2012 marks the 80th anniversary of Donoghue v Stevenson, a case that is frequently cited as the starting-point for a genealogy of negligence. This genealogy starts with the figure of the neighbour, from which, as Jane Stapleton eloquently describes, a “golden thread” of vulnerability runs into the present (Stapleton 2004, 135). This essay examines the harms made visible and invisible through the neighbour figure, and compares the law’s framework to Virginia Woolf’s subtle re-imagining and theorisation of responsibility in her novel (...) Mrs. Dalloway (1925). I argue that Woolf critiques and supplements the law’s representations of suffering. Woolf was interested in interpreting harms using a framework of neighbourly responsibility, but was also critical of the kinds of proximities recognised by society. Woolf made new harms visible within a framework of proximity: in this way, we might think of Woolf’s work as theorizing a feminist aesthetic of justice, and as providing an alternate genealogy of responsibility to Donoghue v Stevenson. (shrink)

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of transnational commemoration of "Hiroshima." I also show that nationalization of trauma of "Hiroshima" involved (...) a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other. (shrink)

Reporting on a study of activists living with HIV/AIDS who give testimonials of their experiences with the disease in various educational settings, this article employs the notion of 'haunting' as a means of analyzing the effect of social justice activism in the "aftermath" of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Because of a shift in both the discursive construction of AIDS and the material symptoms of the disease (due to widespread availability of anti-retroviral medication), the signified of AIDS is "out of joint" with (...) the signification of the disease in the public sphere. AIDS, as a social phenomena and a personal, traumatic experience has been rendered spectral through processes of social othering, structural disenfranchisement, and cultural denialism. Most of the presenters included in this study utilize a strategy of "survivorhood" in order to promote prevention and combat stigma. In doing so, they inadvertently buttress dominant discourses that claim that the disease is now "manageable," normalized, and under control. By contrast, one presenter utilizes a completely different performative approach. In order to confront and subvert the "aftermath" discourse and thereby presence the living trauma of AIDS, this presenter embodies the specter of AIDS. As such, his presentation forces the audience to reckon with processes of social exclusion and cultural otherness. (shrink)

This article looks at the problematic witnessing envisioned in Chinese American writer Ken Liu’s speculative fiction “The Man Who Ended History – A Documentary,” in which the back-to-the-past virtu...

This article explores the central themes in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) by focusing on the complexities of finding oneself placeless and seeking refuge in an unwelcoming global world with porous borders. It examines different aspects of the experience of time, such as transience and waiting, by drawing on postcolonial and refugee studies and theoretical approaches to vulnerability, time, and being. Set in an unnamed city in an unnamed country on the verge of war, Hamid portrays the shattering of everyday (...) life in the city by following the lives of Saeed and Nadia, their growing love relationship, and the impact of their subsequent escape through “magic doors” to several places of refuge on their relationship and understanding of the world. Their story is interspersed with vignettes on several secondary characters who also become refugees by being transposed through magic doors to new locations. By using magic doors and by accelerating, compressing and conflating events and times—the effect of which universalizes the theme of transience and proximity of death—Exit West exposes us to the global history of suffering and invites us to bear witness to the suffering of others and to become aware of our own finitude and the obligations our common vulnerability places on us. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to apply the concept of synergy to the workings of memory in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell by focusing on the relationship between its two main characters, M...

Affective self-transformation premised on empathy has been understood within feminist and anti-racist literatures as central to achieving social justice. Through juxtaposing debates about empathy within feminist and anti-racist theory with rhetorics of empathy in international development, and particularly writing about ‘immersions’, this article explores how the workings of empathy might be reconceptualised when relations of postcoloniality and neoliberalism are placed in the foreground. I argue that in the neoliberal economy in which the international aid apparatus operates, empathetic self-transformation can become (...) commodified in ways that fix unequal affective subjects. Empathy may function here less to produce more intersubjective relations and ways of knowing than it does to augment the moral and affective capacities of development professionals. Yet, I suggest, it is in the ambivalences, tensions and contradictions of both emotion and neoliberalism that spaces for thinking and feeling transnational encounters differently might be cultivated. (shrink)

Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge of (...) the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the “traumatic mood” of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat. (shrink)

Much international and intercultural discourse about historiography is influenced by a way of historical thinking deeply rooted in human historical consciousness and that works throughout all cultures and in all times: ethnocentrism. Ethnocentric history conceives of identity in terms of “master-narratives” that define togetherness and difference as essential for identity in a way that causes tension and struggle. These narratives conceive of history in terms of “clashes of civilizations,” and they reinforce the idea that international and intercultural relations are merely (...) struggles for power. The main elements of ethnocentrism are: asymmetrical evaluation, teleological continuity, and centralized perspective. This essay articulates possibilities for overcoming these three elements by replacing asymmetrical evaluation with normative equality; teleological continuity with reconstructive concepts of development that emphasize contingency and discontinuity; and centralized perspectives with multi-perspectivity and polycentric approaches to historical experience. Adopting these possibilities would lead to a new mode of universal history rooted in a concept of humankind that can help solve the problem of ethnocentrism. This idea of humankind conceptualizes the unity of the human species as being manifest in a variety of cultures and historical developments. This is in fact the traditional concept of historicism, which can be further developed towards a historiography that responds to the challenges of globalization and cultural differences. The essay outlines theoretical and methodological means in historical studies that bring this idea of humankind into the work of historians, thus enabling them to contribute to a new culture of recognition. The article is based on the assumption that the creation of such a culture is the most important task of scholarly work in the humanities in general, and historical studies in particular, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This is an attempt to investigate the causal relationship existing between the psychedelic literary genre in fiction and the application of trauma theory in the study of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Trauma theory, which is a psychological theory in essence; has been widely linked to the study of literature since traumatic responses take narrative forms. Scientifically, many studies have proven that the psychedelic trip leads to a deepened exploration of the unconscious tracing latent emotional traumas. Henceforth, I am (...) going to explore this novel as a psychedelic example of science fiction through a generic analysis due to the numerous parallels I have noticed with the effects of drug administration on real life patients. I will base my claim on a medical theory known as Psychedelic Information Theory which investigates psychedelic hallucinations, expanded consciousness and their impact on the metaphysical aspects of self-exploration. Consequently, I shall presuppose that psychedelics act metaphorically on the text of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest inducing character-based hallucinatory narratives. Hallucinations are caused by an eruption of a psychedelic consciousness that is the antithesis of the normal state of a mind. Hallucinations range from happy enjoyable experiences laden with kaleidoscopic colourful streams of visions to painful manifestations of latent trauma. I endeavour to analyze this novel as a traumatic example of psychedelic fiction through establishing a cause-result relationship between information theory and trauma theory as a fluid encounter between literature and science within science fiction framework. Finally, I attempt to link the cultural integration of psychedelics to the shift of the traumatic experience from cultural to structural. This paper explores primarily the manifestations of Chief Bromden’s historic trauma. It traces secondarily the psychedelic characteristics of the novel. Lastly, it studies the effects of Bromden’s psychedelic journey on his traumatic recovery. (shrink)

Ron Eyerman is one of the authors of the cultural theory trauma with an introduction by Jeffrey Alexander. This text may be seen as a case-study, that underlines and illuminates some of the main features of their theory. Using the examples of three significant social theory texts, Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism” and Bauman’s “Modernity and the Holocaust”, this article illustrates the difference between personal, collective and cultural trauma. All of those texts are connected to (...) the same event – the Holocaust – and the outcome of this event. Bauman and Adorno could have become the victims, but instead survived bearing the trauma, conceptualizing it and thus becoming predecessors of the cultural trauma theory. Ron Eyerman shows the complexity of the relationship between personal and collective trauma, and the construction of social theory. In analyzing these texts he goes into history of their creation, finding evidence of the traumatic experience of the authors. He also analyzes aesthetic characteristics of the texts, showing theese texts as not only pieces of social theorizing but also as personal experiences, trying to find meaning in gaps, voids and inconsistency. The aim is also to illustrate how personal trauma can impact the construction and representation of social theory. (shrink)

