나타샤 트레스웨이의 남부 역사의 시(각)적 버전

Abstract

This article offers a critical examination of the photographic characteristics of Natasha Trethewey’s poetry collection, Native Guard. This article particularly demonstrates how Trethewey’s poems serve as a way of discovering the unspoken and unseen evidence of Southern history, and as a metaphor for a new topographic map of the past and future of the South. It investigates the ways in which Native Guard provides a new perspective about the past of the South by visualizing the hidden narratives of the Civil War, Slavery, and Jim Crow Laws through the vivid descriptions of various relevant photographs and imageries, and thus goes beyond the verbal summoning of the events erased from the public memory. For this, this paper draws upon Roland Barthes’ concepts related to photography such as ‘noema,’ ‘spectrum,’ and ‘punctum,’ in terms of their relations to historical truths and cultural trauma implied in and revealed by many poems in Trethewey’s Native Guard. In short, by taking advantage of the characteristics of photography that contain both reality and artificiality, Trethewey not only reveals the historical facts of the past in photographs, but also the fragments of Southern history, which have been obscured and manipulated by white ideology.