Racial Trauma and Self-Healing in Jefferson’s Negroland A Memoir
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Faculty of Art in English
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.