Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture
Lisa Woolfork (Author)
9780252033902
Hardback, published 14 November 2008
248 pages, 2 photographs
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.513 kg
"Woolfork's book builds on recent work in African American studies and psychoanalytic theory by Cathy Caruth, Claudia Tate, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, challenging and confronting the divides between past and present, freedom and slavery, as they are reenacted bodily and textually in contemporary US culture. Recommended"--Choice
This study explores contemporary novels, films, performances, and reenactments that depict American slavery and its traumatic effects by invoking a time-travel paradigm to produce a representational strategy of "bodily epistemology." Disrupting the prevailing view of traumatic knowledge that claims that traumatic events are irretrievable and accessible only through oblique reference, these novels and films circumvent the notion of indirect reference by depicting a replaying of the past, forcing present-day protagonists to witness and participate in traumatic histories that for them are neither dead nor past. Lisa Woolfork cogently analyzes how these works deploy a representational strategy that challenges the divide between past and present, imparting to their recreations of American slavery a physical and emotional energy to counter America's apathetic or amnesiac attitude about the trauma of the slave past.
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Go There to Know There 1. Trauma and Time Travel 2. Touching Scars, Touching Slavery: Trauma, Quilting, and Bodily Epistemology 3. Teach You a Lesson, Boy: Endangered Black Male Teens Meet the Slave Past 4. Slave Tourism and Rememory 5. Ritual Reenactments 6. Historical Reenactments Conclusion: A Soul Baby Talks Back Notes Works Cited Index
