Disaster Narratives Research Articles

Climate Trauma by E. Ann Kaplan (review)

Reviewed by: Climate Trauma by E. Ann Kaplan Dafna Kaufman E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma (Rutgers University Press, 2016), 196 pages. Paperback. $ 26.55. In Climate Trauma, E. Ann Kaplan examines the effects of global warming on the contemporary Western psyche and film landscape. Kaplan presents her account of these new developments in an analysis grounded in trauma theory. She notes that while theorists have investigated post-traumatic syndrome, there is significantly less written about pretraumatic stress syndrome. Kaplan suggests that premonitions of future catastrophes have the potential to induce traumatic reactions. She argues that the ever-increasing presentation of dystopic futuristic worlds in contemporary film and literature expresses intense global anxiety regarding our planet’s future. She focuses, in particular, on concerns regarding the collapse of current natural and social environments as represented in recent films in the speculative or science fiction genre. She also, more broadly, examines how the circulation of dystopic disaster narratives produces pretraumatic stress within the viewers of the film and Western culture. Kaplan divides futuristic disaster films into two categories: the pretraumatic climate dystopia and the pretraumatic political dystopia., Her first chapter focuses on Jeff Nichols’ 2011 film, Take Shelter, while also relying on examples from The Happening (2009, M. Night Shyamalan) and The Road (2012, John Hillcoat). These narratives portray the world interrupted by “catastrophic climate change” (18). These films invite viewers “to engage with pretrauma narratives by identifying with a probable traumatic future” (35). In the following chapter, Kaplan discusses the pretraumatic political dystopia. Here, she concentrates on the film, Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuarón) and employs examples from less recent films such as Soylent Green (1973, Richard Fleischer) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1995, Volker Schlondorff) for support. The pretraumatic political thriller engages overtly with politics and “the dangers that are inherent in the corporate capitalism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (59). These films, particularly after the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, examine terrorism, political revenge, and other bleak political possibilities for the world’s future (19). The subsequent chapters of Climate Trauma examine additional examples from these two types of dystopic film. In Chapter Four, Kaplan examines the role of memory and temporality in pretrauma fantasies. She specifically examines The Book of Eli (2010, Allen and Albert Hughes) and The Road. Kaplan uses these films to illustrate how these filmic constructions of the future can in turn shape the present and the past (20). In Chapter Five, Kaplan focuses on Blindness (2008, Fernando Meirelles). She places Blindness between the pretrauma political dystopia and pretraumatic environmental disaster film. She also explicitly examines the presentation of body and affect in the gradually deteriorating setting of Blindness. The world in Blindness, Kaplan notes, presents an image of what the world could become “if Western civilization does not change” (101). In her final chapter, Kaplan shifts her focus to the dystopic documentary. Here, she discusses two traumatic climate documentaries: Into Eternity (2010, [End Page 43] Michael Madsen) and Manufactured Landscapes (2006, Jennifer Baichwal). While many of Kaplan’s fictional film examples do not explicitly fault humans for global warming and other contemporary environmental disasters, her documentary choices unambiguously hold humanity responsible for these catastrophes. These documentaries ask the viewer to bear witness to specific future environmental catastrophes and take responsibility for our degradation of the planet. In Climate Trauma, Kaplan discusses a powerful trend within Western popular culture and film. She argues that this trend reflects a serious cultural anxiety regarding the future of the planet. Developing her case through the examination of persuasive filmic and cultural examples, Kaplan builds a strong argument using interdisciplinary tools, drawing from psychology, sociology, economics, environmental studies, film studies, and many other disciplines. The clarity and logic of Kaplan’s work in Climate Trauma makes her case readily accessible to academics and non-academics, teachers and students. The book lacks an exhaustive and thorough discussion of the gender issues at stake in this sub-genre, and this omission is particularly surprising in light of Kaplan’s extensive background in feminist film theory and history. Climate Trauma still powerfully manages to introduce readers to the pretraumatic speculative sub-genre, while also verifying this genre...

