Abstract
Critical discourse on the role of slavery in U.S. history curriculum has tended to rely on calls for justice through truth and complexity. Yet the “truth” of slavery is almost incomprehensibly violent, constituting a form of “historical trauma”; the resultant instructional methods thus resemble what Berry and Stovall term a “curriculum of tragedy.” Ethical questions emerge regarding this method. Chiefly, if slavery constitutes a “historical trauma,” what are the possibilities of a Trauma-Informed curriculum? What are the responsibilities owed to students and historical subjects? Building from critical interventions in Black Feminist Theory and the work of the Frantz Fanon, I propose curricular interventions that attempt to mediate concurrent dynamics of trauma, pain, mourning, action, and revenge.
Highlights
How can we provide control and safety when teaching about events that have already happened? how can contemporary subjects claim control over historical trauma when violence is continually reproduced through contemporary racialization? Here I suggest affective interventions that do not rewrite traumatic histories but offer frameworks to reorient them such that agency and control can be recuperated
Marilyn Ivy (1995) argues that “events” are only determined as such through their recollection: “The second event—when the originary moment emerges as an event to consciousness—is the first instance” (p. 22). Revenge involves those historical moments which are imbued with anticolonial retribution; that which disrupted or resisted the violence of slavery may, in its recollection and reconstruction, serve as repayment
This serves an important role in mediating the instantiation of historical trauma; actions which claim agency clearly and violently offer an escape route to the closed loop of traumatic histories
Summary
To move beyond these violent instantiations in curriculum, to suppose a fully dialogic and consensual encounter between a teacher and student, a complicated encounter between the student and subject emerges. Revenge (in an affective and historiographical sense) involves those historical moments which are imbued with anticolonial retribution (in this case, violence against slaveholders); that which disrupted or resisted the violence of slavery may, in its recollection and reconstruction, serve as repayment This serves an important role in mediating the instantiation of historical trauma; actions which claim agency clearly and violently offer an escape route to the closed loop of traumatic histories. While educators emphasizing affective dimensions of action and revenge should be careful to discourage presentist and revisionist ideologies (i.e., “if I were there, I would have...”) or claims that racial violence is within the capacity of enslaved subjects to end (i.e., “slavery was a choice”), highlighting the capacity for action should still be a critical dimension of consciousness-building In this way, the intersubjective truth and centrality of Black resistance to slavery is essential to developing actionality in the present
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