| Description |
xi, 233 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-221) and index. |
| Contents |
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. |
| Summary |
"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 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" --Publisher description. |
| Subject |
Slavery -- Social aspects -- United States.
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Slavery -- Social aspects. |
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United States. |
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Slavery. |
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Slavery -- United States -- Psychological aspects.
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Psychological aspects. |
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Psychic trauma -- Social aspects -- United States.
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Psychic trauma -- Social aspects. |
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Psychic trauma. |
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Popular culture -- United States.
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Popular culture. |
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Human body in popular culture.
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Human body in popular culture. |
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Slavery in literature.
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Slavery in literature. |
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Slavery in motion pictures.
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Slavery in motion pictures. |
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Historical reenactments -- United States.
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Historical reenactments. |
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United States -- Intellectual life.
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Intellectual life. |
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United States -- Social conditions -- 1980-2020.
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| ISBN |
9780252033902 cloth alkaline paper |
|
0252033906 cloth alkaline paper |
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