The Psychic Hold of Slavery

"The Psychic Hold of Slavery convenes established and emerging scholars from the interdisciplinary field of African American Studies to consider how the psychological imprint of collective trauma and loss crystallizes in contemporary black discursive, aesthetic, and performative practices. The volume's diverse contributors--literary and film critics, philosophers, and cultural theorists--offer original considerations of the temporality of slavery and the challenges of representation in the context of protracted Western traditions of anti-blackness. The essays vary in their objects of study, methods, and conclusions, matriculating to complex dialogue rather than a common endorsement. They are united chiefly by their attention to a paradox at the heart of black studies today: that the history of racial slavery gains intellectual potency and ubiquity in a moment marked by unprecedented legal gains and the popularly professed rise of "post-racial" sensibilities. Consolidating numerous perspectives on the desires, investments, and identitarian logics through which the legacy of slavery persists in contemporary life, this collection will be of interest to critics concerned with the diffuse reverberations of the slave past, and more generally, to those interested in current discussions of anti-black violence, "disposable" populations, and new forms and capacities of black political subjectivity"--