Strange Fruit

Abstract

Nostalgia turns away from a contemporary scene it defines largely through negation, constructing the present moment in terms of its departure from a fantasy of lost individual and collective harmony. As chapter four argued and as Chesnutt insisted, the hyper-racialized pastoral of the Lost Cause—a nostalgia that was the intimately connected inverse of slavery’s traumatic collapse of subjectivity into various forms of the commodified natural—offered a way for whites to retreat from the blood guilt of their history, the risk of “contagion” posed by that traumatic antebellum history in which they were enmeshed.

[T]here is something … that one cannot “get over,” one cannot “work through,” which is the deliberate act of violence against a collectivity, humans who have been rendered anonymous for violence and whose death recapitulates an anonymity for memory. Such violence cannot be “thought,” constitutes an assault on thinking, negates thinking in the mode of recollection and recovery. (486)

—Judith Butler, “After Loss, What Then?”