Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature
Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature
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Abstract
Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women. Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or “witnessing”—trauma to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature, articulating a theory of reading (or “dual-witnessing”) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. The book then places its original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in American literature. This book also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: Reading Trauma in ((African) American Literature
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1
“To Be Free to Say So”: Witnessing Trauma in the Narratives of Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Keckley
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2
“You Cant Understand It”: William Faulkner’s Anti-Witnessing of Race and Gender
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3
“You Got Tuh Go There Tuh Know There”: Dual- and Communal Witnessing in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Margaret Walker’s Jubilee
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4
“This Thing We Have Done Together”: Haunted Witnessing in the the Novels of Toni Morrison and Jesmyn Ward
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Conclusion: Dual-Witnessing as Revolution
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End Matter
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