is producing compelling cultural artifacts. The amnesia that has conveniently made slavery invisible as the root cause of the persistent economic and social exclusion of people of African descent is being challenged by revisionary imaginative efforts, which aim to dislocate domesticating, reconciliatory versions of the past from the collective consciousness and to intervene in the mnemonic archive of slave societies in ways that are not merely psychologically healing, but also socially and culturally transformative. This chapter investigates the memory of slavery as it has been represented in young adult literature in the United States, Great Britain, the Caribbean and Brazil, with a focus on the post-Civil Rights period and young blacks' growing disillusionment with the dream of more equitable societies.