Between Women: Trauma, Witnessing, and the Legacy of Interracial Rape in Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape

Abstract

In Sally's Rape, African American performance artist Robbie McCauley explores what it means to choke on 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, former slave, McCauley's performance bears witness to surviving 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. 2 Part of 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, bodily reaction to what has remained unspoken within dominant collective memory. This connection of body and memoryor refusal of memoryis linked to the complex dynamic found in cross-racial encounters that raise up traumatic histories and questions of survival in public space.

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