Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song

In Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song, Tara T. Green turns to twentieth- and recent twenty-first-century representations of the Middle Passage created by African-descended artists and writers. Examining how these writers and performers revised and reimagined the Middle Passage in their work, Green argues that they recognized it as a historical and geographical site of trauma as well as a symbol for a place of understanding and change. Their work represents the legacy African captives left for resisting “social death” (the idea that Black life does not matter), but it also highlights strong resistance to that social death (the idea that it does matter).

Exploring the presence of water and its impact on African descendants, Reimagining the Middle Passage offers fresh analyses of Alex Haley’s Roots and the television adaptations; the history of flooding in Black communities in literature such as Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, in blues songs, and in television shows such as Treme; and stories of resistance found in myths associated with Marie Laveau and flying Africans.