The aesthetics of translating cultural trauma: Traumatized communities in twentieth-century fiction and film

This project explores the convergence of contemporary American novels, films, plays, and television miniseries around issues of how fiction can represent historical and contemporary traumas affecting both individuals and communities. This work examines narratives by Octavia E. Butler, Linda Hogan, Tony Kushner, and filmmaker John Sayles in order to examine the possibilities and constraints of these genres and media and their respective abilities to pass on the accounts of trauma, often distorted by dominant culture and history, to those within the community. Because of the distortion or erasure of these injustices, members of the dominant culture often feel unimplicated in them; these works then also have a larger audience who must be persuaded to recognize complicity in systems that have resulted from past inequities. I therefore analyze how these works create innovative strategies that address both audiences and translate cultural traumas—including slavery, the continuing dispossession of Native American lands, inner-city segregation, the U.S./Mexico border, and the AIDS crisis—that continue to compromise the possibility for a democratic and egalitarian society. As trauma challenges the structures of knowledge, memory, and reality through its affront to temporality and structures of meaning, I analyze narrative strategies that range from subversion of genre conventions and refusal of closure to fractured narratives, innovative editing patterns, and inclusion of fantastic elements. Too often, traumas affecting racial or sexual Others have been rendered in dominant culture as really the trauma of a heroic or misunderstood member of the majority group or as evidence of their immorality; the works I examine demand a reckoning with the past as lived, remembered, or recovered by those denied a voice and, therefore, a past in the memory of the nation