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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Madeleine Dobie and Mads Anders Baggesgaard
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVII] 2025
► pp. 149–166

Chapter 9
Performing the neurotic

Memory and black subjectivity in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts

This chapter presents the deconstructive concept “neurotic memory” through an analysis of Rivers Solomon’s sci-fi neo-slave narrative An Unkindness of Ghosts. Neurotic remembering is a performative practice that on one level invokes, demonstrates, and repeats the violence inherent in the institution of slavery as it stages the ontological contradictions of the black enslaved female. At the same time, this performative practice presupposes a process of incessant deconstruction and reinvention in the face of trauma, bringing to the fore certain “fugitive sensibilities,” strategies of being and relating beyond the human that open space for the creation of new epistemologies, identities, and pockets of resistance.
Keywords: slavery, psychoanalysis, gender theory, black feminism, Afrofuturism, neo-slave narratives, cultural memory
Article outline
  • Neurosis: A contextual history
  • Performing Neurosis: Rivers solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts
  • Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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