Beyond Tragedy

Abstract

Abstract This study explores the relationship between past and future in neo-slave narratives that feature Black girl protagonists. Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women tells the story of six enslaved women and their youngest recruit Lilith, as they organize a slave revolt in Jamaica at the end of the eighteenth century. In Rosalie l’infâme, Evelyne Trouillot traces the legacy of women’s resistance in Saint Domingue through the eyes of her young protagonist Lisette in this same period. James and Trouillot examine Black girls’ coming of age through collective intergenerational acts of resistance that reappear throughout their texts as a cyclical and irreversible momentum toward freedom. This narrative framing challenges retrospective readings of slave revolts as always doomed to failure and encourages readers to reflect on the possibilities that each of these moments held, to create new futures by destabilizing the foundational laws of slave societies.