In the aftermath of the contemporary horrors of history, such as the Holocaust or the genocides in Africa, there is a proliferation of texts seeking to face the traumas of the past once and for all. The neo-slave narrative---defined by Ashraf Rushdy---initiates a journey focusing on the recovery of the long-avoided slavery past through literary imagination. Using a traumatic historical setting such as slavery, numerous authors re-interpret history by means of fictional characters who intend to re-claim and to validate their geographical spaces, and to modify the official history originally written by the colonizers. This study examines how the text provides a space for attempts to articulate the traumatic experience of slavery in four Hispanic Caribbean novels, and how this space represents a prolific location for contemporary reflection.

This dissertation is organized into three major sections. Chapter one addresses the socio-historical background where the contemporary novel on slavery is currently developing, and establishes the theoretical framework to be used in the following chapters, which includes texts by authors such as Andreas Huyssen, Dominick LaCapra, Pierre Nora, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur. Chapter two revises how two Puerto Rican authors seek to revise Puerto Rico's official history aiming the inclusion of marginalized voices and personal traumas through their novels La renuncia del héroe Baltasar (1974) by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá and Maldito Amor (1986) by Rosario Ferré. Chapter three examines how memory interacts with the challenge to articulate the traumatic past in the novels Doña Inés contra el olvido (1986) by the Venezuelan Ana Teresa Torres, and Santa Lujuria o Papeles de blanco (1996) by the Cuban journalist Marta Rojas.

In these narrative examples, the reader observes different approaches to face the trauma of slavery. By confronting the traumatic experience, multiple problems surface in its verbalization such as the impossibility to recast the integrity of the past via remembrance or recollection of the remains left behind. The significance of the neo-slave narrative lays in the yearning to rid the ghosts of the past and to comprehend how the traumatic past shapes our identity in the present.