Mimicry of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the formation of resistant slave narrative in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
Postmodernism has as its major tenet the eradication of master-narratives in favor of marginalized voices. In so doing, it puts forward various strategies which, though different in methodology, are all critical of the dominant exclusionary discourses. Parodic mimicry is one of these subversive s...
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2017
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Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/11780/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/11780/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/11780/1/17444-63595-1-PB.pdf |
Summary: | Postmodernism has as its major tenet the eradication of master-narratives in favor of
marginalized voices. In so doing, it puts forward various strategies which, though different in
methodology, are all critical of the dominant exclusionary discourses. Parodic mimicry is one
of these subversive strategies which allows the anti-establishment artist to employ the
discriminatory discursive practices and skillfully turn them on their heads. African American
novelist Ishmael Reed adopts the postmodern technique of mimicry to severely criticize and
disrupt the racist structure of the United States. In his “resistant” slave narrative Flight to
Canada (1976), he takes to task the traditional historiography, showing how a so-called antislavery
novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin employs racial essentialism to
reinforce the stereotypical representations of blacks and distort history to the benefit of white
dominators. Through a parody of Stowe’s canonical work, Reed’s novel provides a space for
the black consciousness to serve as an agentic subject and re-narrate the history of slavery,
abolitionism and the Civil War. This paper aims to depict how Reed manages to rewrite the
history of slavery in Flight to Canada by mimicking Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. |
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