This session advances a critical reorientation within African and African American literary and cultural studies: a shift from trauma as a dominant analytic endpoint toward healing as an ongoing, generative, and culturally embedded process. While scholarship has been indispensable in documenting the violences of slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, gendered oppression, and state-sanctioned brutality, it has often privileged representation, witnessing, and narration over restoration, reconstitution, and futurity. This panel asks: what comes after trauma? More precisely, how do Black texts and cultural practices theorize healing not as closure, but as a dynamic mode of living within and beyond enduring structures of violence?
The session treats healing as a multidimensional framework encompassing affect, embodiment, spirituality, narrative reconstruction, and collective memory. Rather than positioning trauma and healing as sequential stages, the panel foregrounds their simultaneity—how Black subjects and communities engage in practices of survival, care, and renewal even as structural violence persists. In doing so, the session attends to healing as epistemology (ways of knowing), as aesthetics (forms of representation), and as praxis (lived and communal practice).
The rationale for this session emerges from a noticeable imbalance in existing scholarship. Foundational work in trauma studies—from psychoanalytic models to postcolonial and Black diasporic frameworks—has richly theorized injury, rupture, and historical violence. However, comparatively less attention has been given to the mechanisms through which Black communities imagine and enact repair. Recent interventions in Afrocentric psychology, Black feminist theory, affect studies, and Africana philosophy have begun to address this gap, emphasizing resilience, care, embodiment, and relationality. This panel builds on and extends such interventions by placing healing at the center of critical inquiry and by examining how literary and expressive forms make healing thinkable.
The session engages and expands existing scholarship by drawing on Africana theoretical frameworks (e.g., Afrocentric psychology, diasporic trauma theory), Black feminist epistemologies of care and embodiment, and literary studies’ attention to narrative form and affect. It contributes to ongoing conversations by proposing that healing is not ancillary to trauma but constitutive of Black life and thought. In this way, the panel participates in a broader disciplinary movement toward reparative reading practices, affective methodologies, and decolonial approaches to knowledge production.
The session will be structured to maximize both intellectual rigor and collective engagement. Each of the four panelists will present for approximately 10–12 minutes, totaling 45 minutes of formal presentations. This will be followed by a moderated 10-minute response from the session chair, who will synthesize key themes and pose guiding questions. The remaining 15–20 minutes will be reserved for open discussion, allowing for substantive audience participation and interdisciplinary exchange.
The individual presentations collectively illuminate distinct but interrelated dimensions of healing. Paul Mukundi’s paper introduces “healuma,” a theoretical framework that conceptualizes the coexistence of trauma and healing within African and diasporic histories. Drawing on Afrocentric psychology and African philosophical traditions, the paper reframes healing as a continuous, culturally grounded process rather than a post-traumatic endpoint. Julia Brown’s presentation examines contemporary short fiction by Black women writers, exploring how characters reconstruct selfhood, agency, and altered notions of joy in the aftermath of trauma. Her work foregrounds the everyday practices of survival and decision-making that constitute post-trauma life. Jae’la Solomon’s paper turns to Black women’s expressive traditions—enslavement-era sorrow songs and early twentieth-century blues—to theorize feeling as a radical methodology of care. By centering embodiment, maternity, and affect, her work demonstrates how expressive forms mediate healing and reclaim interiority. Jimmy Worthy’s presentation engages James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” to examine how historical violence persists within collective consciousness. By tracing the interplay between past and present, the paper considers how the ongoing work of confronting historical trauma participates in processes of communal reckoning and potential healing.
Together, these papers move across theory, literary analysis, and cultural expression to articulate a multifaceted account of healing in Black life. They demonstrate that healing is not a singular outcome but a set of practices, relations, and imaginaries that sustain Black futures.
The panel also reflects a commitment to diversity in scholarly perspective, institutional affiliation, and methodological approach. The presenters include emerging and established scholars from different institutions, bringing together work in literary studies, creative writing, Black feminist theory, and Africana philosophy. This range of voices and disciplinary orientations ensures a rich, dialogic engagement with the topic and underscores the collective nature of rethinking trauma and healing within the field.