Narrative des Anthropozän – Systematisierung eines interdisziplinären Diskurses

Abstract The Anthropocene concept originates from earth system sciences and conceptualizes humanity as a planetary geophysical force. It links current action-oriented time horizons to Earth historical deep time and implies non-separability of natures-cultures. The Anthropocene concept has resonated in debates in natural and social sciences, the humanities and the broader public, serving as an inter- and transdisciplinary bridging concept. Based on an analysis of numerous texts from multiple scientific disciplines and media, this contribution distinguishes five narratives of the Anthropocene: the disaster narrative, the court narrative, the Great Transformation narrative, the (bio-)technological and the interdependence narrative. The five narratives articulate very different perspectives and experiences and transport divergent political, economic, ethical and anthropological values and interests; this is also shown in alternative conceptualizations such as Eurocene, Technocene, Capitalocene or Plantationocene. The analysis reveals that the narratives share significant structural characteristics concerning story, plot, protagonists, spatial and temporal structure and action-oriented emplotment which together can be referred to a meta-narrative of the Anthropocene. Since the partly overlapping, partly contradictory narratives compete for legitimation and dominance in science and the broader public, the findings raise the question whether this struggle will stabilize or undermine the Anthropocene meta-narrative in the long run.

The Stylistic Differences on Disaster Narrative in Kim Joong-hyuk's Novels

The Stylistic Differences on Disaster Narrative in Kim Joong-hyuk's Novels

Social Criticism in Arthur Conan Doyle's <em>The Poison Belt</em>: Cataclysm as Contemporary British Tableau

This article argues that Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Professor Challenger novel, The Poison Belt (1913) uses a disaster narrative structure as a means of offering a tableau of contemporary Britain for the purposes of socio-cultural assessment and burgeoning spiritualist exploration. A conservative text, The Poison Belt uses its science fictional premise to establish a ‘condition of England’ critique informed by Victorian anxieties of social degeneration before offering a wish fulfilment conclusion of cultural re-invigoration

Prospect of a Research about Disaster Literature in East Asia : Focusing on a Study, The Literary Responses to Disasters in East Asia and a Genealogy of Disaster Narratives

Prospect of a Research about Disaster Literature in East Asia : Focusing on a Study, The Literary Responses to Disasters in East Asia and a Genealogy of Disaster Narratives

재난 서사에 담긴 종교적 상징과 파국의 의미 — 김애란, 윤고은, 정용준의 소설을 중심으로 —

재난 서사에 담긴 종교적 상징과 파국의 의미 — 김애란, 윤고은, 정용준의 소설을 중심으로 —

The Palgrave Handbook of Society, Culture, and Outer Space

The Palgrave Handbook of Society, Culture, and Outer Space

Tropical cyclones and coastal communities: the dialectics of social and environmental change in the Sundarban delta

ABSTRACTDisasters caused by cyclones are a cyclical event in the Bay of Bengal delta seaboard. Periodically, cyclone disasters result in damaged houses and the loss of crops and livelihoods. They affect every type of social and economic infrastructure in the delta, which is inhabited by ostracized backward caste groups – seafarers, forest goers and landless peasants. The 1970 Bhola cyclone, for example, was the most catastrophic, generating a 9.1-meter storm surge at the mouth of the Ganges where it meets the Bay killing approximately 300,000 people. Often, these disasters are declared as ‘natural’ and ‘acts of God.’ This paper tests this epistemic viewpoint. I argue that cyclone-related disasters, like other calamities, cannot be merely viewed as ‘natural’ phenomena. Instead their embeddedness in the social and political relations shaping human habitation on the coastal seaboard endangers human settlement and has made the inhabitants vulnerable since the colonial land reclamation program began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Bengal. Through examination of competing discourses around ‘natural disasters’, I demonstrate how cyclones are portrayed as natural (rather than human-induced). The naturalization of disaster benefits powerful actors like politicians, civil engineers and contactors, among others. In analyzing the disaster narrative, I go beyond the textual and rhetorical components to include the socio-political and historical bases of the production of ideas of disaster in the Bengal delta. By focusing on the political and social causes of disaster, this paper does not in any way question the ontological reality of cyclones ‘as dangerous and potentially very destructive natural hazards’; instead, it tries to demonstrate how disaster is naturalized in the different strands of state and epistemic discourse.

