This book concentrates on six neo-slave narratives written by late 20th and early 21st century black American women: Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata and A Sunday in June, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, Joan California Cooper’s Family, and Athena Lark’s Avenue of Palms. It explores the process of re(-)membering of the black female characters in these novels, and shows how these authors manage to both write the transgenerational trauma of slavery and write through it, enabling black American women’s voices to be heard. This analysis of famous classics, as well as less-known books, demonstrates how black American women’s traumatic memory of slavery is inscribed in a transgenerational black female body. Conjuring up questions of narratology and intertextuality, it highlights how working-through takes the form of a narrativization of this traumatic memory by diverse means. This book also reflects upon the links between the collective and personal psyches by laying emphasis on the ineluctable intertwining of national history and individual destiny.

In The Affirmative Discomforts of Black Female Authorship, the author examines how three popular black female authors (Roxane Gay, Beyoncé and Issa Rae) simultaneously complement and complicate hegemonic notions of race, identity and gender in contemporary American culture.

Studies of traumatic stress have explored the challenges to memory as a result of extreme experience, particularly in relation to the ways in which trauma resonates within the survivor’s body and the difficulties survivors face when trying to incorporate their experience into meaningful narratives. Jennifer Griffiths examines the attempts of several African American writers and playwrights to explore ruptures in memory after a traumatic experience and to develop creative strategies for understanding the inscription of trauma on the body in a racialized cultural context. In the literary and performance texts examined here, Griffiths shows how the self is reconstituted through testimony—through the attempt to put into language and public statement the struggle of survivors to negotiate the limits placed on their bodies and to speak controversial truths. Dessa in her jail cell, Venus in the courtroom, Sally on the auction block, Ursa in her own family history, and Rodney King in the video frame—each character in these texts by Sherley Anne Williams, Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, Gayl Jones, and Anna Deavere Smith gives voice not only to the limits of language in representing traumatic experience but also to the necessity of testimony as the public enactment of memory and bodily witness. In focusing specifically and exclusively on the relation of trauma to race and on the influence of racism on the creation and reception of narrative testimony, this book distinguishes itself from previous studies of the literatures of trauma.

This book tests the limits of fugitivity as a concept in recent Black feminist and Afro-pessimist thought. It follows the conceptual travels of confinement and flight through three major Black writing traditions in North America from the 1840s to the early 21st century. Cultural analysis is the basic methodological approach and recent concepts of captivity and fugitivity in Afro-pessimist and Black feminist theory form the theoretical framework.

In this book, Jill Salberg and Sue Grand offer an overview of the psychoanalytic work on transgenerational trauma, rooting their perspective in attachment theory, and the social-ethical turn of Relational psychoanalysis. Transgenerational Trauma: A Contemporary Introduction is a cutting-edge study of trauma transmission across generations. Salberg and Grand consider how our forebears' trauma can leave a scar on our lives, our bodies, and on our world. They posit that, too often, we re-cycle the social violence that we were subjected to. Their unique approach embraces diverse psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories, as they look at attachment, legacies of violence, and the role of witnessing in healing. Clinical and personal stories are interwoven with theory to elucidate the socio-historical positions that we inherit and live out. Social justice concerns are addressed throughout, in a mission to heal both individual and collective wounds. Transgenerational Trauma: A Contemporary Introduction offers a nuanced and comprehensive approach to this vital topic, and will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists and other mental health professionals, as well as students and scholars of trauma studies, race and gender studies, sociology, conflict resolution, and others.

This book concentrates on six neo-slave narratives written by late 20th and early 21st century black American women: Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata and A Sunday in June, Gayl Jones' Corregidora, Joan California Cooper's Family, and Athena Lark's Avenue of Palms. It explores the process of re(-)membering of the black female characters in these novels, and shows how these authors manage to both write the transgenerational trauma of slavery and write through it, enabling black American women's voices to be heard. This analysis of famous classics, as well as less-known books, demonstrates how black American women's traumatic memory of slavery is inscribed in a transgenerational black female body. Conjuring up questions of narratology and intertextuality, it highlights how working-through takes the form of a narrativization of this traumatic memory by diverse means. This book also reflects upon the links between the collective and personal psyches by laying emphasis on the ineluctable intertwining of national history and individual destiny.

Textbook

Using a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, Laufer examines the topic of maternal infanticide through the lens of Jungian theory and presents an integrated and forensic view of this issue as an aggregate of personal and political moments, and as a feminine and feminist outcry urging human evolution. The first part of the book will dissect the identity of the infanticidal mother and the Death Mother archetype, with the author providing firsthand accounts of patients that she has worked with in her professional career. The second part of the book focuses on interpreting that act of maternal infanticide, and these chapters will look to the construct of patriarchal Motherhood as a way of explaining the drive and actions of an infanticidal mother. The third and final section of the book takes the concept of evolution and transmutation a step further and addresses what is required in our modern state for the event of maternal infanticide. This is an important new book for Jungian and analytic clinicians and scholars with an interest in maternal archetypes, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in perinatal mental health. It would also be appropriate for forensic psychologists and legal analysts, and academics and clinicians in the fields of women’s health and studies.

Often, our trans-generational legacies are stories of 'us' and 'them' that never reach their terminus. We carry fixed narratives, and the ghosts of our perpetrators and of our victims. We long to be subjects in our own history, but keep reconstituting the Other as an object in their own history. Trans-generational Trauma and the Other argues that healing requires us to engage with the Other who carries a corresponding pre-history. Without this dialogue, alienated ghosts can become persecutory objects, in psyche, politics, and culture. This volume examines the violent loyalties of the past, the barriers to dialogue with our Other, and complicates the inter-subjectivity of Big History. Identifying our inherited narratives and relinquishing splitting, these authors ask how we can re-cast our Other, and move beyond dysfunctional repetitions - in our individual lives and in society. Featuring rich clinical material, Trans-generational Trauma and the Other provides an invaluable guide to expanding the application of trans-generational transmission in psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and trauma experts.

This book synthesizes ecofeminist theory, American studies, and postcolonial theory to interrogate what New Americanist William V. Spanos articulates as the "errand into the wilderness": the ethic of Puritanical expansionism at the heart of the U.S. empire that moved westward under Manifest Destiny to colonize Native Americans, non-whites, women, and the land. The project explores how the legacy of the errand has been articulated by women writers, from the slave narrative to contemporary fiction. Uniting texts across geographical and temporal boundaries, the book constructs a theoretical approach for reading and understanding how women authors craft counter-narratives at the intersection of metaphorical and literal landscapes of colonization. It focuses on literature from the United States and the Caribbean, including the slave narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet E. Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs, and contemporary work by Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Native American writer Linda Hogan. It charts the contrast between America’s earliest idyllic visions and the subsequent reality: an era of unprecedented violence against women of color and the environment. This study of many canonical writers presents an important and illuminating analysis of American mythologies that continue to impact the cultural landscape today. It will be a significant discussion text for students, scholars, and researchers in environmental humanities, ecofeminism, and postcolonial studies.