This paper explores trauma in Carolivia Herron’s 'Thereafter Johnnie', which investigates the potential emancipation of the traumatized gendered and racialized daughter’s body from a nation-state born from a system of patriarchy and racism by conceiving of its apocalyptic demise and the birth of a new state through an the discourse of incest, paralleling present-day violations with the historical institution of slavery. Placing contemporary literary trauma theories in relation to African American literary criticism, this paper suggests that the black daughter’s body becomes a site of conflict between linear or historical and traumatic time, where trauma is encoded through violence, revealing a form of counter-historical temporality linked to corporeity as a form of corporeal testimony.