This essay offers a critical examination of two recent Holocaust films that exemplify contrasting approaches to Holocaust representation: Peter Forgacs’s 1997 The maelstrom: A family chronicle and Quentin tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious basterds. One film is historical; the other translates history to figurative exaggeration. The essay explores how The maelstrom positions viewers within the constructed subjunctive spaces of the film, while Inglourious basterds positions viewers as spectators of history as comic book. Looking at these films together illuminates competing rhetorical claims to (...) expertise in film production and reception, and, in the context of Holocaust memory, the levels of expertise required of viewing audiences. Moreover, the analysis reveals that rhetorical aporia no longer dominates inventional possibilities for cinematic memory construction of the Holocaust. (shrink)

Booker T. Washington's Cotton States Exposition Address enlarges our understanding of the genre of witnessing by presenting a version of public testimony and historical remembrance sharply at odds with contemporary definitions of the genre. Washington's resolute choice to lend voice as a living witness to the atrocities of slavery in the service of conspicuously pragmatic and narrowly defined interests rather than universal human rights dramatically separates his performance of public witnessing from its late modern forms. Whereas survivors of historical atrocity (...) in the post–World War II era ritually assume the difficult responsibility of testifying to past evils with the greatest possible accuracy, Washington relates the history of slavery—most notably its legacy of heinous human rights abuses—in radically inventive ways. The address demonstrates that those who embody the putative collective voice of subaltern communities may, in particular circumstances, call on the public to willfully forget, rather than somberly remember, the crimes of history. In doing so, the speech also suggests that the ability to bear witness may not automatically result in the ability to petition for equal human rights. (shrink)

In this article I examine the challenging question concerning whether communal forgiveness is possible. In order to show that it is in principle possible I articulate and then respond to two of the most powerful objections to communal forgiveness that have been formulated to date, namely: (1) the argument that only victims can forgive; and (2) the argument that forgiveness is unconditional and thus outside the scope of such things as communal or political deliberation. I argue that communal forgiveness is (...) a process of transformation that requires at the practical level an institutional framework in which a representative of a community can initiate the process of forgiveness, like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu did in South Africa. Because forgiveness is a process of transformation, it cannot be assessed at the level of acts or commitments alone, but is a wager on the future that will indeed show whether the communities involved have accepted the transformation. (shrink)

The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding a human (...) dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war as festival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra (‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedl‰nder (‘Rausch’ or ‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’. (shrink)

This article explores aspects of eros in education in relation to ideas of indirectness associated with the French concept of pudeur, sometimes translated as ‘modesty’. It explores lines of thought extending through Emerson and Nietzsche but reaching back to Plato's Symposium. This is a means of exposing the ‘impudence’ of some aspects of contemporary education and of pointing towards a conception of eros that is otherwise obscured.

A paradigmatic means of conveying a turningpoint in a narrativeof danger is the line ‘we knew that’s it’. In four tellings of a single narrative about danger during the Holocaust, anarrator varies this line in ways that maintain its collective focus on knowledge, but alter what is ‘known’. An analysis of changes in the ‘we knew [x]’ line reveals its relationship with the changingstructure of the narrative and with the shift toward multi-vocalic means ofexternal evaluation. Also suggested is the relationship (...) of the overall narrative changes to the changing place of Holocaust discourse, narrative and oral history in memory culture, and the larger discourse of resistance and survival. (shrink)

This essay considers the divergent efforts of Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek to arrive at a postmetaphysical conception of ethics that would sidestep the pitfalls of traditional Western humanism yet still possess universal applicability. Butler approaches this task through her ethics of precarity, which posits vulnerability as a foundation for a generalizable ethics of relationality in the Levinasian vein. Badiou and Žižek, in turn, work from a more Lacanian perspective, attempting to leap directly from the singular to the (...) universal by bypassing the particular. After considering the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, I propose that posthumanist theory needs to reconsider its resistance to a priori norms, for such norms do not need to be metaphysically grounded to be ethically compelling and politically useful. (shrink)

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the (...) politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the ‘co-option’ and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women’s movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more ‘authentic’ past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism’s future. Advancements in Women’s Studies and activist (now ‘NGOized’) practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism’s present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost ‘home’. (shrink)

Witnessing the Anthropocene: the task feels both urgent and impossible. How can the human, whether individually or collectively, witness catastrophe at a planetary scale? It is perhaps no surprise...

