“Woolfork’s book builds on recent work in African American studies and psychoanalytic theory by Cathy Caruth, Claudia Tate, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, challenging and confronting the divides between past and present, freedom and slavery, as they are reenacted bodily and textually in contemporary US culture. Recommended”--Choice
"With great clarity, Lisa Woolfork engages the most sophisticated theoretical ideas about trauma and slavery. This intricate, comprehensive, and inclusive work joins a burgeoning field of studies that directly analyze slavery in contemporary neo-slave narrative."--Helena Woodard, associate professor of English, University of Texas
"A welcome addition to the African diaspora conversations about slavery, its trauma, and the complications of its remembrance. Woolfork's focus on the bodily epistemology of the slave past as a part of a transnational, multi-racial, multi-generational critique is well conceived and provocative."--Sheila Smith McKoy, author of When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Violence