| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. By Ron Eyerman. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. viii, 302 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-521-80828-6. Paper, $23.00, ISBN 0-521-00437-3.)

The sociologist Ron Eyerman uses social-scientific theory to analyze blacks' collective memory of slavery from Reconstruction through the late twentieth century, arguing that slavery and the failure of emancipation created a cultural trauma through which African Americans must reinterpret and represent their collective identity. Eyerman assesses successive generations by focusing on public representations and on social movements, which he sees as central to forming and articulating generational collective consciousness.

Eyerman argues that the postemancipation generation tended to look forward, rather than back to a past of victimization, but exerted only limited control over public expression and collective identity. Turn of the century New Negro spokespersons such as W. E. B. Du Bois had greater capacity to re-conceptualize the past and forged a more positive racialized collective identity within their forced separation from the dominant society. The generation maturing amidst the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance built upon this nascent nationalism, developing two narrative frameworks within which subsequent generations engaged the cultural trauma of slavery. One, evolutionary and forward-looking, represented by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, selectively mined slavery for a cultural heritage and a foundation for progressive racial advancement. Marcus Garvey exemplified a second narrative that couched the past in terms of tragedy and redemption and whose goal was not progressive advancement but restoration of lost glory.

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