RADICAL RETICENCE: QUIETNESS, VISION, AND RESISTANCE IN CONTEMPORARY REPRESENTATIONS OF SLAVERY

Throughout the 21st century, some artists, athletes, and politicians began to use their platforms to speak out against the issues of systemic racism and police brutality that continue to affect black Americans to this day. While this outpouring of support for the black community has helped move the needle in terms of equity and inclusion initiatives, critics have often labeled these figures and movements too public or loud, conflating the concepts of talking and loudness with resistance to the status quo. Yet, in an era when “silence is not an option” and “quietness is complicity,” African American authors and artists have taken a subtle and quiet approach to depicting the lives of enslaved men and women. More specifically, novels, films, and art from the past two decades portray resistance as not only a public and physical phenomenon, but a mental and ideological one. This dissertation project comes at the intersection of African American literary, religious, and historical studies to argue that quiet and internal acts, such as surrender, memory, and visions, throughout contemporary representations of slavery provide an effective form of resistance to white hegemonic authority, ideology, and values. It asks readers to look beyond the public and the loud, to think about resistance that is not merely physical, to consider the possibilities present in reticence.