Conclusion

The conclusion explores how the theories of dual-witnessing and Venn liminality originated and summarizes how readers can position themselves to dual- versus anti-witness. This section also underscores the power of African American literature to promote dual-witnessing and explicates how readers may witness dually and communally black and female personhood, culture, trauma, and triumph through the African American literary tradition. Finally, the conclusion theorizes how dual-witnessing can extend out of the individual conversation between speaker-survivor and reader-listener into a larger, collaborative engagement with trauma, so that dual-witnessing serves not only as an intellectual exercise but also as a revolutionary response that helps redress racism, sexism, trauma, and other forms of violence.

“This Thing We Have Done Together”

This chapter analyzes Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) alongside Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) to investigate how contemporary African American literature witnesses the aftermath of slavery alongside the intersecting jeopardies of blackness, womanhood, and poverty. Both authors’ novels prompt readers to engage the trauma of American slavery. Ward’s books also treat other racially-charged traumas, such as the devastation of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the incarceration of African Americans as a contemporary form of slavery. Both authors’ novels employ ghosts to symbolize the need for American trauma to be witnessed. In contrast to Morrison’s Beloved, however, Ward’s ghosts do not need to be exorcized in order for communities to heal. Instead, Ward’s ghosts resurrect to witness testimonies cut short and to impel even reluctant readers to confront, through fiction, America’s painful histories.

Introduction

The introduction explicates theories of dual-witnessing and Venn liminality and introduces the reader to the terminology the author developed to address readerly engagement of (African) American traumatic and testimonial literature. The introduction also explains how the author’s modes of reading trauma intersect with American literature, critical race theory, and gender criticism and unpacks what (and how) this Venn conversation contributes to the fields of trauma, race, gender, and reception studies and (African) American literature.

“You Got Tuh Go There Tuh Know There”

This chapter examines how African American literature models and promotes dual-witnessing by underscoring the necessity of primary witnessing and impelling the reluctant reader to witness the narrative experience secondarily. To explore this doubly testimonial orientation, the chapter analyzes two key texts: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)—in which the life-narrative of the protagonist, Janie, is witnessed dually through conversation with her friend Pheoby—and Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), which likewise embraces dual-witnessing and additionally moves the conversation from two speakers of the same community, race, and gender (e.g., Janie and Pheoby in Their Eyes Were Watching God) to many speakers who partake in an epic-scaled, multiethnic, multi-gendered, and multi-classed communal witnessing. In reading these novels together, the chapter considers how Their Eyes Were Watching God witnesses primarily to Jubilee, which in turn witnesses the earlier work secondarily and intertextually.