american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

206 NOTES
magic realism: http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/resourcebank/
definitions/.
3. In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987), Bernard W.
Bell briefly discusses the dynamic between truth of sensation and truth
of fact in relation to Morrison. See the chapter on Poetic Realism.
4. For further reading on trauma theory, see Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed
Experience; Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York:
Routledge, 1992); Cassie Premo Steele’s We Heal from Memory; Kai T.
Erikson’s Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the
Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Richard J.
McNally’s Remembering Trauma (Boston: Belknap/Harvard UP,
2003); and Frederick Crews’s “The Trauma Trap.”
5. See Albee’s The American Dream (New York: Coward-McCann,
1961), Baraka’s Dutchman (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks,
1964), and Dragún’s Historia del hombre que se convirtió en perro
(History of the Man Who Was Converted into a Dog; 1957.
Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispánica. 5th ed. New York:
McGraw Hill, 2004: 282–288). Also see Leslie Catherine Sanders’s
chapter on Jones/Baraka and her discussion of the Theater of Cruelty
in The Development of Black Theater in America.
6. Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans and along the
Gulf Coast brought these faces and ministrations to the shores of the
United States in late summer 2005. See Spike Lee’s When the Levees
Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (A Spike Lee Film, HBO, 2006) for a
captivating look at the lives behind these disconnected media images.
7. In the novel Reservation Blues (New York: Grove P, 1995), Sherman
Alexie expresses a similar sentiment, in this case in relationship to
music: “Big Mom played a new flute song every morning to remind
everybody that music created and recreated the world daily” (10).
8. In Beloved (New York: Vintage International, 1987), Morrison writes,
with regard to the relationship between schoolteacher (the brutal
slaveholder) and Sixo, his slave: “schoolteacher beat him anyway to
show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined”
(225). As in the Thylias Moss poem discussed in chapter two,
Morrison and Harjo suggest the importance of redefinition to freedom
and autonomy.
9. There are thirteen years between The Country Between Us and The
Angel of History. Editing the voluminous Against Forgetting by many
accounts took a remarkable amount of Forché’s time. In a 1988 interview,
Forché hints that work on The Angel of History had already been
underway for years. See her interview with Montenegro.
10. Palmer’s reference to Benjamin in one of the series of title poems suggests
interesting connections. The line “This is how one pictures the
angel of history” (227) directly quotes Benjamin. The title of Forché’s
book and the inclusion of the entire passage from Benjamin’s work as