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Unwritten Grief: White Witnessing, Black Trauma, and National Memory
Steinbach, Brian Patrick
Steinbach, Brian Patrick
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Abstract
This project investigates the connection of a present-day mismanagement of testimonies of trauma and national grieving processes to a longstanding white aversion to grieving racial trauma, which emerged in the decades following the end of the U.S. Civil War and the end of slavery.My work builds upon scholarship that recognizes the Civil War as a major catalyst in the establishment of institutions and rituals for national grief and mourning in the U.S. However, my work shows that at the same moment in which the federal government took great strides to erect national apparatuses to reconcile the grief of a divided nation that needed to mourn its war-dead, a concurrent, and at-odds effort was made by those same institutions of power to disregard the traumatic testimonies of the countless numbers of Black men and women who suffered and died under the institution of slavery.My analysis marks the U.S. Civil War and the end of slavery as a starting point for considering the ways in which dominant white national institutions of memorialization and national grief have consistently resisted the necessary work of truth and reconciliation in the wake of four centuries of enslavement on the continent. Because this work looks primarily at shifts in private and public (local and national) grieving practices over the last one hundred and fifty years, its chapters focus on shifts in the institutionalized processes of white repressions of Black testimonies of trauma, resulting in a study that is more exemplary than exhaustive. This dissertation examines literary, biographic, and various spatial forms of Black testimony and white (a-)witnessing that have made up the nation’s dominate white institution of national memory and grief. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that the mismanagement of these institutions over the last hundred and fifty years have promoted a white national domestic imaginary that granted permission for its white citizens to a-witness Black trauma in the nation’s past, and has granted intergenerational permission for its present day white citizens to a-witness Black trauma in the nation’s present.
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Date
2023-01-01
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University of Kansas
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This item contains archived web content.
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- Embargoed until 2173-05-31
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Keywords
English literature, American history, Grief, Memory, Nation, Race, Testimony, Trauma