Download or read book Creating Memory and Cultural Identity in African American Trauma Fiction written by Patricia San José Rico and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do contemporary African American authors relate trauma, memory, and the recovery of the past with the processes of cultural and identity formation in African American communities?
Download or read book Cultural Trauma written by Ron Eyerman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-13 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Ron Eyerman explores the formation of the African-American identity through the theory of cultural trauma. The trauma in question is slavery, not as an institution or as personal experience, but as collective memory: a pervasive remembrance that grounded a people's sense of itself. Combining a broad narrative sweep with more detailed studies of important events and individuals, Eyerman reaches from Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, the New Deal and the Second World War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond. He offers insights into the intellectual and generational conflicts of identity-formation which have a truly universal significance, as well as providing a compelling account of the birth of African-American identity. Anyone interested in questions of assimilation, multiculturalism and postcolonialism will find this book indispensable.
Download or read book Race Trauma and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans. Approaching trauma from several cutting-edge theoretical perspectives -- psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and cultural and social theories -- Schreiber analyzes the lasting effects of slavery as depicted in Morrison's work and considers the almost insurmountable task of recovering from trauma to gain subjectivity. With an innovative application of neuroscience to literary criticism, Schreiber explains how trauma, whether initiated by physical abuse, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, or abandonment, becomes embedded in both psychic and bodily circuits. Slavery and its legacy of cultural rejection create trauma on individual, familial, and community levels, and parents unwittingly transmit their trauma to their children through repetition of their bodily stored experiences. Concepts of "home" -- whether a physical place, community, or relationship -- are reconstructed through memory to provide a positive self and serve as a healing space for Morrison's characters. Remembering and retelling trauma within a supportive community enables trauma victims to move forward and attain a meaningful subjectivity and selfhood. Through careful analysis of each novel, Schreiber traces the success or failure of Morrison's characters to build or rebuild a cohesive self, starting with slavery and the initial postslavery generation, and continuing through the twentieth century, with a special focus on the effects of inherited trauma on children. When characters attempt to escape trauma through physical relocation, or to project their pain onto others through aggressive behavior or scapegoating, the development of selfhood falters. Only when trauma is confronted through verbalization and challenged with reparative images of home, can memories of a positive self overcome the pain of past experiences and cultural rejection. While the cultural trauma of slavery can never truly disappear, Schreiber argues that memories that reconstruct a positive self, whether created by people, relationships, a physical place, or a concept, help Morrison's characters to establish subjectivity. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Schreiber's book unites psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and social theories into a full and richly textured analysis of trauma and the possibility of healing in Morrison's novels.
Download or read book The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U S Literature and Culture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture explores hospitality in literature, language and cinema from a variety of methodological perspectives that illustrate the richness of American hospitality.
Download or read book American Borders written by Paula Barba Guerrero and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-17 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Borders: Inclusion and Exclusion in US Culture provides an overview of American culture produced in a range of contexts, from the founding of the nation to the age of globalization and neoliberalism, in order to understand the diverse literary landscapes of the United States from a twenty-first century perspective. The authors confront American exceptionalism, discourses on freedom and democracy, and US foundational narratives by reassessing the literary canon and exploring ethnic literature, culture, and film with a focus on identity and exclusion. Their contributions envision different manifestations of conviviality and estrangement and deconstruct neoliberal slogans, analyzing hospitable inclusion in relation to national history and ideologies. By looking at representations of foreignness and conditional belonging in literature and film from different ethnic traditions, the volume fleshes out a new border dialectic that conveys the heterogeneity of American boundaries beyond the opposition inside/outside.
Download or read book Cultural Memories of Origin written by Frank Wilker and published by Universitatsverlag Winter. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Cultural Memories of Origin' focuses on how the second maritime leg of the African slave trade - commonly referred to as the Middle Passage - is represented in select literary and artistic works of African American culture. The book analyses several discursive, aesthetic and political shifts in the memory production about the transatlantic slave trade and discusses their ramifications for the construction of black identity in the U.S. Given the deracinating nature that the middle passage experience had on African subjects, as well as the representational difficulties in portraying this rupture, the book's analytical framework incorporates theories of trauma. By addressing the productive contrast and the methodological differences that exist in between what is in general deemed "historical scholarship" on the one hand and "cultural memory" on the other, the book contributes to the ongoing discussion about the possibility of an involuntary inheritability of traumatic events.
