"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. Further, live performances and reenactments of slavery also rely on the time-travel motif (and the requisite suspension of disbelief) as a strategy to confront contemporary audiences with such spectacles as slave ship captivity, slave auctions, or a slave's decision to escape to freedom. As Lisa Woolfork cogently reveals, these cultural expressions indicate a concern that the traumatic meanings and consequences of American slavery have been lost to those living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Woolfork analyzes how these works deploy a representational strategy that challenges the divide between past and present, imparting to their re-creations of American slavery a physical and emotional energy to counter America's apathetic or amnesiac attitude about the trauma of the slave past."
By:
Lisa Woolfork
Imprint: University of Illinois Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 499g
ISBN: 9780252033902
ISBN 10: 0252033906
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 14 November 2008
Audience:
College/higher education
,
A / AS level
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
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
Reviews for Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture
"""A welcome addition to the African diaspora conversations about slavery, its trauma, and the complications of its remembrance. Woolfork's focus on the bodily epistemology of the slave past as a part of a transnational, multiracial, multi-generational critique is well conceived and provocative."" Sheila Smith McKoy, author of When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Violence"
