Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Cultural, Collective, and Literary Trauma: Foundations for Analysis
?1 Trauma: What it Is, How it Feels, What it Does
?2 Collective Trauma
?3 A "Story to Pass on"? Trauma and its Transmission
?4 Trauma, Memory and Space: Sites of Memory/Sites of Trauma
?5 Trauma Writing/Writing Trauma
?6 Trauma Fiction
3 History, Roots and Myth: Toni Morrison's Paradise and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day
?1 History and Traumatic Memory
?2 Paradise: The Perils of Sublimated History
??2.1 History Revisited
??2.2 This, you Must Learn: The Elders' Exaltation of History
??2.3 Not the Truth, after all: Archival Work and the Unearthing of the Secret
??2.4 "An Endless Cycle of Repetition": Inverted Racism and Violence
??2.5 Wind of Change: When the Out There Reaches Paradise
??2.6 Breaking the Cycle of Repetition: Sharing Trauma
?3 Know thy Roots: Mama Day and the Significance of the Past
??3.1 Dynamic Memory vs. Stagnant History
??3.2 The Day Family: A Trauma within the Folds of Memory
??3.3 The Need for Roots: George and Cocoa
4 The Dangers of Repression/Suppression: Toni Morrison's Beloved
?1 Trauma and Hidden Memory
?2 Beloved: The F/ Hateful Power of Repressed Trauma
??2.1 "The Unspeakable": Repressive Signs in Beloved's Characters
??2.2 A Ghost (Hi)story: Beloved as the Return of the Repressed
??2.3 Voicing it out: The Attempt and Failure of the Talking Cure
??2.4 The Light at the End of the Tunnel: Denver and Recovery from Trauma
5 The Recovery of History: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and David Bradley's the Chaneysville Incident
?1 A Quest for One's Past: Individuals, Collectivities, and Recovered Memory
?2 The Truth Shall Make you Fly: Unearthing the Past in Song of Solomon
??2.1 Trauma in Song of Solomon
??2.2 That's Not My Thing: Milkman's Initial Disinterest in the Past
??2.3 Of Roots and Ancestors: The Recovery of History as a Treasure Hunt
??2.4 It Is All in There: Myth, Tales and Folk Culture as a Repository of Memory
??2.5 Lieux de Memoire: Places of History and the History in Places
??2.6 Hallowed Be thy Name: Naming and the Power of Designation
??2.7 Learning (in order) to Fly: The Acquisition of Historical Knowledge as a Liberating Process
??2.8 Turning the Tables: Reversal of Stigmas and our Debt to the Future
?3 Digging up History: The Chaneysville Incident and the Ethnic Historian
??3.1 Historians vs. Archeologists: Study or Action?
??3.2 Scholarly Knowledge vs. Ancestral Wisdom
??3.3 The Contesting and Therapeutic Value of Recovering the Past
??3.4 The Coalescence of Fact and Fiction: Bridging Genres and Cultures
6 Epilogue: Is Closure Possible? The use of Trauma in Art as a Vehicle for Political Struggle
?1 "National Amnesia": Searching for its Cure
?2 Fighting Our Own Battles: The Use of Trauma in Political Struggle
?3 Trauma as Art or the Art of Trauma?
?4 Is Closure Possible?
Works Cited
Index
