In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction During the second half of the twentieth century, the postmodern era emerged as a result of the increasing sway of poststructural theories that reject the conception of culture as a systematic structure organized by binary oppositions. Fredric Jameson explains that “[p]ostmodernism as it is generally understood involves a radical break, both with a dominant culture and aesthetic,” a break that has created the impetus and space for new social, economic, political, and cultural discourses and forms throughout Western society (Foreward vii). Rejecting modernist despair over cultural fragmentation and the nostalgic search for stability and continuity, the postmodernist instead seeks to imagine or transform the past in ways that problematize the entire notion of historical knowledge by “locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of singularity” (Hutcheon, Poetics 129). In the age of postmodernity, it has, thus, become possible to deconstruct master narratives that have long operated to maintain traditional power structures and to create counter-narratives that decenter the white male subject and dismantle totalizing or essentializing claims. In the United States, a central factor in causing this shift in thinking was the pressures associated with changing demographics. According to W. Lawrence Hogue, “by the 1960s, the majority of people of color lived in America ’s large metropolitan areas” rather than rural locales.1 This shift also coincided “with the proliferation and extension of mass culture and the mediation of culture by the media, which increased their visibility” and enabled them to use their numbers more effectively in demanding political, cultural, educational , and economic equality (11). Women also were entering college and professional occupations in increasing numbers, which resulted in further pressure for equality in the workplace. The establishment of the National Organization of Women in 1966, women’s increasing access to birth control, and changing mores regarding marriage also fueled the women’s movement. Although racial tensions existed within the women’s movement, as well as among different racial minority groups, women and all people of color ultimately benefited from the 258 Novels since World War II civil rights legislation that was finally enacted in the 1960s to end segregation; require equal pay; prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex; and ensure voting rights were protected.2 Nevertheless, civil rights for black Americans have only been gained by a long and contested process that reopened old wounds with the objective of making slavery “part of America’s collective memory, not merely that of one of its constituent members” (Eyerman 18). In this process, the South inevitably lagged behind the North in accepting and implementing legal mandates, which resulted in continued discord and Federal intervention, especially regarding desegregation. The unforeseen consequences of merging schools, educators , and students caused further race-related trauma throughout the 1970s. “White intransigence,” however, “impeded but could not altogether forestall the revolution in southern institutions that activists struggled to bring about” (Brundage 274). Over time, the Jim Crow “solid” South gave way, and distinctions between this region and the North have become increasingly less obvious. Nevertheless, southerners still look to the past to define themselves, and controversies about historical memory continue to erupt because of their relationship to issues of identity and power. Narratives of the past are held together through repetition and retellings that return to fixed points again and again from different directions. According to Kumkum Sangari, this [r]epetition is the mnemonic glue that binds the stories as well as that which allows the stories a point from which to depart in a different direction. It both preempts surprise and encodes a desire to totalize, to resist fragmentation and to structure the new through the familiar, and it builds upon the notion of improvisation wherein each performance can be repeated, yet no two performances are identical, for each is always open to the transformations of a particular context. Thus repetition is the ground of both the new and the same. (11) Because of the achievements of the civil rights and women’s movements, new voices and nuances have been added to the South’s collective memories of slavery and the war, memories that transform the traditional narrative of a monolithic South by retelling the story from new perspectives and contexts. The twentieth-century experience of the Holocaust has enlarged and informed our understanding of cultural trauma and the role of witnessing and [3.14.15.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 04:33...

Share