Survival Predicament And Intergenerational Trauma Of The African Americans

Being regarded as a new voice of American literature,Jesmyn Ward is a rising star.Her novel Sing,Unburied,Sing was published in 2017 and won the National Book Award.The unique narrative strategy adopted in this novel not only breaks the limitation of time and space,but also connects the slave history with reality.From the narrative perspectives of the three characters,the novel reveals the racial predicament of the African Americans in different times and presents the African Americans’ racial trauma in different generations to the readers.The thesis consists of an introduction,a main body and a conclusion.The introduction briefly introduces the history of slavery,Jesmyn Ward,the novel Sing,Unburied,Sing,and the structural composition of the thesis.The main body includes five parts.The first part is a literature review on Sing,Unburied,Sing,detailing the relevant studies abroad and at home,and it expounds on the innovation and research significance of this thesis.The second part is the theoretical framework.It presents the development of spatial criticism theory and the core of Henri Lefebvre’s spacial theory.From Part Three to Part Five,the novel is interpreted from three spaces: physical space,social space,and mental space.In Part Three,from the perspective of physical space,the thesis presents the transformation of three places: Parchman,Kill,and Bois Sauvage.This part illustrates the confrontations and conflicts between the African Americans and the white through the transformation of the three physical spaces.Part Four will analyze the racial and sexual oppression the African Americans suffered from the angle of social space,and it can be divided into the African Americans’ political space and gender space.In Part Five,from the mental space,the African Americans’ transmission of intergenerational trauma will be analyzed.Through the comparisons of the African Americans’ and whites’ physical space and social space to highlight the survival predicament of the African Americans,and by analyzing the African Americans’ mental space to present the intergenerational transmission of their trauma,this thesis concludes that in addition to demonstrating her concern for the oppression and predicaments of the African Americans,Jesmyn Ward also expresses the resistance of the African Americans in their physical,social and mental spaces.The significance of this thesis is to arouse public attention to racial issues of the African Americans.