'This thing we have done together': Witnessing race, gender and trauma in postbellum American literature

This dissertation treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women. Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about---or "witnessing"---trauma to overcome it. To this critical conversation, I add my own research into the readerly engagement of traumatic and testimonial literature, articulating a theory of reading (or "dual-witnessing") that elucidates how speakers and readers may witness together. Specifically, my project places my theories of traumatic reception in conversation with African American literature to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of (African) Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in postbellum American literature. My dissertation also considers what Deborah King calls the "multiple jeopardy" of race and gender and how speakers and readers may cross such constructs in order to witness collectively. Ultimately, my examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those testimonial works that promote multicultural and readerly-speakerly dual-witnessing out of and through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing dovetails with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, my dissertation analyzes the slave narratives of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and the novels of William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, and Toni Morrison.