A neo-slave narrative is about more than enslavement. Novels within this genre use histories of slavery to query race, gender, sexuality, place, and to debate the degree to which past practices remain current. Part of what the genre asks is, still? During the post–Civil Rights and Black Power eras, black creators reconsidered the significances of enslavement and subverted its vast representational legacy. Over the course of the nineteenth and well into the first half of the twentieth century, slavery has long been given tangible representation through literature, film, the plastic arts, and popular culture has made extensive use of its legacy in music, jokes, and advertisements. What few of these forms presented was black interiority. Neo-slave narratives provide a means of seeing a frequently represented institution differently. They go beyond the binaries of slaves and masters, victims and victimizers, to show the pervasiveness and complexity of a social system.

The term neo-slave narrative generally references contemporary works that adopt the antebellum narrative of the enslaved to illuminate conceptions of race, as well as the importance of perspective and historiography. Many novels previously discussed in this study fall within this genre, including Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and David Bradley's Chaneysville Incident. Within this tradition, different writers use different forms, of course. Toni Morrison's Beloved and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) embody speculative techniques of fantasy and time travel to recover history and link it to the present. Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003) and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage complicate presumptions of race and allegiance. Still others such as Sherley Anne William's Dessa Rose (1986) and Mat Johnson's Pym (2011) rewrite not only American slavery but also American literary history.

When the term was first employed is unclear. Ishamel Reed used it in 1984 to describe Bradley's Chaneysville Incident (R. Martin n. pag.). Bernard Bell is frequently credited with coining the term and inaugurating scholarship on it. In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987), he describes it as a contemporary narrative of flight from bondage to freedom with elements of the slave narrative blended with fable and legend, used to illuminate racism, migrations, and cultural spirit (289).