Embodying American slavery in contemporary culture /Lisa Woolfork.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction : go there to know there -- Trauma and time travel -- Touching scars, touching slavery : trauma, quilting, and bodily epistemology -- Teach you a lesson, boy : endangered black male teens meet the slave past -- Slave tourism and rememory -- Ritual reenactments -- Historical reenactments -- Conclusion : a soul baby talks back.

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 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. --From publisher's description.

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