Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture (review)

Argumentatively compact yet refreshingly eclectic in its use of evidence, Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture offers an original contribution to scholarship on the cultural legacies of slavery. As a whole, Woolfork's six chapters argue that representations of bodily responses to the trauma of slavery in African American popular culture reveal a type of knowledge, a corporeal knowledge of traumatic experience that runs counter to the elusive trauma of much literary theory on trauma. Rather than the predominantly psychic domain of Freudian trauma, which is available only through oblique reference, the texts investigated here propose a distinctly diasporic trauma that is imaginatively available to bodily experience. Through fictional and performative devices of time travel, contemporary black bodies return to the slave past in the novels, films, and tourist sites that Woolfork cogently describes. As explained by the anecdotal refrain from the introduction, they "go there to know there."

The value of Woolfork's study comes in the variety of texts that encode such time-traveling journeys back to the knowable "there" of slavery—Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Haile Gerima's film Sankofa (1993), Phyllis Perry's Stigmata (1989), the reformatory films Brother Future (1991) and The Quest for Freedom: The Harriet Tubman Story (1992), debates surrounding Colonial Williamsburg's 1994 slave auction, the ritual reenactment of the Middle Passage The Maafa Suite: A Healing Journey, and comedic representations of slavery in Chappelle's Show. If there is a weakness in Woolfork's selective staging of conventional notions of trauma, it is made up for by the book's rich description and insightful re-situating of such texts as bodily types of epistemology. The result is an expanded understanding of vernacular theories of memory and traumatic knowledge.

The introduction does a fine job of articulating the scope and purpose of the book: to consider bodily epistemology—a "representational strategy that uses the body of a present-day protagonist to register the traumatic slave past" (2)—as a means to challenge the principle of latency in much trauma theory. Referencing the work of Cathy Caruth, Walter Benn Michaels, Claude Lanzmann, Michael Rothberg, and others, Woolfork makes the case that most theories of trauma are anti-representational. They posit an essentially elusive trauma that prefers psychic registration over physical or corporeal responses and an indirect rather than direct experience of the originary trauma. In Woolfork's view, a contrary theory underwrites such works as Butler's Kindred, one of the primary subject texts of chapter one, as the novel imagines the protagonist not allegorically engaging with the traumatic past as Freudian theory would have it, but directly engaging with the past and as a result critiquing the implicitly racist mind-body split espoused by current invocations of trauma in literary theory. Still, Woolfork's positioning of a heterogeneous array of contemporary trauma theory into the role of the straw-man (so unvarying that a whole paragraph from the introduction on this trend in trauma theory is repeated verbatim in the first chapter) may leave some readers disenchanted.

Nevertheless, the force of Woolfork's argument centers less on bodily epistemology's difference from Freudian trauma than on the differences (often gendered) between one textual deployment of it and another. A comparative methodology, in fact, appears as an organizational strategy within each chapter. Thus, whereas Butler's novel produces not only a supernatural opportunity for the present-day Dana to experience slavery directly, but also an intellectual remove from the collapse of past and present in which Dana is able to contextualize her experience using knowledge derived from historical texts, Mona, the protagonist of Gerima's Sankofa, is forced to lose her pre-time travel consciousness, becoming the vessel of the actual slave whose consciousness overtakes her body. Characterizing this difference as dual approaches to empathy, Woolfork embarks in the second chapter to consider the novel Stigmata as a reconciliation of the two. According to Woolfork, the bodily referents and quilting aesthetics in Perry's novel "open up a space to rethink the antirepresentational...