The most successful historical arguments are expressed in a voice unmistakeably the author’s own, yet this numbers among the most difficult skills to accomplish. In this article, I discuss a series of seminars which I ran in University College London’s History Department in order to help undergraduate historians develop their authorial voice. Some of these seminars were held under the aegis of University College London’s Writing and Learning Mentor Programme; others were held as a series of classes taken by all (...) first-year undergraduate historians. The aim was to encourage students to think carefully about how historical research can be articulated, and about the links between different types of history and different types of argument. In order to define historical argument, we studied the characteristics of several different but very established historians, and used this as a springboard to focus on the authorial voices of the students themselves. (shrink)

This article considers what it means to give plants a voice as witnesses to nuclear events. It examines two texts that attempt to represent the nonverbal testimony of irradiated plants through a hybrid approach of text and image: Sugihara Rieko’s Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees (Hibakuju junrei, 2015) and Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur’s The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (2016). Published a year apart, both texts focus on the afterlife of nuclear catastrophes: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (...) in 1945 and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Sugihara’s book is an account of the hibakujumoku – trees that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and continue to produce new growth to this day. Combining maps, photographs, interviews, and short essays, Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees is intended as an immersive guidebook to the nearly 170 irradiated trees located within a two-kilometer radius around Hiroshima’s ground zero. It presents these trees as “living witnesses” whose subsequent flourishing has provided human survivors with a conceptual figuration of destructive plasticity. Marder and Tondeur’s The Chernobyl Herbarium formally resembles Sugihara’s Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees, and likewise combines text (a combination of short theoretical essays and personal remembrances of the Chernobyl meltdown) and images (Tondeur’s photograms of plants grown in the exclusion zone) into a slim volume that calls for a rejection of language as the sole means of bearing witness. According to Marder, Tondeur’s photograms “bring out the testimony of the plant,” and yet the same procedure renders these plant witnesses “specimens,” full of radioactivity but devoid of life (something Sugihara’s book avoids through the medium of photography). The Chernobyl Herbarium is an attempt to capture, in fragmentary form, the limits of language in the conceptualization of plant life and in the proper conceptualization of the Chernobyl disaster. Ultimately, both texts are experiments to “think the unthinkable and represent the unrepresentable,” to borrow Marder’s words, through a deep, speculative engagement with the botanical realm. As wordless testimony is given voice through human–botanical intra-action, the plasticity of plant life (its capacity to adapt and change) is highlighted, and this allows us to locate moments of phytomorphism – the attribution of vegetal qualities to the human – in these two self-proclaimed “guidebooks.”. (shrink)

Trauma is a term that is widely used in memory studies, along with a number of other academic fields and disciplines. This article takes issue with its loose and indiscriminate application. Such application generates an unresolved paradox: trauma is associated with memories of events that are uncontrollable, yet large-scale commemorative practices or processes of social reconciliation assume that experiences of these are controllable, amenable to being assimilated into narrative form and so available for rhetorical purposes. Following an examination of this (...) paradox, the article looks in detail at two examples of experience involving painful memories of two kinds – those which have become integrated into relatively easily told stories, and which can then involve rhetorical work, and those which have not become woven into a life-narrative and so are not available for such work. The article also considers some of the methodological and analytical problems that occur when traumatic or painful memories arise in the course of sociological fieldwork. (shrink)

1. Transmodernity, in the words of Irena Ateljevic, is “an umbrella term that connotes the emerging socio-cultural, economic, political and philosophical shift” which we are experiencing in the era...

