Awards

• Winner of CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2021.

Overview

"Focusing on U.S. slavery and its aftermath in the nineteenth century, The Archive of Fear explores the traumatic force field that continued to inflect discussions of slavery and abolition both before and after the Civil War. It challenges the long-assumed distinction between psychological and cultural-historical theories of trauma, discovering a virtual dialogue between three central U. S. writers and Sigmund Freud concerning the traumatic response of slavery's perpetrators. A strain of trauma theory and practice comes alive in the temporal and spatial disruptions of New World slavery-and The Archive of Fear shows how key elements of that theory still inform the infrastructure of race relations today. It argues that trauma theory before Freud first involves a return to an overlap between crisis, insurrection, and mesmerism found in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Mesmer's ""crisis state"" has long been read as the precursor to hypnosis, the tool Freud famously rejected when he created psychoanalysis. But the story of what was lost to trauma theory when Freud adopted the ""talk cure"" can be told through cultural disruptions of New World slavery, especially after mesmerism arrived in Saint Domingue where its implication in the Haitian revolution in both reality and fantasy had an impact on the history of emancipation in the United States."

Full Product Details

9780198866299

Table of Contents

Reviews

Brimming with inspired historical insight, The Archive of Fear expands our thinking about both trauma and slavery in powerful ways. Zwarg takes up the writings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois to show us how the violence that structured Atlantic enslavement had a temporality that exceeds the legal boundaries of slavery, spreading traumatic energies in insidious, hard-to-detect ways. This a timely and thoroughly engrossing book. * Nancy Bentley, U of Pennsylvania, author of Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 * A fascinating study of racial terror, trauma, and the black reconstruction of democracy, The Archive of Fear works in the historical interim between Mesmer and Freud to establish rich conceptual and historical connections between such theorists and chroniclers of slavery, slave insurrection, and Jim Crow as Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois and the developing science of mental life they decisively anticipated and enlarged. This is a work of theoretical elegance, historical cunning, and often stunning analysis. * Eric Lott, CUNY Graduate Center, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism * Making skilful use of trauma theory, Christina Zwarg sets up an intriguing dialogue between Douglass, Stowe, Du Bois, and Freud that opens up new perspectives on slavery in the American hemisphere. A bracing and original study that shows how an archive of fear has continued to stymie efforts to achieve an interracial democracy. * Robert S. Levine, author of The Lives of Frederick Douglass and The Failed Promise of Reconstruction *

Author Information

Christina Zwarg is a Professor of English at Haverford College where she won a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. After completing a Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard University she published Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson and the Play of Reading, which Choice named an Outstanding Academic Book and Cornell University Press nominated for the MLA First Book Award. Zwarg has published on 19th and 20th century authors and topics in American Literature, American Literary History, Novel, Studies in Romanticism, Poe Studies, and Cultural Critique and Social Text, and her work has been reprinted in Norton Critical Editions. She has also served as a member of the Division of Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature on the Delegate Assembly of the MLA.

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