How do contemporary African American authors relate trauma, memory, and the recovery of the past with the processes of cultural and identity formation in African American communities? Patricia San José analyses a variety of novels by authors like Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and David Bradley and explores these works as valuable instruments for the disclosure, giving voice, and public recognition of African American collective and historical trauma.

In this book, Ron Eyerman explores the formation of the African-American identity through the theory of cultural trauma. The trauma in question is slavery, not as an institution or as personal experience, but as collective memory: a pervasive remembrance that grounded a people's sense of itself. Combining a broad narrative sweep with more detailed studies of important events and individuals, Eyerman reaches from Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, the New Deal and the Second World War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond. He offers insights into the intellectual and generational conflicts of identity-formation which have a truly universal significance, as well as providing a compelling account of the birth of African-American identity. Anyone interested in questions of assimilation, multiculturalism and postcolonialism will find this book indispensable.

With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.

Five sociologists develop a theoretical model of 'cultural trauma' & build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new & binding understandings of social responsibility.

Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison’s career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison’s fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in Home. In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature represented by Morrison’s focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two poems: Rita Dove’s “The Buckeye” and Sonia Sanchez’s “Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo.”

American Borders: Inclusion and Exclusion in US Culture provides an overview of American culture produced in a range of contexts, from the founding of the nation to the age of globalization and neoliberalism, in order to understand the diverse literary landscapes of the United States from a twenty-first century perspective. The authors confront American exceptionalism, discourses on freedom and democracy, and US foundational narratives by reassessing the literary canon and exploring ethnic literature, culture, and film with a focus on identity and exclusion. Their contributions envision different manifestations of conviviality and estrangement and deconstruct neoliberal slogans, analyzing hospitable inclusion in relation to national history and ideologies. By looking at representations of foreignness and conditional belonging in literature and film from different ethnic traditions, the volume fleshes out a new border dialectic that conveys the heterogeneity of American boundaries beyond the opposition inside/outside.

Featuring contributions from a wide array of international scholars, the book explores the variety of representational strategies used to depict female traumatic experiences in texts by or about women, and in so doing articulates the complex relation between trauma, gender and signification.

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture explores hospitality in a range of cultural expressions from a variety of approaches. The authors analyze and discuss forms of hospitality in canonical literature, ethnic literatures, language or movies. These span from the classical to the contemporary and include a focus on language, power, hybridism, and sociology. The common theme in these contributions is that of American identity. By looking at a diversity of representations of American culture, using a multiplicity of approaches, the authors convey the richness of American hospitality as a vital aspect of its culture.

The literary tradition begun by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s has since flourished and taken new directions with a diverse body of fiction by more contemporary African-American women writers. This book examines the treatment of domestic violence in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Love, Terry McMillan's Mama and A Day Late and a Dollar Short, and Octavia Butler's Seed to Harvest. These novels have given voice to oppressed and abused women. The aims of this work are threefold: to examine how female African American novelists portray domestic abuse; to outline how literary depictions of domestic violence are responsive to cultural and historical forces; and to explore the literary tradition of novels that deal with domestic abuse within the African American community.

Looking at the work of Junot Díaz, Cristina García, Julia Alvarez, and other Latino/a authors who are U.S. citizens, Marta Caminero-Santangelo examines how writers are increasingly expressing their solidarity with undocumented immigrants. Through storytelling, these writers create community and a sense of peoplehood that includes non-citizen Latino/as. This volume also foregrounds the narratives of unauthorized migrants themselves, showing how their stories are emerging into the public sphere. Immigration and citizenship are multifaceted issues, and the voices are myriad. They challenge common interpretations of "illegal" immigration, explore inevitable traumas and ethical dilemmas, protest their own silencing in immigration debates, and even capitalize on the topic for the commercial market. Yet these texts all seek to affect political discourse by advancing the possibility of empathy across lines of ethnicity and citizenship status. As border enforcement strategies escalate along with political rhetoric, detentions, and deaths, these counternarratives are more significant than ever before, and their perspectives cannot be ignored. What we are witnessing, argues Caminero-Santangelo, is a mass mobilization of stories. This growing body of literature is critical to understanding not only the Latino/a immigrant experience but also alternative visions of nation and belonging.