Cultural Memories of Origin: Trauma, Memory and Imagery in African American Narratives of the Middle Passage by Frank Wilker (review)

The experience of reading Frank Wilker's Cultural Memories of Originraises a complex question about genre expectations and international scholarship: if a scholar writes in English but primarily follows European continental—in this case, German—conventions of academic writing, what is his envisioned target audience? Does the intended audience primarily consist of Anglophone scholars accustomed to the manners and mores of Anglo-American academic writing, or of German-speaking scholars used to German writing conventions, or of transnational readers for whom English is today's Latin or academic Esperanto? In Cultural Memories of Origin, fidelity to the writing conventions of German academia means that Wilker provides a discursive survey of his topic, the representation of the middle passage in select African American literary and artistic works, rather than offering and defending a succinctly stated argument. In lieu of a thesis, Wilker articulates his task: he sets out to "point out the usefulness of the language of trauma and to discuss its hermeneutic limits" and to "seek out the various terms upon which cultural memory manifests itself pertaining to the Middle Passage" (19-20). These goals are as commendable as the book's topic is important.

Yet, being a U. S.-based reader accustomed to the importance of argumentation, I cannot resist claiming that a more tightly thesis-driven approach would have been useful, for two reasons. First, a fair amount of scholarship on middle passage tropes and narratives in African American cultural production has already been published, including and following Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, the pioneering 1999 essay collection coedited by Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen. Second, virtually any analysis of cultural representations of the middle passage revolves around trauma and memory, and both trauma theory and memory studies are now veritable industries. A relatively concise articulation of Wilker's approaches to trauma and memory would therefore have been helpful early on. Wilker's prose is marked by sentences such as "[This work will] incorporate the concept of trauma as an analytical tool—a tool whose precision will be explored in the following chapter" (13). Cutting some of the circularity, repetition, and heavy signposting would have improved the text's flow and reader-friendliness throughout the monograph.

One important contribution that Cultural Memories of Originmakes to the existing scholarship on the cultural mediation of the middle passage is the multiplicity of genres represented by its primary sources, which originate in what Wilker calls "the post-Immigration and Nationality Act era" (18), that is, the post-1965 era from the Black Arts Movement to the present. They include Amiri Baraka's play Slave Ship, Toni Morrison's canonical neo-slave narrative Beloved, Charles Johnson's philosophically imbued postmodernist novel Middle Passage, Saidiya Hartman's genre-defying memoir and historical study Lose Your Mother, cartoonist and illustrator Tom Feelings's visual narrative The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo, and various installation pieces by visual artist Kara Walker. However, Wilker's initial commentary on his source selection does not articulate what is at stake, methodologically, in his choice of this multigeneric and formally diverse material (15-18). To his credit, Wilker elaborates on the hermeneutic relationship between the textual and the visual across his sources in later chapters—stating, for example, that while Morrison and Hartman treat the middle passage "as an element of the 'unspeakable' …, as a void which resists representation …, Walker's silhouettes materialize this void …, invit[ing] the viewer to fill the void of the silhouette" (263).

Wilker opens his monograph with a 120-page-long (from a U. S. standpoint, an extraordinarily long) introductory segment consisting of four chapters. Chapters two and three provide well-researched overviews of trauma theory and of the challenges of culturally "remembering" the traumatic experiences of those violently uprooted Africans who historically underwent the middle passage. However, these chapters, which do not...