In light of the great interest in interdisciplinary trauma research, this article explores the philosophical-literary concept of cultural trauma from the perspective of psychiatric and psychoanalytical studies of the long-term consequences of the Holocaust. The extensive literature on the psychological after-effects of the Final Solution offers an exceptional opportunity to study the aftermath of extreme violence from different subject positions, including the perspectives of survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and their descendants. Moving from the epicenter of the historical event of the Holocaust (...) to its psychological periphery, the survey reveals how much the concept of trauma has changed in the course of five decades as a result of political and cultural developments. But the review of the literature also demonstrates that none of the existing concepts of Holocaust trauma is well suited to explain the effects of Holocaust representations on individuals or collectives who encounter the Final Solution only as a media event for educational or entertainment purposes. (shrink)

This article interprets Ayn Rand's last novel, Atlas Shrugged, through the lens of Trauma Studies. The author argues that the novel reflects Rand's traumatic experiences of the February and October revolutions in Russia and can be viewed as the means by which the author engaged in the process of what Dominick LaCapra has called “working-through.”.

This paper examines the phenomena of ‘postmemory’ as a mode of possession that responds to experiences of suffering. As such, the hyper-connectivity it is concerned with is not that of the digitalisation of contemporary life but is rather ‘vertical’ hyper-connectivity indicating the disturbance of past injustices that have neither been mourned nor remedied and so keep returning to haunt the present and the future.

This article examines the way aspects of recent history were excluded in key studies emerging from psychoanalytic social psychology of the mid-20th century. It draws on work by Erikson, Marcuse and Fromm, but focuses in particular on Alexander Mitscherlich. Mitscherlich, a social psychologist associated with the later Frankfurt School, was also the most important psychoanalytic figure in postwar Germany. This makes his work significant for tracing ways in which historical experience of the war and Nazism was filtered out of psychosocial (...) narratives in this period, in favour of more structural analyses of the dynamics of social authority. Mitscherlich’s 1967 work The Inability to Mourn, co-authored with Margarete Mitscherlich, is often cited as the point at which the ‘missing’ historical experience flooded back into psychoanalytic accounts of society. I argue that this landmark publication does not hail the shift towards the psychoanalysis of historical experience with which it is often associated. These more sociological writers of the mid-century were writing before the impact of several trends occurring in the 1980s–90s which decisively shifted psychoanalytic attention away from the investigation of social authority and towards a focus on historical trauma. Ultimately this is also a narrative about the transformations which occur when psychoanalysis moves across disciplines. (shrink)

Recent work on trauma, especially in the field of Holocaust studies, has tackled the question of how the “generation after” relates, and relates to, the trauma of its immediate ancestors as it navigates between the poles of remembrance and appropriation. Other studies have shifted focus towards the effects of trauma upon narration, in part through critiquing the prevailing psycho-analytic model of trauma as an unrepresentable event that evades/forecloses language. Aeschylus’ Suppliants, with its chorus of fifty female Danaids who react to (...) their traumatic present by recourse to tales of the traumatic past of their ancestor Io and her son Epaphos, offers a productive stage for testing the applicability of these theoretical frames to the genre of ancient Greek tragedy. The Danaids’ turn to the past explores the agency of an ancestral trauma that reaches into their present, and in doing so highlights the unsteady inheritance of trauma both for those who relate and for those who witness these acts of testimony. The act of supplication itself is defined in part by physical contact between the suppliant and the supplicandus, yet this ritual emphasis on touch is amplified by the play’s consistent focus upon a series of real and hypothesized touches, from the traumatic to the salvific. Through this engagement with the haptic context of trauma and traumatic recall, Aeschylus’ play proposes an enlarged aetiology of touch—across cognitive, affective, and physical registers—for the ritual of supplication itself. (shrink)

This article investigates how historians have sought to foster empathic identification with victims in various narratives on the genocide of European Jewry. It takes historians’ extreme reactions to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executionersas a point of departure, and argues that most historical narratives fail to address how graphic writing about atrocities generates identification with both perpetrators and victims. The essay then analyses how some historians have sought, successfully or not, to overcome this problem.

