Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture by Lisa Woolfork HARDBACK

Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary CultureAuthor(s): Lisa Woolfork\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Illinois Press, United States\nImprint: University of Illinois Press\nISBN-13: 9780252033902, 978-0252033902\nSynopsis\nThis 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 cogently analyzes how these works deploy a representational strategy that challenges the divide between past and present, impar.