Not Even Past
Not Even Past
Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten
Series: American Literatures Initiative
Contributors: Dorothy Stringer (author)
Format: Hardback , 272 pp, 6 b/w illustrations
Publication date: 15 Nov 2009
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN-10: 082323147X
EAN: 9780823231478
"Not Even Past" highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is 'not even past', narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail. Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works parallel psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era and offer important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today.
Author Biography:
DOROTHY STRINGER teaches at Temple University.