Haunted by the Specters of Racial Trauma: The Emmett Till Case in US Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the different ways of coming to terms with the traumatic Emmett Till case in US fiction. The 1955 gruesome lynching of the fourteen-year-old black youth in the Mississippi Delta raised a cultural trauma in the US collective imaginary that particularly pierced the African American community. To explore the individual and collective responses to the infamous case, my study focuses on the three major novels inspired by the tragic incident: Bebe Moore Campbells Your Blues Aint Like Mine (1992), Lewis Nordans Wolf Whistle (1993), and Bernice L. McFaddens Gathering of Waters (2012). My critical analysis of these narratives is imbued with a theoretical framework mainly based on trauma theory but also influenced by spectrality studies and black studies. With the above premises in mind, my dissertation argues that fiction provides a better understanding of the real impact of the Emmett Till trauma on the US collective imaginary and, second, that fiction can have a decisive impact on writers and readers and how they can come to terms with trauma. Such an examination is initially underpinned by a broad contextualization of the long history of racist violence in the US that, starting in the present to evince the roots of the current racist ideology, pulls at its fatal thread back to the conditions that brought about Tills infamous killing. Ultimately, my study considers the existing interrelations and divergences between race, class, and gender with regard to trauma that intersect across the three main novels based on the Emmett Till case.