ABSTRACT This paper aims to offer both an interpretation and a critique of the epistemological foundations underlying one of the most recent approaches to trauma studies: cultural trauma theory. After the First World War, the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, inquired into whether his diagnostic of “traumatic neurosis” could shed light on how collectives deal with unsettling experiences and memories. Throughout the intervening decades, Freud´s insights into collective trauma have attracted the interest of scholars from various disciplines within the (...) humanities and social sciences, from literary studies to historiography, memory studies, and, finally – the focus of this paper – cultural and social theory. By underlining the ways in which the proponents of cultural trauma theory – Jeffrey Alexander, Neil Smelzer, Piotr Sztompka, Bernhard Giesen, and Ron Eyerman – have reframed Freudian ideas regarding the transmission of legacies of collective suffering, the paper considers whether the notion of trauma can be extended to the analysis of cultures and societies. It explores the ambivalent relationship between psychoanalysis and contemporary cultural trauma theory to disclose the theoretical assumptions and weaknesses of the latter. (shrink)

This dissertation aims to address literary texts written in English by diasporic writers of African descent in the context of trauma. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of “traumatic realism,” it seeks to question the Eurocentrism that marks cultural trauma studies and bring into focus the anxieties of home and (un)belonging as indicators of post-traumatic African cultures. The three analyzed works by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Caryl Phillips are placed at the crossroads of cultures, beyond the victim/perpetrator dichotomy, in (...) order to construct new cartographies that question the history of colonial modernity. The spatiotemporal intricacies of postmemory in the texts problematize the “realism” of nationalist narratives and question the prefix “post” in “post-colonial” that claims a “working through” the ills of the past. Confronted with the detritus of the “real,” the African diaspora seeks to provide an ethical understanding of the past as it lays bare the far-reaching aftereffects of colonial and slave-holding enterprises on the daily lives of the displaced Africans. In “traumatic realist” terms, the writers negotiate the politics of space and race as they are constantly implicated as postgenerations of colonialism and slavery, while engaging contemporary readers ethically in the repercussions of a painful past. Several studies have addressed displacement as a traumatic aftereffect of colonialism and slavery. Yet, “traumatic realism” and its exploration of the overarching notion of “the implicated subject” by writers of African descent has not been given enough consideration. This dissertation follows a chronotopic (Bakhtin) line of investigation that realigns the dichotomous past and present, or the extreme and the everyday, as it draws on the intricacies of postmemory that bring forth the “lived” manifestations of the colonial discourse. Central to this study is the way in which the structures of nation-states, especially in Africa and/or Britain, continue to foster the forces of forgetting and separation that blight the realities of the displaced African subjects. Today, we bear witness to the growing numbers of refugees, exiles, and immigrants, particularly African ones, who are confronted with oppression, genocide, and racism between the structures of the nation-states in Africa and Europe. This context stresses the need to address pressing questions that highlight what Michael Rothberg refers to as “historical responsibility which engages other subjects, be they descendants or non-descendants of colonial violence, to bear responsible witness to the lasting aftereffects of the colonial and slaveholding pasts. The critical double bind of their representation of the past brings two issues to the fore: Although they need to provide a particularized documentation of the past, the writers resort to a non-competitive model that locates the violence inflicted on the displaced Africans side by side with those suffering from other forms of violence centered in the West. Keywords: African literature, trauma, realism, memory, diaspora, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Caryl Phillips. (shrink)

In this article, we offer a new conceptualization of intellectuals as carriers of cultural trauma through a case study of the Aum Affair, a series of crimes and terrorist attacks committed by the Japanese new religious movement Aum Shinrikyō. In understanding the performative roles intellectuals play in trauma construction, we offer a new dichotomy between “authoritative intellectuals,” who draw on their privileged parcours and status to impose a distinct trauma narrative, and “dialogical intellectuals,” who engage with local actors dialogically to (...) produce polyphonic and open-ended trauma narratives. We identify three dimensions of dialogical intellectual action: firstly, the intellectuals may be involved in dialogue with local participants; secondly, the intellectual products themselves may be dialogical in content; and thirdly, there might be a concerted effort on the part of the intellectuals to record and to disseminate dialogue between local participants. In the context of the Aum Affair, we analyze the works of Murakami Haruki and Mori Tatsuya as dialogical intellectuals while they sought, with the help of local actors’ experiences, to challenge and to alter the orthodox trauma narrative of Aum Shinrikyō as exclusively a social evil external to Japanese society and an enemy to be excluded from it. Towards the end of the article, we discuss the broader significance of this case study and suggest that in light of recent societal and technological developments, the role and scope of dialogical intellectuals as carriers of trauma are changing and possibly expanding. (shrink)

