Politics Of Trauma Research Articles

Book review: The Politics of Trauma and Integrity: Stories of Japanese “Comfort Women”

Book review: The Politics of Trauma and Integrity: Stories of Japanese “Comfort Women”

Notes on Contributing Authors

Michael A. Figueroa is Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He specializes in musics of the SWANA region and its diasporas, with an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Arab diaspora in North America, and issues related to music, poetry, and multimedia. He is the author of City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2022), and co-editor of Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma (University of Michigan Press, 2020).Morgan James Luker is Associate Professor of Music at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He is author of The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and the founding director of Tango for Musicians at Reed College (www.reed.edu/tango).Althea SullyCole is an ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist from New York City. She has studied her primary instrument, the kora, a 21-stringed harp from the Mandé region of West Africa, for ten years, three of which were spent in Dakar, Senegal. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University and the Sylvan C. and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow in the Musical Instruments Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Deonte L. Harris, assistant professor in the International Comparative Studies program at Duke University, holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include global Black studies, diaspora studies, critical race studies, and the anthropological study of value. These broader interests animate his current book-in-progress, which investigates the local, diasporic, and global dimensions of Caribbean carnival culture in postwar UK, and the value of carnival among Black Britons of Caribbean heritage. Harris is a past chair of the SEM Student Union (2014–2016); former member of the SEM Council and Diversity Action Committee (2017–2020); and current co-chair of the Gertrude Rivers Robinson Network of Black Ethnomusicologists (2020–2022).Katie Young is a postdoctoral research fellow based at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. At present, she is researching experiences of music at night for Black-Irish and Afrodiaporic musicians in Cork and Galway, Ireland, as part of the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) NITE research project. She recently received her PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Compassion and trauma in affective witnessing: The case of A Private War

This article analyses the architecture of affective witnessing in the biographical film, A Private War (Michael Heineman 2018), representing the life and work of famous war correspondent, Marie Colvin. Focusing on the self-reflexive representation of affective witnessing in the film, the article discusses the ethical aspects of compassion in war reporting and the politics of trauma and moral injury with their dangerous impact on the life of the protagonist. Affective witnessing implies an ethical position of compassion and responsibility for the victims of war, but it also implies various levels of trauma, with maladaptive effects on the psyche of war correspondents. The analysis of the film is the basis for a theoretical exploration of the affective practice of witnessing and the dangers of trauma and moral injury that accompany the work of war journalists.

Staci K. Haines (2019) - The politics of trauma: somatics, healing, and social justice

Staci K. Haines (2019) - The politics of trauma: somatics, healing, and social justice

The Politics of Trauma: Gender, Futurity, and Violence Prevention in South Africa

In this article, I consider the framing of trauma as an epigenetic exposure that warrants intergenerational interventions. I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa in 2014-15 to illustrate how violence prevention in this context is increasingly framed in epigenetic terms. I show that, in contrast to the anticipatory logic of a programmatic focus on maternal investment as a means to arrest intergenerational cycles of violence, violence produces different infrastructures of anticipation and effects on intergenerational relations. I argue against the speculative conflation of trauma and intergenerational epigenetics, to resist a newly biologized view of the bodily manifestations of apartheid history-in itself a re-inscription of damage, and a form of violence. Drawing on Murphy's concept of distributed reproduction (2017b), I argue for collectivized forms of intervention that aim for accountability and social justice.

The Politics of Trauma and Resistance in Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black.

David Diop is a French novelist of Senegalese descent. At Night All Blood Is Black is his second novel which was first published in French as Frère d’âme on the 16th of August, 2018. The English translation of the novel was done by Anna Moschovakis and published in November 2020. The translation later went on to win the 2021 International Booker Prize. Diop’s novel deals with the life of Alpha Ndiaye and through him that of Mademba, his more-than-brother. Set against the colonial backdrop Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black deals with grief, violence, and death caused by the World War. It is as much the story of the violence of war as it is of the quotidian life of a Senegalese villager far removed from the settings of the French metropolis and the war.

The Politics of Trauma and Memory Activism: Polish-Jewish Relations Today

The Politics of Trauma and Memory Activism: Polish-Jewish Relations Today

Queer urban trauma and its spatial politics: A lesson from social movements in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

Growing attention has been devoted to the political geography of urban social movements but trauma, its urban context and spatial politics, have been significantly neglected. This paper aims to develop the concept of ‘queer urban trauma’ and its aftermath in the sense of urban and spatial activism, through an analysis of two traumatic events for the LGBT community in Israel. It explains how traumatic events taking place within urban contexts affect the spatial politics of LGBT and queer urban activism. Based on geographies of sexualities and queer theory, this paper aims to fill this gap by analysing traumatic events in two Israeli cities: the 2009 shooting of two young queers in a youth club in Tel Aviv, and the 2015 stabbing of a young girl during the Jerusalem Pride Parade. Tel Aviv is considered the liberal centre of Israel and a local ‘gay heaven’, as well as a destination for global gay tourism. Jerusalem on the other hand is usually described with a sense of alienation among LGBT and queer individuals and movements, where every political, spatial, cultural and financial achievement is a struggle. We argue that the politics of trauma are constructed differently in these two urban settings, producing important nuances of urban activism and politics. Through this empirical discussion, we develop the concept of ‘queer urban trauma’, revealing divergent forms of spatial visibility, presence and activity of the queer movements within urban spaces.

