White Amnesia - Black Memory?: American Women’s Writing and History

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Reading a series of prose texts by 20th century white women writers ranging from The Making of Americans to Civil Wars this study interrogates a correlation between authors’ subject positions as white and their textual investments in American history. It displaces the diffuse acceptance of whiteness as a given property by foregrounding it as a shared, and unquestioned feature of the white reader’s and the text’s consciousness. To trace the literary legacies of white amnesia about the Middle Passage is an urgent response to white women writers’ participation in US-American historical mythology. At a point of convergence of Black Studies, American Studies and Gender Studies this investigation results in a profound denaturalization of what American history and American cultural memory may signify.