Not Even Past: Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten
Dorothy Stringer
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 ... Read more
Show LessProduct Details
About Dorothy Stringer
Reviews for Not Even Past: Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten
-—Naomi Mandel, University of Rhode Island “This is the beginning of a cultural moment for critical studies of race and trauma, and Stringer makes a timely and eloquent foray into that field.”
-—Gwen Bergner, West Virginia University