Abstract
This essay is not based upon the teaching of a particular course, but rather on my experience of teaching African American literature in a wide variety of pedagogical contexts. These range from middle class white British students at a research university in the English Midlands, to working class Afro-Caribbean students at a “new” university in London, and non-anglophone students of diverse ethnic and class backgrounds, including immigrant and refugee experiences, at the University of Geneva. I say “teaching African American Literature to” but that is an unfortunate phrasing. While, on the one hand, I want to open to students the important archive of African American writing of which they are often unaware, on the other, I seek to create in the classroom a constructive environment in which to stage a conversation about the range of moral, ethical, and political, as well as aesthetic, issues raised by this body of writing.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
Butler, Octavia, Kindred (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979, repr. 2004).
Caruth, Cathy, “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History,” in Yale French Studies, 79, special issue, Literature and the Ethical Question (1991): 181–192.
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Christopher Bigsby (ed.) (London: Everyman, 1993).
Felman, Shoshana, “Education and Crisis,” in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma, special issue of American Imago, 48.1 (Spring 1991): 13–60.
Greenspan, Henry, “Testimony and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness,” in Hilene Flanzbaum (ed.), The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999): 45–67.
Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), Jean Fagan Yellin (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).
LaCapra, Dominick, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” in Critical Inquiry, 25 (Summer, 1999): 696–727.
Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Margalit, Avishai, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Michaels, Walter Benn, “You Who Never Was There: Slavery and the New Historicism — Deconstruction and the Holocaust,” in Hilene Flanzbaum (ed.), The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 181–197.
Morrison, Toni, Beloved (New York: Signet, 1987).
Morrison, Toni, “The Site of Memory,” in William Zinsser (ed.), Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 103–124.
Olick, Jeffrey K., “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,” in Sociological Theory, 17.3 (Nov 1999): 333–348.
Sturken, Marita, “The Remembering of Forgetting: Recovered Memory and the Question of Experience,” in Social Text, 57 (Winter 1998): 103–125.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University Library, “Documenting the American South: North American Slave Narratives,” available at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/index.html, accessed May 5, 2006.
Wilkomirski, Binjamin, Fragments (New York: Schocken, 1996).
Further reading
Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann, Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).
Caruth, Cathy (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Caruth, Cathy (ed.), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Felman, Shoshana, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Fisch, Audrey (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Fleischner, Jennifer, Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
Fulton, Doveanna S., Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006).
Gilmore, Leigh, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992, repr. 1997).
Kaplan, E. Ann, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
LaCapra, Dominic, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Tal, Kalí, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Washington, Mary Helen (ed.), Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 18601960 (New York: Virago, 1989).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2010 Deborah L. Madsen
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Madsen, D.L. (2010). Teaching Trauma: (Neo-)Slave Narratives and Cultural (Re-)Memory. In: Wisker, G. (eds) Teaching African American Women’s Writing. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137086471_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137086471_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-00348-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-08647-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)