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Events
Mar. 1 | 2012 Franklin Prize
Nominations for 2012 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best-published book in American Studies due
Mar. 1 | 2012 Romero Prize
Nominations for 2012 Lora Romero Publication Prize for the best-published first book in American Studies due
Mar. 1 | Community Partnership Grants
Applications for the 2012 Community Partnership Grants Program to assist American Studies collaborative, interdisciplinary community projects due
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Dacey-Groth, Camilla. "Slaves of Fiction: Coming to Terms with the American Holocaust through Representation of Slavery in Post-Civil-Rights Fiction and Film," Bowling Green State University, August 2001.
This dissertation discusses representations of slavery in post-civil-rights fiction and film as reflections of and influences on public policy and opinion concerning race in the Unites States. In particular, I examine William Styron’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alex Haley’s Roots, Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the films, Jefferson in Paris, An American Scandal, and A View From the Mountain. I use these texts and films to discuss the twentieth-century historiography of slavery, and I tie both popular culture and historical studies to important political and cultural events and trends. The goal of my study is to examine America’s process of coming to terms with its past of slavery and to shed light on contemporary debates such as the debate about reparations for African-Americans and an official apology for slavery. The reparations debate illustrates the strengths and the limitations of the selected narratives as tools for addressing the challenges of racial injustice and reconciliation. Taken together, the texts by black authors embody an understanding of slavery shared by many African-Americans. By telling the stories of slavery from various black perspectives, these works offer a significant reference point for African-American self-understanding. They do not express or transform the self-understanding of most whites, however. For that, what is needed is a tradition of self-critical “slave holder narratives” by white authors alongside a tradition of slave narratives and neo-slave narratives by black authors; a tradition for which we find a fitting analogy in the searching post-war literature of non-Jewish Germans trying to grapple with their own relation to the Holocaust.
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