Possessing the Past

Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature

Lisa Hinrichsen

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780807160060
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807160077
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Employing recent theories of memory from multiple areas of study, Possessing the Past illuminates the tangled relationships among trauma, fantasy, and the public sphere, and their impact on the "South" in imagination and in reality. Focusing on the roles that narrative and fantasy play in creating a sense of regional distinctiveness, Lisa Hinrichsen brings a wealth of critical scholarship to her consideration of memory and southern literature.

Hinrichsen's nuanced readings of a diverse group of southern authors, including William Faulkner, Roberto Fernández, Erna Brodber, Monique Truong, and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, offer new ways of conceptualizing memory, place, and history. She unravels southern literature's critical confrontation with the region's history through complex systems of remembrance and erasure, and she traces how fantasy mediates trauma and adjudicates identity. Expansive in its psychoanalytical approach, her work explores issues of law, testimony, and social justice; the role of nostalgic fantasies of gentility at midcentury; the relationship between white empathy and social fantasy; the resemblance of regional patterns of disavowal to national ideologies of forgetting in Vietnam-era fiction; and the impact of contemporary multicultural literature on memory and community.

Possessing the Past broadens the theoretical framework used to conceptualize memory and trauma, while grounding traumatic testimony in the specifics of time and place amply offered by southern literature. It provides new readings of an array of southern writers and deepens our understanding of the continuing importance of history, memory, and fantasy in the literature of the U.S. South.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” indicate endnotes.

Abraham, Nicholas, 232n10, 232n15

Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 34, 46, 231n8, 242n9

Adams, Clementina R., 200

Adams, Jessica, 19

Adler, Thomas P., 238n14

Adorno, Theodor, 66, 72, 236n4

affect: Berlant on, 7, 241n6

in Cao’s Monkey Bridge, 183

as form of history, 195–96

Grossberg on, 103

historical mediation and, 3

in Lumpkin’s The Making of a Southerner, 101–5, 107

in Mason’s In Country, 139, 148, 149

in Morris’s North Toward Home, 123, 124

Naipaul on, 13

in Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth, 192–93

African Americans. See specific works and topics, such as segregation or blackness

Allison, Dorothy, 213

Althusser, Louis, 59–60, 115

American dream, 205–6

American exceptionalism, 134, 163, 208, 241n5. See also national identity

The Americanization of Dixie (Egerton), 134

anamorphosis, 57–59, 235n35

Anderson, Benedict, 7, 161

anthropological practice in Brodber’s Louisiana, 168, 170–72

Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 26–27, 72, 160–61

Asian Americans, 177–78, 182. See also Bitter in the Mouth (Truong); Monkey Bridge (Cao)

autobiography: common themes, 94–100

Gilmore’s auto/biographical demand, 98

Lumpkin’s The Making of a Southerner, 100–108

Morris’s North Toward Home, 122–32

Smith’s Killers of the Dream, 108–22

Ayers, Edward L., 10–11, 15, 96, 179

“backwardness,” southern, 13–14, 229n18

Baker, Houston A., Jr., 15, 16, 160, 212, 215–23, 243n1, 245n7

Bauman, Zygmut, 86

belonging, 5, 96, 97–98, 99, 118, 180, 203

Beloved (Morrison), 139, 241n12

Benjamin, Walter, 66, 92

Bennett, Jill, 184

Berlant, Lauren, 7, 97–98, 143, 228n10, 241n6

Betts, Doris, 135

Bhabha, Homi, 165, 187, 204

bildungsroman genre, 123–24, 179–80, 181, 192

Bitter in the Mouth (Truong), 162, 176–80, 191–97

black identity, 165, 218–25

black modernism, 217–18

blackness: Brodber’s Louisiana and, 171–72, 175

Brodber’s remapping of black subjectivity, 165–66

Gilroy’s Black Atlanticism, 165–66

trauma of black body reinscribed onto white body, in Smith’s Killers of the Dream, 120–21

Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and, 239n22. See also race

Bleikasten, André, 35, 38, 40, 232n14

Blight, David, 95

body and embodiment: Asian body as “jettisoned,” 177–78

black bodies, regulation of, 217–18

Bourdieu on, 238n17

in Brodber’s Louisiana, 171–72

in Cao’s Monkey Bridge, 183–84

disavowal of, 114–15

Foucault on, 238n16

immigrant body and representative burden, 209

in Lumpkin’s The Making of a Southerner, 101, 103–5

in Mason’s In Country, 147–49

in Morris’s North Toward Home, 122–23

role in dramatizing memory’s performance, 184

in Smith’s Killers of the Dream, 110, 113–16, 120–21

taste and synesthesia in Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth, 194–97

trauma of black body reinscribed onto white body, 120–21

Watson on recalcitrant role of, 241n11

in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 74–75

Bone, Martyn, 21

The Book of Salt (Truong), 191

boundaries, 159, 163–64

Bourdieu, Pierre, 79–80, 82, 238n17, 239n21

Bow, Leslie, 179

Brodber, Erna, 164, 171. See also Louisiana (Brodber)

Brooks, Cleanth, 231n5

Brooks, Peter, 231n8

Brown, Judith, 78

Brundage, Fitzhugh, 5, 69–70

Burnham, Michelle, 244n3

Butler, Judith, 76, 100, 222

Caldwell, Erskine, 67

Campbell, Will, 98

Cao, Lan, 180. See also Monkey Bridge (Cao)

Caribbeanness, 169. See also Louisiana (Brodber)

Caruth, Cathy, 14, 38, 47, 139, 175

Cash, W. J., 4, 8, 13, 16, 25, 68–69, 101

Castle, Terry, 42

Castronovo, Russ, 228n10

Cheng, Anne Anlin, 16–17, 18

Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Memory in Transit: Mourning, Memorialization, and the Work of Fantasy in the U.S. South
• One. Trauma, Testimony, and Temple Drake in Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun
• Two. Wanting Magic: Fantasy, Fiction, and Cultural Capital in A Streetcar Named Desire
• Three. Southern Autobiography, Wound Culture, and the Politics of Victimhood
• Four. Visions and Revisions of Vietnam: Misrecognition, Memory, and the Meaning of War
• Five. Imagining Otherwise: The Post-Plantation Multicultural Imagination
• Coda. Turning South Again: A Meditation on Repetition, Renewal, and Remembering
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index