SOURCE: “Mother’s Milk and Sister’s Blood: Trauma and the Neoslave Narrative,” in Differences, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 101-26.

In the following essay, Morgenstern discusses the role of trauma and repetitive accounts in Jones's Corregidora and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

In “Negotiating Between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery After Freedom—Dessa Rose,” Deborah McDowell poses a question: “Why the compulsion to repeat the massive story of slavery, in the contemporary African-American novel, especially so long after the empirical event itself?” (144). In referring to repetition compulsion, the name given to a psychic and behavioral phenomenon that is seemingly senseless and potentially destructive, McDowell implicitly evokes the theory of trauma. She suggests that retelling manifests an attempt to gain mastery over elusive or defeating histories and their narration. This essay will pursue McDowell’s lead in exploring the connections and disjunctions between trauma and the neoslave narrative, the twentieth-century novel about...