The Psychic Hold of Slavery : Legacies in American Expressive Culture

What would it mean to “get over slavery”? Is such a thing possible? Is it even desirable? Should we perceive the psychic hold of slavery as a set of mental manacles that hold us back from imagining a postracist America? Or could the psychic hold of slavery be understood as a tool, helping us get a grip on the systemic racial inequalities and restricted liberties that persist in the present day? Featuring original essays from an array of established and emerging scholars in the interdisciplinary field of African American studies, The Psychic Hold of Slavery offers a nuanced dialogue upon these questions. With a painful awareness that our understanding of the past informs our understanding of the present—and vice versa—the contributors place slavery’s historical legacies in conversation with twenty-first-century manifestations of antiblack violence, dehumanization, and social death. Through an exploration of film, drama, fiction, performance art, graphic novels, and philosophical discourse, this volume considers how artists grapple with questions of representation, as they ask whether slavery can ever be accurately depicted, trace the scars that slavery has left on a traumatized body politic, or debate how to best convey that black lives matter. The Psychic Hold of Slavery thus raises provocative questions about how we behold the historically distinct event of African diasporic enslavement and how we might hold off the transhistorical force of antiblack domination. "The Psychic Hold of Slavery convenes established and emerging scholars from the interdisciplinary field of African American Studies to consider how the psychological imprint of collective trauma and loss crystallizes in contemporary black discursive, aesthetic, and performative practices. The volume's diverse contributors--literary and film critics, philosophers, and cultural theorists--offer original considerations of the temporality of slavery and the challenges of representation in the context of protracted Western traditions of anti-blackness. The essays vary in their objects of study, methods, and conclusions, matriculating to complex dialogue rather than a common endorsement. They are united chiefly by their attention to a paradox at the heart of black studies today: that the history of racial slavery gains intellectual potency and ubiquity in a moment marked by unprecedented legal gains and the popularly professed rise of "post-racial" sensibilities. Consolidating numerous perspectives on the desires, investments, and identitarian logics through which the legacy of slavery persists in contemporary life, this collection will be of interest to critics concerned with the diffuse reverberations of the slave past, and more generally, to those interested in current discussions of anti-black violence, "disposable" populations, and new forms and capacities of black political subjectivity"-- Provided by publisher Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. “Do You Want to Be Well?” 1. 12 Years a What? Slavery, Representation, and Black Cultural Politics in 12 Years a Slave 2. The Fruit of Abolition. Discontinuity and Difference in Terrance Hayes’s “The Avocado” 3. Black Time. Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness 4. The Inside-Turned-Out Architecture of the Post-Neo-Slave Narrative 5. Memwa se paswa. Sifting the Slave Past in Haiti 6. Staging Social Death. Alienation and Embodiment in Aishah Rahman’s Unfi nished Women 7. Dancing with Death. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled 8. Laughing to Keep from Crying. Dave Chappelle’s Self-Exploration with “The Nigger Pixie” 9. The Cartoonal Slave 10. Trauma and the Historical Turn in Black Literary Discourse Conclusion. Black Lives Matter, Except When They Don’t. Why Slavery’s Psychic Hold Matters Selected Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index