| This dissertation combines philosophical and socio-psychological questions about memory and cultural trauma, Asian and Black Diaspora Studies, critical race feminism, and feminist literary and film analyses. In it, I study how Asian and Black feminist writers and filmmakers deploy memory and cultural trauma as narratives and sites of witness, healing, commemoration and anti-colonial anti-racist resistance. Individual and collective memory---of transatlantic slavery, the Middle Passage, colonial conquest, war trauma, semiotic racial violence, sexual violence, and/or sexual desire---is recalled in the writings of Audre Lorde, Dionne Brand, and Maxine Hong Kingston, and in the films of Rea Tajiri, Julie Dash, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. I argue that memory is used by these artists to construct identity and narratives of home, to work through and mourn various historical traumas of their respective communities, and to rewrite the nation of historical amnesia by commemorating the voices and narrative past of the silenced and the marginalized. Memory as a discourse is used strategically to explain group past and to provide identities for the group in the present. Memory, including traumatic memory, plays a crucial role in the group self-image as the group uses the past as a screen to project its unrecorded and recorded histories, desires, struggles, conflicts and controversies. For these authors and filmmakers, memory is the first strategy to rewrite conventional historiography, to fill in the void and silence with forgotten or elided histories, specifically the invisible histories of women and the colonized. The artists under consideration explore sites of memory, recollection objects, erotic and traumatic embodied memories, collective ethnic memories, and familial and generational memories, to understand the localized histories of their respective communities. They recognize how the painful effects of the past influence the present, how history is lived and experienced as a wound for women and subjugated communities. They turn to fiction, both literature and film, to record historical knowledge through imaginative speculation by tracing the gaps, absence and silence in official public memory. These artists produce counter-histories and counter-memories to challenge the painful amnesia that marks historical and contemporary North America. |
