Traumatic possessions: The body and memory in multiethnic women's writing and performance (Sherley Anne Williams, Anna Deavere Smith, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gayl Jones, Robbie McCauley)

This dissertation uses contemporary trauma theory to examine the intersubjective dynamic involved in testimony and witnessing after trauma in multiethnic narrative and performance by women. Trauma fractures the symbolic order and testimony restores a sense of connection for the survivor. In the performance and literary texts I examine, the reconstitution of the self through testimony provides an opportunity to challenge the dominant symbolic order and the cultural inscription that silences the voices of survivors. Part of the task of moving away from the false projection of cultural anxiety onto survivors entails acknowledging the actual bodily experience of trauma, or telling the body's story, instead of inscribing a story onto the body. The writers included in this dissertation linger in the struggle for the subject to re-define herself within a symbolic order that accommodates traumatic experience even as that experience always forces a recognition of the limits of representation. It is this struggle to listen to the body's voice, to process its information, and to move beyond the isolation of trauma that renders the body mute that emerges in the texts examined in this dissertation. The work includes four chapters focusing on questions about testimony and traumatic memory, both in body and language. The first chapter introduces issues of cross-racial witnessing and relationship between history and individual memory in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose. In Chapter Two, which examines Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight Los Angeles, city pavement and police tasers replace Dessa's sweatbox as the site of torture, but the site of testimony and official interpretations remains the courtroom. The third chapter focuses more thoroughly on issues related to the female body and cultural response to historical crisis, specifically in transgenerational trauma, in Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior and Gayl Jones's Corregidora. Finally, Chapter Four uses Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape to look at rape as a traumatic event that both separates and divides women across racial boundaries. “Pain is full of information,” according to Robbie McCauley, who uses her own naked body to evoke the painful legacy of interracial rape.