This dissertation argues that 21st century neo-slave narratives utilize genre as a tool to speculate freedom and alternative forms of black being in the present day. I consider genre not strictly as a means of categorization, but as a technology deployed by authors and filmmakers such as Octavia Butler, John Jennings, and Gerard Bush to grapple with the antiblackness that shapes existence in the afterlife of slavery. My use of “genre” is not limited to literary and filmic genres that might seem more obvious in their overlap with neo-slave narratives, such as horror or sci-fi, but encompasses Sylvia Wynter’s linking of “genre” and “gender” through their shared etymological root, “kind”. What kinds of black being are imagined through the blurring, rupture, or creation of genres within the form of the neo-slave narrative? Across three chapters, “21st Century Neo-Slave Narratives and Genre as Technology” charts multiple uses of various genres by analyzing a 19th century “traditional” slave narrative as an anchor text alongside two contemporary works. The first chapter examines the relationship between neo-slave narratives and horror through readings of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the graphic novel adaptation of Kindred and the film Antebellum. I assert that a sense of claustrophobic temporality drives the terror of these narratives and the need to merge what is already ostensibly horrific content (slavery) with the horror genre. The second chapter interrogates the relationship between gender and genre. Cast out of the category of woman by what Hortense Spillers refers to as “ungendering”, enslaved black women instead perform alternative iterations, or genres, of gender for themselves and use them to define and fight for freedom. I examine this through depictions of enslaved black womanhood in what I refer to as the anti-sentimental novel. While sentimentalism relies on sympathy to appeal to an understanding of freedom based on ideals of Christian morality and respectability, the anti-sentimental provokes feelings such as disgust or irritation while putting forth a conceptualization of freedom that is not fixed and is instead shaped by the genres of womanhood that the characters in novels, including The Bondwoman’s Narrative, The Book of Night Women, and The Good Lord Bird, inhabit. Chapter three explores adaptation as a vehicle that facilitates neo-slave narratives’ maneuvering across genres and forms of media. I examine how Nat Turner is utilized as a “serial figure”, defined by Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer as a stock, recurring character that is subject to various media changes over the course of its usage. Depictions of Turner that appear in text are not references to him as historical figure, but as a product of fiction. The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. as Fully and Voluntarily Made to Thomas R. Gray is read alongside the film The Birth of a Nation and graphic novel Nat Turner to address how adapted works about a single figure can have divergent articulations of revolution and freedom, even when adapted into the same literary genre.