Archiving the Trauma Diaspora

Abstract

This study offers a close, contextualized reading of classroom observations that contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary discourses around trauma cultures, art education, cultural artifacts and archives. Using a single case from my larger dissertation research, I identify and describe an example of the diaspora of trauma as it emerges in the higher education narrative arts classroom. In the larger research project, I used extended case study methods to investigate conceptual and practical tools for working in arts education settings in which traumatic narratives may emerge and developed a framework for the analysis and archiving of creative artifacts as part of a diasporic trauma archive. Working creatively with trauma diaspora is framed in terms of a de-centered and non-hierarchical production of public archives of culturally contextualized and politically informed personal narratives. The trauma-sensitive artifact is understood as a way of making legible the “unspoken” or “unwritten” aspects of cultural trauma, such as those experienced via the body and interpersonal affect. Archive is considered a locally and historically dispersed, but cohesive body of work that speaks to and about cultural trauma.