Earticle

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영어

This paper intends to join the recent debate in African American literary scholarship regarding contemporary narratives’ “historical turn” to the slave past by situating the critical dialogue within a larger context of Black (in)humanity. Questioning the literary modes through which slavery is represented, scholars have examined psychological and aesthetic investment in the traumatic slave past as a means of forging contemporary African Americans’ relationship to Black subjectivity. This paper shifts the analytical focus in approaching the historical turn debate by examining two early neo-slave narratives-Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora-as emphasizing individual agency and selfhood of the post-slavery generations. While many scholars have criticized neo-slave narratives’ melancholic historicism as pessimistically overdetermining the Black political future in the United States, I create a rupture in the existing scholarship by examining subtle moments of Black subject formation in narratives of slavery. By engaging with theories of memory and trauma, I argue that Morrison and Jones warn against the dangers of ancestors’ collective trauma devouring the present lives of post-slavery African Americans.

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Works Cited
Abstract

키워드

저자

• Eugene Pae [ Graduate Student, State University of New York at Albany ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학21 [English21]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1738-4052

• 수록기간

  1967~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 820