Narratives of recovery: Trauma, history, and the use of the supernatural in contemporary African American cultural productions

The past thirty years have brought forth a vibrant renaissance of visual and literary art dealing with the horrors of slavery. Clearly, contemporary African American artists are participating in a (re)writing/righting of history. I propose that more than attempting to recover the past, many of these contemporary narratives of slavery also aim at a recovery from the past. Psychoanalytical literature dealing with trauma, when read alongside the African American novels, films, plays, and art exhibition under study in this project, brings out features that reveal the presence of cycles of trauma and recovery.;Beyond sharing similarities with psychoanalytic texts, these Narratives of Recovery share a certain device: All make use of the supernatural. These authors/artists use the fantastic to collapse 5 boundaries between the past and the present, endowing the past with an immediacy that renders it more accessible, transformable, and ultimately, recoverable. This blurring of temporal boundaries results in a constant "replay" of the past into the present, which resembles the flashbacks experienced by victims of trauma, a mechanism triggered naturally by the body in order to prevent the repression of traumatic events and to allow for a process of healing to take place. Through a psychoanalytical framework, this project interacts with literary, dramatic, and cinematographic texts for the purpose of illuminating African Americans' and Americans' relationship(s) to the legacy of slavery. Ultimately, it aspires to enrich the meaning of Narratives of Recovery by juxtaposing their reading against a compatible, perhaps even catalytic, analytical tool that makes salient the injuries scarring the American past and present.;This dissertation considers the supernatural as a narrative device that makes visible the presence of trauma in the works of such artists as Terri Adkins, Octavia Butler, Haile Gerima, Charles Johnson, Kasi Lemmons, Suzan-Lori Parks, Gloria Naylor, and Jewell Parker Rhodes. It considers the particular cultural, historical, and social setting from which these Narratives arise. At the core of the project stands the premise that distinctive links exist between the themes and devices found in recent African American cultural productions and specific aspects of psychoanalytical theory, particularly symptoms of trauma and recovery processes.