From Racial Difference to Racial Indifference: The Neo-Liberal Narrative and Its Colonial Legacy Through the Example of Washington Black (2018) by Esi Edugyan

Abstract

The present article centres on Washington Black—a neo-slave narrative whose eponymous hero documents his route from slavery to freedom. The novel offers insight into how the structural legacy of colonialism lives on in (neo-)liberalism, which is understood here as a currently dominant socio-economic system and a set of beliefs rooted in the colonial economy and colonial ideology. The paper investigates how harmful discursive formations once created to justify European civilizing missions and chattel slavery are still being used to belie the reality of structural violence and systemic inequity, where particular groups are being racialised and marginalised at the same time. Through the prism of the novel, the article looks at how the discourse of universal human rights, the idea of a grateful slave, and the myth of self-sufficiency may be employed as the mechanisms of social control over the Other.