Arthur Hailey as Richard Nixon: Workplace Safety in Airport

In his best-selling 1968 novel Airport, Arthur Hailey takes psychological workplace stresses seriously, and he places white-collar workplace safety at the centre of his novel. The disaster narrative in Airport not only lands an airplane against the odds but also shows how important workplace safety is to the safe and continued functioning of the transportation system. In this way, Hailey’s novel narratively and thematically registers changes in contemporary US culture that would soon take legislative form, as when Richard Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970.

The politics of natural disasters in protracted conflict: the 2014 flood in Kashmir

This paper explores the politics of the 2014 floods in the contentious and conflict-prone Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The September 2014 floods were the most serious natural disaster in the state in the past 60 years, and affected some two million people in the Kashmir valley. Drawing on qualitative interview evidence from 50 flood victims in south, central and north Kashmir, the paper examines the extent to which the disaster transformed existing political narratives. In doing so, it examines the role of the state and central governments, the army, local volunteers, and the media. The paper engages with the politics of disaster literature, exploring how disasters can serve as a lens rather than as a catalyst, and stressing the relevance of understanding the social construction of disaster narratives.

Rivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ Writings

Rivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ Writings

Project Fukushima! Performativity and the Politics of Festival in Post-3/11 Japan

This article describes the political performances of the annual Project Fukushima! festival that—only a few months after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster on 3/11/11, and each summer since—has brought thousands to sing, dance, and make music in Fukushima City. Why celebrate Fukushima in the midst of a meltdown? I argue that performance has taken on a vital critical dimension in the ambivalent pluralism that drives contemporary public protest movements. Music and dance—particularly in the festivals that have become deeply integrated into social activism in post-3/11 Japan—have become particularly expedient ways to enable broad critiques of technocultural capitalism and its silencing of marginal populations. The performativity of festival connotes but does not necessarily constitute public dialogue. Rather, it makes audible the dissonance of diverse political assemblies, who respond with ambivalence to demands to speak with a singular voice. I examine the ways in which the anthropology of social movements can attend to new performative assemblies that reframe narratives of disaster and displacement to describe emergent scenes of embodied interdependence in a global politics of survival. By blurring the lines between social expression and the disruptive noise of collective spectacle, Project Fukushima! builds the ambivalence of regional culture into a platform for amplifying the noise of political community in the disaster zone.

Mediating the Morals of Disasters: Hurricane Katrina in Norwegian News Media

The Norwegian media responses to Hurricane Katrina were structured around three well-established sets of motifs in a globalized late modern disaster discourse: 1) The collapse of civil society, 2) Social vulnerability 2) Extreme weather and global warming. These sets of motifs portray relationships or non-relationships between natural evil and moral evil. Starting with Voltaire’s description of Candide’s arrival in Lisbon after the earthquake I discuss how an 18th century disaster discourse is echoed in contemporary media narratives. This paper explores a folkloristic and narratological approach to writing nature. I use Hurricane Katrina as a case for studying Norwegian media disaster narratives. In these narratives I am concerned with how such narratives transform disasters from being acts of nature to become issues of morale. Modern disaster narratives have more complex historical roots then often claimed. This complexity is mirrored in the media representations of Hurricane Katrina.

