Rewriting American History in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Metahistoricity, the Postcolonial Subject, and the Return of the Repressed

Writing as an African American woman existing at the margins of American society in the mid 1970s, Mildred D. Taylor demonstrated a postmodern awareness of fictionality and history in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976). Reworking African American history from the point of view and voice of a black subaltern female child, Taylor succeeds in recovering a silenced and repressed history of African Americans, and in adding that history to the larger American experience. Instead of reinforcing and perpetuating negative stereotypes of blacks—individual or collective—that are historically produced by and distributed in a white society, and taking their passive, marginalized, and violated status for granted, Taylor represents African Americans as active agents, who can employ strategic resistance—”trickery” and “disidentification”—in order to reappropriate dominant, repressive discourses for their own purposes to survive in a racist society. In doing so, Taylor does not make her historical fiction merely serve as a record of conventional history. Instead, she creates a meaningful place in which the once ostracized, discriminated against, and marginalized voice not only can be heard, recognized, and respected, but also the formerly voiceless Others can be transformed into historical subjects or agents able to challenge master narratives and hierarchies.