| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26.3 (2005) 1-23 Trauma, Witnessing, and the Legacy of Interracial Rape in Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape Jennifer Griffiths Robbie: In 1964 at the library job a U.S. history major who'd graduated from Smith College said— Jeannie: I never knew white men did anything with colored women on the plantations. Robbie: I said "It was rape." Her eyes turned red. She choked on her sandwich and quit the job. Robbie McCauley, Sally's Rape In Sally's Rape, African American performance artist Robbie McCauley explores what it means to "choke" on a repressed history. When asked about the creative motivation behind her Obie-winning play Sally's Rape, Robbie McCauley responds, "I did this series out of the obsession for examining my feelings of survival." Centered around the rape of great-great-grandmother Sally, a former slave, McCauley's performance bears witness to surviving a traumatized personal and cultural history. Ann E. Nymann refers to Sally's Rape as "a social experiment in which Robbie McCauley, an African American performance artist, performs the black female subject out of victimization." Part of a series that includes Indian Wars and My Father and the Wars, Sally's Rape focuses on the connection between family and the unspeakable within personal and collective memory. Using family anecdotes and her own experience, she begins the process of uncovering the denial of sexual violence against black women and the damage caused by this denial. The Smith graduate's response in the above scene exemplifies the kind of experience McCauley calls forth in her work; that is, a bodily reaction to what has remained unspoken within dominant collective memory. This connection of body and memory—or refusal of memory—is linked to the complex dynamic found in cross-racial encounters that raise up traumatic histories and questions of survival in public space. The scene evokes what Douglas Crimp and Thomas Keenan refer to as "socially produced trauma," or the psychic damage caused by societal indifference to suffering, or failed witness. According to trauma experts such as Judith Herman, Dori Laub, and Bessel van der Kolk, trauma involves a delay in response. The emotional and physical responses not experienced initially are raised when the survivor perceives a potential threat in a new situation, causing the survivor to relive the terror of the original experience on a physiological level. The embodied memory is experienced without a direct link to the "story" of the original experience. In this way, the experience of memory has been fractured. Traumatic memory exists in two distinct forms: the relentlessly recurring image, stereotyped and static, and the unconscious bodily response to conditions that bear psychic resemblance to the original experience. Recovery requires a reintegration of fractured memory forms. This reintegration occurs when the original trauma survivor processes the story with a willing witness, who assists the survivor in understanding the connections between the actual event and its impact on her life. However, failing to recognize the survivor's experience, on a cultural as well as individual level, reproduces traumatic experience. In "The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over," Keenan elaborates on the role public denial plays in exacerbating the effects of the original trauma: There's a double trauma here. On the one hand, there's a cataclysmic event, which produces symptoms and calls for testimony. And then it happens again, when the value of the witness in the testimony is denied, and there's no one to hear the account, no one to attend or respond—not simply to the event, but to its witness as well. The "socially produced trauma" enacted in the library scene entails a lack of recognition of the survivor's story that reinforces shame in the survivor and denies the implication of others in the traumatic history. The two performers stage what Antonius C. G. M. Robben refers to as a "contestive relation" in cultural memory, "which keeps [opposing cultural groups] hostage to each other's memory politics. . . . People cannot mourn their losses when others deny that those losses took place." Efforts to mourn are undermined by this denial, Robben suggests, and "[t]he contest of memory denies conflicting...
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