Racial Trauma and Self-Healing in Jefferson’s Negroland A Memoir

Abstract

This dissertation explores Margo Jefferson’s politics of memory about the encountering experience of bias that resulting trauma to author. The double rejection leads Jefferson to suicidal moves and difficulties to her clan, the neo-aristocrat African- American. Jefferson’s Negroland A Memoir unfolds the mainstream American society’s discrimination to the Non-white elite African- American more on the ground of the skin color than economy and position. This memoir is righteous confession of Jefferson’s hindrance between dilemmas of sophisticated aristocrat which is taken as deleterious in eyes of Negroes who lacks the sufficiency and always biased by American whites in term of color, race and an origin. Author has adopted in this memoir to heal her racial wound through or used theoretical frameworks are, Politics of Memory of humiliation, rejection, and racial discrimination which have endorsed psychic trauma to her. It is her cleverness to imprint those traumas into words or proposed by Suzzate A. Henke “Scriptotherapy” with Lacapra’s “Working Through” to eradicate sad memories and continuously self-healing for re-organizing, reenacting, re-living and co-opting into the society with normal life.