Download or read book Humour and Politics in Africa written by Daniel Hammett and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2023-03-27 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyses of humour often focus primarily on the Global North, with little consideration for examples and practices from elsewhere. This book provides a vital contribution to humour theory by developing a Global South perspective. Taking a wide-ranging view across the whole of the continent, the book examines the relationship between humour and politics in Africa. It considers the context of the production and reception of humour in African contexts and argues that humour is more than just symbolic. Moving beyond the idea of humour as a mode of resistance, the book investigates the ‘political work’ that humour does and explores the complex entanglements in which the politics, practices and performances of humour are located.
Download or read book The Resilience Myth written by Soraya Chemaly and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the “must-read” (NPR) Rage Becomes Her presents a powerful manifesto for communal resilience based on in-depth investigations into history, social science, and psychology. We are often urged to rely only on ourselves for strength, mental fortitude, and positivity. But with her distinctive “skill, wit, and sharp insight” (Laura Bates, author of Girl Up), Soraya Chemaly challenges us to adapt our thinking about how we survive in a world of sustained, overlapping crises. It is interdependence and nurturing relationships that truly sustain us, she argues. Based on comprehensive research and eye-opening examples from real-life, The Resilience Myth offers alternative visions of relational hardiness by emphasizing care for others and our environments above all.
Download or read book Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives written by Dana Mihăilescu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-12 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects work by several European, North American, and Australian academics who are interested in examining the performance and transmission of post-traumatic memory in the contemporary United States. The contributors depart from the interpretation of trauma as a unique exceptional event that shatters all systems of representation, as seen in the writing of early trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dominick LaCapra. Rather, the chapters in this collection are in conversation with more recent readings of trauma such as Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” (2009), the role of mediation and remediation in the dynamics of cultural memory (Astrid Erll, 2012; Aleida Assman, 2011), and Stef Craps’ focus on “postcolonial witnessing” and its cross-cultural dimension (2013). The corpus of post-traumatic narratives under discussion includes fiction, diaries, memoirs, films, visual narratives, and oral testimonies. A complicated dialogue between various and sometimes conflicting narratives is thus generated and examined along four main lines in this volume: trauma in the context of “multidirectional memory”; the representation of trauma in autobiographical texts; the dynamic of public forms of national commemoration; and the problematic instantiation of 9/11 as a traumatic landmark.
Download or read book Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction written by Keith Eldon Byerman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction
Download or read book Cultural Trauma s Influence on Representations of African American Identity in Alice Walker s Everyday Use written by Raheem Terrell Rashawn Elmore and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis employs Ron Eyerman's Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity as a conceptual lens to analyze representations of African American identity in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use." In Cultural Trauma, Eyerman implements two narrative frames, the tragic/redemptive and progressive, to explore how cultural trauma has influenced the identity formation of generations of African Americans from Reconstruction to the present. This literary analysis uses those narrative frames to investigate why the characters in "Everyday Use" form conflicting cultural identities and interpretations of heritage despite sharing racial and ethnic ties. Moreover, this study reveals that the contrasting representations of African American identity presented by the characters in "Everyday Use" are a result of the variance within the tragic/redemptive and progressive, narrative frames that shaped their respective worldviews. The fundamental differences between the progressive and tragic/redemptive frames lies in how they regard the African and the American, and how they interpreted the meaning of slavery. By examining "Everyday Use's" characters in the context of cultural trauma, this piece presents a balanced interpretation of the opposing two energies in "Everyday Use." Particularly, instead of offering a one-sided interpretation of the characters, as other critics have, this analysis focuses on the complexities within the diverse representations of African American identity presented in the story.
Download or read book Nat Turner in Black and White written by Luminita Dragulescu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-23 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals how writers, as explorers of collective memory and historical record, imagine cautionary Nat Turner-tales that reflect their time and beliefs. The book critically surveys how Turner inspired the cultural imagination and became a largely misunderstood and polarizing figure in the US imaginary. By locating the Turner Insurrection within the territory of historical race trauma, writers across the color-line have exposed the lasting impact of slavery on American society. As African Americans continue to endure the indignities and inequity of an insidiously racist system, servile insurrections emerge as models of heroic rebellion. Historical literature is mnemonic in nature and cautionary in purpose. Since rebellion is predetermined within unjust systems, as recently as May 2020, the police killing of yet another unarmed Black man caused nation-wide protests. The US is undergoing a paradigm shift that dispels the political fiction of racial equality and the optimistic rhetoric of a colorblind and racially reconciled America, as it exposes the devastating effects of race trauma.
