A Relative Pain: The Rape of History in Octavia Butler's "Kindred" and Phyllis Alesia Perry's "Stigmata"
Abstract
frican American writers are still writing slave narratives. One hundred thirtynine years after emancipation, more than four decades after the Civil Rights movement, the experience of slavery, the costs of escape, and the pain of remembering still compel attention. Yet even as the racial realities of modern America press literary scholars, historians, filmmakers, and others to keep our dark national history fresh in our collective consciousness, the march of time makes our peculiar institution seem reassuringly distant to some, and less recoverable than ever. As we began the twentieth century, thousands of ex-slaves were still alive, many testifying to their experiences (albeit often in compromised ways) through public forums such as the Work Projects Administration interviews. As we enter the twentyfirst century, no survivors remain, and very few who have actually beheld or spoken to a former slave. An experiential and bodily connection to slavery has been lost. No one alive bears the physical scars of African American enslavement, those visible
- Journal
- College English
- Published
- 2002-03-01
- DOI
- 10.2307/3250747
- CompPile
- Open Access
- Closed
- Topics
-
- Export
- BibTeX RIS
Citation context
Cited by in this index (0)
No articles in this index cite this work.
References (0)
No references on file for this article.
Related articles
-
Argumentation Sep 2026Jennifer Schumann; Steve Oswald
-
Assessing Writing Jul 2026Louie Giray; Kershnee Sevnarayan; Kgabo Bridget Maphoto
-
Assessing Writing Jul 2026From keystrokes to scores: Toward a multidimensional predictive model of writing evaluation by humans and large language models across linguistic, cognitive, and social dimensions ↗Qiao Gan; Benjamin Adams
-
Assessing Writing Apr 2026Langdon Holmes; Wesley Morris; Scott Crossley; Joon Suh Choi
-
Composition Forum 2026Mathew Gomes