Embodied narratives of disaster: the expression of bodily experience in Aceh, Indonesia

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 caused massive destruction to coastal Aceh, Indonesia, and left countless numbers of people dead or wounded. This article focuses on the embodied narratives of three Acehnese women who survived the disaster and, like many others in Aceh, told their stories ‘through’ their bodies. A detailed ethnographic account of their narratives reveals how the body stretches temporally between the ‘narrated event’ and the ‘narrative event’, both through the representation of the body in narratives and through the embodied performance of narratives. Moving beyond meaning‐centred analyses of narratives, I argue that the central accomplishment of these narratives is that they convey poignant bodily experiences to others and thereby create a shared, post‐disaster, world. Ultimately, through these embodied narratives of disaster people remake their world, with others, in the wake of its ‘unmaking’.

Disaster response and recovery: Aid and social change

This article offers a discussion of the complex and far‐reaching impacts that disaster aid has on the socio‐ecological and cultural‐political transformation of affected communities through three different and interrelated theoretical and ethnographic angles presented in the “Response and Recovery” section of the plenary session on the anthropology of risk, hazards, and disasters. It introduces the research on “disaster narratives,” the framing of “bad victims,” and state‐led recovery of ethnic cultures by Mark Schuller, Roberto Barrios, and Qiaoyun Zhang respectively. Responding to the special issue's uniting theme of “continuity and change,” this article analyzes the historical, discursive, political, and social relationships embedded in relief efforts and recovery projects that can induce long‐term change in social lives and relations. It argues that the restoration and endurance of the pre‐disaster ecologically and culturally shaped practices and relationships largely depend on how disaster, damage, and survivors are perceived and manipulated. It observes the oftentimes contested social changes with disaster aid (or lack thereof), reconstruction policies, and recovery projects. Revealing the indigenous adaptation and struggles under imposed reconstruction and resettlement plans, this article hopes to bridge the epistemological and practical gaps between the work of the humanitarian agencies and the needs of the affected populations.

Disasters, Queer Narratives, and the News: How Are LGBTI Disaster Experiences Reported by the Mainstream and LGBTI Media?

ABSTRACTThe media plays a significant role in constructing the public meanings of disasters and influencing disaster management policy. In this article, we investigate how the mainstream and LGBTI media reported—or failed to report—the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) populations during disasters in Brisbane, Australia and Christchurch, New Zealand. The implications of our work lie within recent disasters research suggesting that marginalized populations—including LGBTI peoples—may experience a range of specific vulnerabilities during disasters on the basis of their social marginality. In this article, we argue that LGBTI experiences were largely absent from mainstream media reporting of the Brisbane floods and Christchurch earthquake of 2011. Media produced by and about the LGBTI community did take steps to redress this imbalance, although with uneven results in terms of inclusivity across that community. We conclude by raising the possibility that the exclusion or absence of queer disaster narratives may contribute to marginality through the media’s construction of disasters as experienced exclusively by heterosexual family groups.

