Revised Memories and Colliding Identities: Absence and Presence in Morrison's "Recitatif" and Viramontes's "Tears on My Pillow"

Androne, Helane

doi:10.1093/melus/32.2.133

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…Greene Benjamin (2013) elaborates how the incident related to Maggie remains the central trauma in Roberta and Twyla's lives, which also becomes a common ground for them to reinscribe their conflicting lifenarratives, albeit she does not employ insights from trauma theory to accomplish that. Likewise, Androne (2007) acknowledges how Maggie plays the role of "archetypal mother," embodying the trauma of Twyla and Roberta. Nonetheless, the discussion rather centres on Karla Holloway's Afrocentric interpretive paradigm which puts "a spiritual and a physical mother at its centre" (Holloway, 1992, as cited in Androne, 2007 to analyze motherhood without reverting to trauma theories.…”

Section: Prominent Criticisms On the Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

“I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?”: Trauma, Testimony, and the Possibility of Healing in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Ahsan

2022

Sp.J of Dep. of Eng.

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Trauma studies as a discipline came to prominence in the 1990’s. Though Sigmund Freud’s theories constitute its foundation, the eclectic nature of it provides scope for including post-structural, postcolonial, narrative, and sociocultural theories to analyze texts. It analyses the influence of trauma in culture and society and the ways through which trauma is represented. American author Toni Morrison has always been pivotal in representing the subjugation, torture and trauma inflicted upon her African-American community through her works. Apart from that, her works intend to retrieve the forgotten and discredited history of African-Americans in her writings. In “Recitatif,” she explores the institution of racism in an innovative way: her protagonists, Twyla and Roberta, belong to two different ethnicities but she keeps their racial identities concealed by not attaching any racial codes to anyone. While identifying the characters’ ethnicities, the readers come to face their own biases. Simultaneously, they also register the traumatic nature of the narrative. This paper intends to explore “Recitatif” in the light of trauma studies. By doing so, it will delineate Morrison’s view regarding the different modes of trauma that afflict the lives of African-American people. Spectrum, Volume 16, June 2021: 230-243

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Section: Prominent Criticisms On the Storymentioning

confidence: 99%