This thesis examines the ways in which contemporary cinema from a range of different countries, incorporating a variety of styles and genres, explores the relationship to the past of people living in the present who are affected by traumatic national histories. These films, which I’ve grouped under the term ‘temporal gateway’, focus on the ways in which characters’ experiences of temporality are fragmented, and cause and effect relationships are loosened as a result of their situations. Rather than a recreation of (...) historical events, these films are concerned with questions of how to remember the past without being defined and trapped by it: often exploring past events at a remove through techniques of flashback and mise-en-abyme. This thesis argues that a fuller understanding of how relationships to the past are represented in what have traditionally been seen as different ‘national’ cinemas is enabled by the hybridity and indeterminacy of the temporal gateway films, which don’t fit neatly into existing categories discussed and defined in memory studies. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary approach in order to draw out the features of the temporal gateway film, demonstrating how the central protagonist, the character whose life is in limbo, personifies the experience of living through the past in the present. This experience relates to the specifics of a post-trauma society but also to a wider encounter with disrupted temporality as a feature of contemporary life. I demonstrate how these films construct a new way of transmitting the experience of living with the past, through detailed analysis of approximately fourteen films from Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, including a detailed study of Lucrecia Martel’s work. This formal analysis is developed through the perspective of the historical, political and institutional to show how the films transcend a variety of existing definitions in films studies, to blur boundaries of categorisation. (shrink)

This thesis offers a comparison of documentary case studies to explore how moments from reality are recorded and how future representations of them can offer or instigate a parallax to create a new or different way of understanding the occurrence of such moments and how they have been remembered. I postulate that this shift in perspective offers an interaction with reality through a reconfiguration of the Real of these moments. The study will consider this assertion in relation to Žižek’s and (...) Baudrillard’s reflections on the Real as being an excessive moment unable to be assimilated and the veiled encapsulation of what lies beyond the Image-Event. After exploring the use of images from reality, my thesis will go on to consider the processes of recollecting and communicating past occurrences to highlight the potential that documenting and revisiting past memories – re-collecting them – can actively impact and evolve the trajectory of personal histories. Utilising LaCapra’s notion of the working through traumatic memories enables my investigation to plot a course which considers the memory narratives of my case studies as subject to a, ‘continual process of retranslation’ and, as such, explores the subjectivity of the Real of occurrences. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to critically investigate and problematize how museum exhibitions on Difficult Matters, like war and sexual violence, can be designed in order to contribute to teaching-learning relations between museum and visitor, which may transform existing perceptions of self, others, and the world and evoke a deepened sense of responsibility in the viewers, i.e. an ethical transformation.Based on a hermeneutic phenomenological approach the study takes three paths to shed light on the above. 1) Investigating literature on (...) museum studies on New Museology and Difficult Matters on the basis of which the research maps out current problems of understanding the pedagogical and ethical potentials. 2) From conducting case studies of two specific exhibitions to make an in-depth examination of designing exhibitions on Difficult Matters and how these are related to contextual conditions. 3) Investigating pedagogical theoretical literature inspired by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and literature in feminist philosophy on ethics of vulnerability all closely linked to the case studies, the study develops a conceptual basis for understanding the practice of designing exhibitions on Difficult Matters. A main finding is that designing exhibitions on Difficult Matters is related to the condition of vulnerability and this demands a pedagogical perspective sensitive to the ethical implications of exhibition making. This is because evoking ethical transformation is conditioned by a teaching-learning relation, which inspires openness on the part of the visitor to an encounter with the other and her/his life-story as being different from existing perceptions - an openness which is defined by vulnerability. As a result, vulnerability is at the heart of exhibitions on Difficult Matters.The overall conclusion to be drawn from the study is that vulnerability is a key concept in museum pedagogy and that vulnerability is an ambivalent potentiality which must be addressed from a double perspective on vulnerability as being inherent to the human condition and dependent on the particular situation. Consequently, vulnerability calls for pedagogical considerations and ethical attention from museum professionals, when designing exhibitions on Difficult Matters. (shrink)