Historical Trauma, Abolitionism, and Social Reforms in Selected American Novels

Résumé fourni par la source

This article examines how selected American novels reimagine slavery not as a closed historical episode, but as an enduring psychic, cultural, and social wound that continues to shape contemporary structures of inequality and reform. Focusing on six novels—Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and David Anthony Durham’s Walk Through Darkness (2002) the study investigates how these texts move beyond the conventions of the traditional protest novel by deploying non-linear temporality, speculative narration, and cultural memory as modes of historical recovery and critique. Methodologically, the article adopts an interdisciplinary framework that brings together cultural studies, socio-historical materialist criticism, and psychoanalytic trauma theory to analyze representations of race, embodiment, genealogy, maternal loss, and collective memory. The analysis demonstrates that these novels do more than revisit the history of slavery; they reveal its ongoing afterlives in modern psychological, legal, and social formations. The study further argues that experimental literary forms are not merely aesthetic choices, but necessary strategies for representing trauma that exceeds linear historical narration. By linking literary form to social advocacy, the article positions contemporary American fiction as a vital site of historical witnessing, ethical remembrance, and imagined structural reform. Keywords: Historical trauma; cultural memory; abolitionism; social reform; contemporary American fiction; neo-slave narrative; trauma theory; race and gender.

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