Book reviews

Christine Cornea and Rhys Owain Thomas, eds, Dramatising Disaster: Character, Event, Representation. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 172pp. US$67.99 (hbk).Jennifer WoodwardCornea and Thomas's Dramatising Disaster: Character, Event, Representation examines depictions of disaster in visual media to provide a detailed critical treatment of the subject. Acknowledging the various connotations of 'disaster' in the introduction, the collection embraces the term's diverse implications and distinguishes itself from more focused studies of the topic. Offering as broad a definition of 'disaster' as possible, Cornea and Thomas avoid becoming tied up in taxonomic debate. The introduction emphasises that the text looks 'not upon a specific disaster or a specific disaster context, but upon the wider topic of disaster ... [and] is therefore able to offer a broad account of disaster across genre and media' (4-5). The collection's importance, therefore, lies in its ambition to draw scholarly attention to the way the media represents disaster, its figurative and metaphorical strategies, and its historical and cultural contexts. Embracing a diversity of disaster narratives and the interdisciplinarity of media studies, Dramatising Disaster is a significant contribution to the field. As with any collected volume, the analytical methodologies are varied and the critical contexts distinct; the approaches to the genre can, in places, seem disconnected. However, the text is well organised, and the editors have taken care to contextualise the content, providing a short introduction to each of the main sections in addition to the volume's overall introduction.The book's scope is reflected in its structure. Organised into three parts, it engages with 'disaster' in increasingly broad terms. 'Part I: Personal Identity, Trauma and Disaster' examines personalised disaster in film and television. 'Part II: Representing the Aftermath: New York and New Orleans' considers evocations of urban disaster and the way the two cities have been portrayed in film, video games, comics and television. 'Part III: End Times: The Politics of Disaster' engages with depictions of global cataclysm. Here film, television and pseudo-documentary are discussed in relation to contemporary anxieties. The volume's increasingly broad trajectory, which moves from personalised renderings of disaster to more extensive globalised depictions, means that it simultaneously moves towards (structurally) and beyond (conceptually) traditional notions of secular eschatology.The contributions contained within Part I of Dramatising Disaster approach the subject matter in distinct ways. The opening essay, 'Diagnosis Disaster', takes as its focus the impact of cancer on the lives of women and their families in Stepmom (Columbus US 1998) and The Family Stone (Bezucha US 2005). Interrogating gender representations, Liz Powell argues that in these films cancer is the catalyst for masculine heroics and feminine suffering and sacrifice. The chapter offers the most personalised analysis of disaster in the book and for some readers may stretch their understanding of what a 'disaster narrative' encompasses. Indeed, possibly reflecting a little insecurity about the diverse manner in which the term is being applied, the introduction to Part I reminds readers that 'disaster' can affect an individual or a whole society (8). Reinforcing this point, Powell offers engaging, informative and insightful analysis to argue convincingly that cancer is often constructed as cultural disaster.Chapter Two, Rob Bullard's 'Trauma and Technological Accident in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter', offers astute analysis to present the case for a connection between technology and trauma in Egoyan's film (Canada 1997). Linking trauma theory and visual culture, Bullard presents a sparkling reading of the film that shows how an accident can exist as disaster for both individual and community. …

Organizing collective action amid the ripple effects of change: narratives of crisis, disaster, and opportunity

ABSTRACTThis study examines how narrative is used by remote stakeholders to cope with organizational change. Specifically, I focus on the public narratives of community leaders because these narratives often function as a rhetorical resource to attract businesses, receive grants, and retain local residents. Public stories announcing, explaining, and managing the ripple effects of organizational change warrant deeper analysis in order to refine our ability to respond to these effects at a community level. This in-depth case study analysis of one community's efforts to respond to the loss of its largest employer suggests that naming a change event as a crisis, disaster, or opportunity positions actors differently within narratives, creating powerful implications for social action. Specifically, crisis narratives call for punishment of the causal agent and legislation of responsibility; disaster narratives call for assistance to affected communities and legislation of support; and opportunity narratives create an unclear policy mandate and demand transformational leadership to mobilize action.

Keeping Count of the End of the World: A Statistical Analysis of the Historiography, Canonisation, and Historical Fluctuations of Anglophone Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Disaster Narratives

Over the past decade, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic disaster narratives seem to have become more popular than ever before. Since its inception in secular form in the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, the genre has experienced a number of fluctuations in popularity, especially in the twentieth century. Inspired by Franco Moretti’s influential Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), the aim of this study is to analyse the historiography, canonisation, and historical fluctuations of Anglo-phone apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic disaster narratives in literature and film through an elementary statistical analysis of previous surveys of the field. While the small database on which the study is based essentially consists of a meta-study of historiography and canonisation within the genre, disclosing which works have been considered to be the most important, the data is also used to assess the periods in which the most influential, innovative, and/or popular works were published or released. As an attempt is also made to explain some of the fluctuations in the popularity of the genre - with an eye to historical, cultural, medial, social, and political contexts – perhaps the study might help us understand why it is that we as a society seem to need these stories ever so often.

Disaster Narratives in the South Korean Cultural Imaginary

Disaster Narratives in the South Korean Cultural Imaginary