Author : Mallory Findlay
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 116 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (889 download)
Book Synopsis Against a Reality Unbearable: The Problems of Nostalgia's Disavowals in Plantation Reminiscences by : Mallory Findlay
Download or read book Against a Reality Unbearable: The Problems of Nostalgia's Disavowals in Plantation Reminiscences written by Mallory Findlay and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines how black and white writers memorialized slavery of the American South, first through slave narratives, then through nostalgic memoirs written by former slaveholding women. The writing subjects of both kinds of testimonies witness history and mediate cultural trauma in ways that demonstrate how each side viewed and experienced the nature of slaves, the nature of slavery, and the morality of the slaveholder. Both kinds of testimonies evince a traumatized writing subject, although the perpetrator trauma of the former slaveholders manifests affectively as nostalgia for the antebellum plantation, which I read as a response to being defeated and subsequently vilified, as well as to being guilty but refusing culpability. Both slave narratives and nostalgic reminiscences exhibit narratives silences, but the silences of perpetrator narratives can be discursively filled by the voices of victims. Therefore, the authoritative posture nostalgic memoirs assume is undermined and nostalgia's attempt at amelioration ultimately fails in the wider discourse of American slavery.