Traumatic Redemption Chronotope as Theoretical Model to Study Serial Shakespeares

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 his article proposes a methodology to study Shakespearean intertexts in contemporary complex TV series. While the presence of Shakespeare’s inter-texts in contemporary complex TV seems ubiquitous, a sustained and theoretically focused academic study of the impact of Shakespeare in these works has not been produced. Reviewers and social media users’ comments have proposed readings of the series pointing at the importance of the series’ redemptive qualities. Taking Hannah Wolfe Eisner’s “Into the Middle of Things: Traumatic Redemption and the Politics of Form” as basis, I am presenting a theoretical model to study serial Shakespeares, with which I am referring to a limited corpus of American complex TV series appropriating Shakespeare’s texts, as narratives embedded in a cultural politics of trauma and redemption. Additionally, it shows that such series potentially work as guidelines to study the overall impact of traumatic redemption in other contemporary adaptations of Shakespearean plays.
 
 
 

Lives of Wars and Trauma

Lives of Wars and Trauma Adia Mendelson-Maoz (War lives: On the army, revenge, grief and the consciousness of war in Israeli fiction). By Nitza Ben-Dov. Pp. 396. Tel Aviv: Shoken, 2016. (We are broken rhymes: A politics of trauma in Israeli literature). By Hannan Hever. Pp. 299. Jerusalem: Magnes, 2017. "Of arms and the man I sing": these famous opening words from Virgil's Aeneid (Book 1) enshrine the theme of war as a source of literary creation. From antiquity to the present day, authors have depicted wars in poetry, drama and prose, in biographies, historical accounts, and novels. Wars have been described in rhyme, and figurative language, as well as in narratives, through complex characters, as well as through realistic and fictional portrayals. Many theories of drama and prose, as well as the development of the concept of the literary hero, have been shaped by the literature of war. The universality of war as a social phenomenon raises moral, psychological, and social issues all of which can be presented powerfully in literature. The cruelty of conflict engenders traumatic experiences, which are reflected in many ways in literary texts. The concept of trauma was initially formulated by Sigmund Freud in his studies on hysteria at the turn of the twentieth century while treating mostly female patients. Yet clearly trauma has existed as long as human-kind has walked the earth. After World War I, and with a greater intensity since World War II and specifically in the last few decades, the theory of trauma has become a key part of literary studies. The confrontation with extreme situations and the contemporary awareness of trauma has led to a rethinking of the concept of representation, and prompted literary scholars (mainly as of the early 1990s) such as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Judith Herman, along with theorists from other fields such [End Page 421] as Dominick LaCapra, to develop literary trauma theories.1 In these theories, trauma is not only a disaster but also a mode of experience associated with the notions of retrospection, deconstruction, and reconstruction of memory, repetitions, and fragmentation. Thus it is not surprising that the literary theory of trauma has evolved through the writings of post-structuralists and deconstructionalist scholars (such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard). Today, trauma theory is a critical category of literary studies promoted by such scholarly voices as Anne Whitehead, Ann Kaplan, and Deborah Horvitz, to name a few.2 The non-linearity, arbitrariness and incomprehensibility of trauma challenge traditional concepts of representation, but its non-representability provides a rare opportunity to depart from concepts of the true or the real to better reveal underlying socio-political situations, cultural and historical contexts, and ethical issues. Thus, literature, unlike other disciplines such as history, psychology, and sciences, can create what Iris Murdoch (in the context of ethical criticism) called not only facts but a "new vocabulary of attention" when dealing with war and other extreme situations of suffering.3 This problematization of the representation of war and trauma associated with the power of literature is a key concern in Modern Hebrew literature. Hebrew literature, and Israeli literature in its wake, was fused with the history of Jewish people in the twentieth century and the Zionist ideological mission. Literature played an active role in the educational system and the creation of Israel. Literary texts from the start mirrored ideological complexities, ethical issues, and traumatic lapses. For instance, debates on Jewish masculinity were major components of Hebrew literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from Peretz Smolenskin, through the works of Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Uri Nissan Gnessin to Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Uri Zvi Greenberg. Later, major canonical Israeli writers continued to grapple with the Zionist national ideological myths and their relationship to questions of masculinity, [End Page 422] military conduct, trauma, and bereavement (Moshe Shamir, S. Yizhar, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz to name a few). The urge to tell a story that cannot easily be told has prompted many authors to find different literary venues, both in prose and poetry to walk the narrow path between the personal, intimate, empathetic narrative, and retrospective...

