Lawrence Hill's Critical Aesthetics of Cultural Resilience

Abstract

This chapter suggests that Lawrence Hill’s writing develops forms of consciousness through the practice of a critical aesthetics of cultural resilience that foregrounds language from the perspective of mixed-race subjectivity. Placed at the crossroads of the fraught notions of resilience, Black exceptionalism, and language, this chapter reveals how Hill’s fiction veers away from traditional trauma narratives that view trauma as dissociative and unrepresentable and dwells instead on the potential of the trope of narrative to disclose the hegemonic distortions, omissions, and misrepresentations of chattel slavery and its aftermaths, while at the same time offering new ways to build cultural resilience as an effective form of resistance and self-re/creation.