Description: The Archive of Fear explores the trauma theory in relation to U.S. discussions of slavery and abolition before and after the Civil War.
Review Quotes: "Her marvelous study is concise yet packed with important details that will be valuable to a wide range of readers, particularly those in courses on American slavery." -- T. L. Lott, CHOICE
"Making skilful use of trauma theory, Christina Zwarg sets up an intriguing dialogue between Douglass, Stowe, Du Bois, and Freud that opens up new perspectives on slavery in the American hemisphere. A bracing and original study that shows how an archive of fear has continued to stymie efforts to achieve an interracial democracy." -- Robert S. Levine, author of The Lives of Frederick Douglass and The Failed Promise of Reconstruction"A fascinating study of racial terror, trauma, and the black reconstruction of democracy, The Archive of Fear works in the historical interim between Mesmer and Freud to establish rich conceptual and historical connections between such theorists and chroniclers of slavery, slave insurrection, and Jim Crow as Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois and the developing science of mental life they decisively anticipated and enlarged. This is a work of theoretical elegance, historical cunning, and often stunning analysis." -- Eric Lott, CUNY Graduate Center, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism"Brimming with inspired historical insight, The Archive of Fear expands our thinking about both trauma and slavery in powerful ways. Zwarg takes up the writings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois to show us how the violence that structured Atlantic enslavement had a temporality that exceeds the legal boundaries of slavery, spreading traumatic energies in insidious, hard-to-detect ways. This a timely and thoroughly engrossing book." -- Nancy Bentley, U of Pennsylvania, author of Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920