Forgetting to Remember: The Performance of Memory, History, and Gender in John O. Killens’ The Cotillion: Or One Good Bull is Half the Herd

Abstract

This article considers John Oliver Killens’ novel, The Cotillion: Or One Good Bull is Half the Herd, in the context of explorations of memory in the African American literary tradition and to a lesser degree trauma studies and argues that Killens’ novel, often dismissed or overlooked for its supposed limited political vision, engages in explicit critique of politics of resistance by interrogating the very way that Black cultural workers use historical individual and collective memory.