Introduction: Phantasmic trauma narratives -- Phantasmic Africanisms: Igbo cosmology in Octavia Butler's Kindred -- Phantasmic Midrashim: the Midrashic roots of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is illuminated -- A phantasmic tribalography: the case of LeAnne' Howe's Miko kings: an Indian baseball story -- Projecting the phantasmic -- Conclusion: The call to infinite responsibility.
Summary:
Empathy and the Phantasmic in Ethnic American Trauma Narratives' examines a burgeoning genre of ethnic American literature called phantasmic trauma narratives, which use culturally specific modes of the supernatural to connect readers to historical traumas such as slavery and genocide. Drawing on trauma theory and using an ethnic studies methodology, this book shows how phantasmic novels and films present historical trauma in ways that seek to invite reader/viewer empathy about the cultural groups represented. In so doing, the author argues that these texts also provide models of interracial alliances to encourage contemporary cross-cultural engagement as a restorative response to historical traumas. Further, the author examines how these narratives function as sites of cultural memory that provide a critical purchase on the enormity of enslavement, genocide, and dispossession.
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