Download or read book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome written by Joy DeGruy and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From acclaimed author and researcher Dr. Joy DeGruy comes this fascinating book that explores the psychological and emotional impact on African Americans after enduring the horrific Middle Passage, over 300 years of slavery, followed by continued discrimination. From the beginning of American chattel slavery in the 1500’s, until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Africans were hunted like animals, captured, sold, tortured, and raped. They experienced the worst kind of physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual abuse. Given such history, Dr. Joy DeGruy asked the question, “Isn’t it likely those enslaved were severely traumatized? Furthermore, did the trauma and the effects of such horrific abuse end with the abolition of slavery?” Emancipation was followed by another hundred years of institutionalized subjugation through the enactment of Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, peonage and convict leasing, and domestic terrorism and lynching. Today the violations continue, and when combined with the crimes of the past, they result in further unmeasured injury. What do repeated traumas visited upon generation after generation of a people produce? What are the impacts of the ordeals associated with chattel slavery, and with the institutions that followed, on African Americans today? Dr. DeGruy answers these questions and more as she encourages African Americans to view their attitudes, assumptions, and emotions through the lens of history. By doing so, she argues they will gain a greater understanding of the impact centuries of slavery and oppression has had on African Americans. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome is an important read for all Americans, as the institution of slavery has had an impact on every race and culture. “A masterwork. [DeGruy’s] deep understanding, critical analysis, and determination to illuminate core truths are essential to addressing the long-lived devastation of slavery. Her book is the balm we need to heal ourselves and our relationships. It is a gift of wholeness.”—Susan Taylor, former Editorial Director of Essence magazine
Download or read book How to Read African American Literature written by Aida Levy-Hussen and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Aida Levy-Hussen’s argument develops on two levels: as a textual analysis of black historical fiction, and as a critical examination of the reading practices that characterize the scholarship of our time. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and feminist and queer theory, Levy-Hussen examines how works by Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Octavia Butler, Charles Johnson, and others represent and mediate social injury and collective grief. In the criticism that surrounds these novels, she identifies two major interpretive approaches: “therapeutic reading” (premised on the assurance that literary confrontations with historical trauma will enable psychic healing in the present), and “prohibitive reading” (anchored in the belief that fictions of returning to the past are dangerous and to be avoided). Levy-Hussen argues that these norms have become overly restrictive, standing in the way of a more supple method of interpretation that recognizes and attends to the indirect, unexpected, inconsistent, and opaque workings of historical fantasy and desire. Moving beyond the question of whether literature must heal or abandon historical wounds, Levy-Hussen proposes new ways to read African American literature now.
Download or read book Traumatic Memory and the Ethical Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature written by Susana Onega and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the construction and artistic representation of traumatic memories in the contemporary Western world from a variety of inter- and trans-disciplinarity critical approaches and perspectives, ranging from the cultural, political, historical, and ideological to the ethical and aesthetic, and distinguishing between individual, collective, and cultural traumas. The chapters introduce complementary concepts from diverse thinkers including Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Abraham and Torok, and Joyce Carol Oates; they also draw from fields of study such as Memory Studies, Theory of Affects, Narrative and Genre Theory, and Cultural Studies. Traumatic Memory and the Political, Economic, and Transhistorical Functions of Literature addresses trauma as a culturally embedded phenomenon and deconstructs the idea of trauma as universal, transhistorical, and abstract.
Download or read book Making Black History written by Dominique Haensell and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-10-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study proposes that – rather than trying to discern the normative value of Afropolitanism as an identificatory concept, politics, ethics or aesthetics – Afropolitanism may be best approached as a distinct historical and cultural moment, that is, a certain historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa, as signifier, as real and imagined locus, embodies in the globalized, yet predominantly Western, cultural landscape of the 21st century. As such, Making Black History looks at contemporary fictions of the African or Black Diaspora that have been written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism. Discursively, this moment is very much part of a diasporic conversation that takes place in the US and is thus informed by various negotiations of blackness, race, class, and cultural identity. Yet rather than interpreting Afropolitan literatures (merely) as a rejection of racial solidarity, as some commentators have, they should be read as ambivalent responses to post-racial discourses dominating the first decade of the 21st century, particularly in the US, which oscillate between moments of intense hope and acute disappointment. Please read our interview with Dominique Haensell here: https://blog.degruyter.com/de-gruyters-10th-open-access-book-anniversary-dominique-haensell-and-her-winning-title-making-black-history/
Download or read book The Call of the Past written by Patricia San José Rico and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
