This course explores neo-slave narratives, contemporary literary texts that return to the historical question of American chattel slavery in order to re-imagine the violent destruction of life itself and to retell a story of dehumanization, accommodation, resistance, resignation, and revolt. In other words, this is a course about aesthetics and politics--a course that seeks to understand how literary production produces politics, responds to political contestation, and mobilizes the authority of genre to stake a claim in a wider social dialogue. This particular course takes as its central concern the production of neo-slave narratives as a response to the variegated history of racial capitalism. Over the course of the quarter we will explore what can and should be included in this genre, and how the genre functions. We will examine the relationship between slave narratives written in the 19th century to neo-slave narratives written in the 20th and 21st centuries, paying particular attention to how contemporary texts construct gendered, raced and sexualized understandings of both bondage and freedom. Narratives that imagine women’s experiences in slavery will be a central concern. Questions that will guide our inquiry throughout include: How and why have neo-slave narratives become a cultural preoccupation in recent decades? How does the representation of motherhood in bondage shed light on the past and the present? How can we understand the relationships between genre and gender, and gender and narrative form? How do neo-slave narratives meditate on life in the context of racial capitalism? How do they weigh in on the all-important question of what it means to be free? Reading for the course will a range of novels and a selection of theoretical and historical texts on literary genre, slavery, race and motherhood.