Trauma and Metamorphosis in Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales (original) (raw)

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Abstract

Writers like Page and Harris construct the plantation pastoral by transforming the temporal structure and experiential content of slavery’s trauma into the nostalgia of the Lost Cause, the always-receding fantasy-history of an antebellum Southern Garden where white authority over black slaves was literally natural—coextensive with white stewardship of a pastoral landscape that both entirely subsumed black identity and was symbolized by it. The transformation was never complete, however, never permanent. It required constant repetition, largely because it was, in fact, a secondary effect of slavery’s antebellum trauma and not the pastoral origin it claimed to be. That repetition was an echo of the latency that structures all traumatic experience, a nostalgic landscape always at risk of being overrun by the terrible history it so strenuously attempted to keep at bay.

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