Topography and Frontier: Gibellina's City of Art

Topography and Frontier: Gibellina's City of Art

Humanitarian therapeutics of war and the politics of trauma and violence in Lebanon

This paper relies on ethnographic and archival research to narrate the humanitarian trouble in finding trauma in the July 2006 war in Lebanon. The humanitarian inability to easily locate a visible trauma shared by war-affected communities intersected with other political, social and public health debates on the modern ways of suffering from war and violence in 2006 Lebanon. This paper provides a preliminary reading of these debates, as I argue that trauma, whether defined and framed by psychiatry, psychology and humanitarianism as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or evoked in popular Lebanese culture and discourse to express suffering, takes many material, political and ideological values for different stakeholders and communities in Lebanon. This multi-faceted meaning of trauma in Lebanon, sometimes intersecting, other times clashing, provides us with an understanding of the contemporary politics of suffering from violence in Lebanon.

Peace Building and the Politics of Responsibility: Governing Northern Ireland

This article looks at the implications of the politics of trauma for building and sustaining peace. Drawing in particular on the Northern Irish example, it argues that articulating a commitment to societal responsibility is essential to building a peaceful democracy. The paper brings together recent work on political responsibility by Iris Marion Young and Eric Gordy to explore how models for building democratic peace (consociationalism, deliberative democracy and agonistic democracy) may be reinforced and complemented with a consideration of ideas concerning social connections. While these ideas are implicit within the 1998 Northern Irish peace accord, I suggest that the practice of governing Northern Ireland frequently clashes with the persistence of unresolved issues from the past. The article suggests that a policy of placing responsibility at the forefront of political discourse may work to constrain these clashes.

Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (review)

Reviewed by: Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War Barbara Hales Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. By Anton Kaes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 326. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-0691008509. Anton Kaes’s Shell Shock Cinema presents readings of Weimar film in the context of the ravages of World War I. Kaes argues that Weimar film is best understood as a means of psychologically working through the emotional turmoil of German defeat that included two million dead and four million disabled, as well as the tumultuous social and cultural changes brought on by modernity. Kaes brings his psychoanalytic analysis of trauma and mourning in the Weimar collective unconscious to readings of film protagonists from many of the period’s canonic works (Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920], F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror [1922], and Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen [1924] and Metropolis [1927]). Rather than directly confronting the soldier’s predicament, Kaes describes the common tension of the battlefield as these characters are struggling with “unspeakable events” through incidents of crime and horror off the battlefield (3). For Kaes, postwar cinema translates “military aggression and defeat” on the battlefield into the betrayal, sacrifice, and injury of the characters in the filmic landscape (3). These character analyses draw on common postwar themes including the returning shell-shocked veteran, the experience of mourning and the burden of the dead on the living, narratives of honor in defeat, and the anxiety resulting from the tumultuous changes brought on by industrialization and modernity. Although Weimar cinema is largely a response to World War I, it depicts these tensions through the psychological landscape that plays out off the battlefield. Kaes provides valuable analyses of Weimar’s early cinema, including lesser known works such as Toward the Light (1918) and Nerves (1919). Building on the work of scholars such as Paul Lerner (Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 [2003]), Kaes investigates the medical literature of the period on neurosis, and posits that these films point to the possible treatment of psychosomatic illness. For example, Kaes argues with regard to Robert Reinert’s Nerves that just as the German population is plagued by a “collective neurasthenia,” so too is it able to empathize with the returning soldier “buffeted” by war (43). The analysis of the war neurotic is further developed in a study of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which the inmate of an insane asylum captures the medical community’s attempts to treat the war neurotic as he recounts a disjointed story about a sadistic psychiatrist and a hypnotized patient. Kaes nicely brings out the film’s irony of whether it is the asylum director or the shell-shocked patient who is truly insane. In Kaes’s analysis of Nosferatu, the ravages of war and the veteran’s neurosis are transferred to the entire society as the character Hutter, like millions of World War I soldiers, travels to the East and returns home in a neurotic state to find his town decimated by a plague. [End Page 183] Kaes analyzes the myth of heroism and loss as seen through the Nibelungen saga. As the hero Siegfried is laid out for burial like a fallen soldier, Germany is given a filmic memorial for its dead, signifying a national body and fatherland (148–49). In Nibelungen, Kriemhild’s Revenge (part two), the victim becomes the avenger, as a narrative of violence and defeat is staged in the act of total warfare. Here we have infantrymen in the trenches together with death and mourning, signifying important tropes of shell-shock cinema. In an analysis of Metropolis, Kaes focuses on the various reactions to modernity. On the narrative level, the film shows a cynicism toward an older generation that has misused technology for profit. The contrast is thus drawn between the use of technology in war, along with the alienation of industrialization, and the potentially liberating possibilities of modernity presented in the context of America (177, 182). The end of the film suggests a return to more humanistic values and a longing for...

MATERIAL SPECTERS: INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS, DISASTER MANAGEMENT, AND EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS

In this essay, Marianna Papastephanou discusses three books—Michalinos Zembylas's The Politics of Trauma in Education; Sigal Ben‐Porath's Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict; and Kenneth Saltman's Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools—from the perspective of the material causality of conflict and of the significance this might have for conflict resolution and the role that education may play in it. Setting out from the Derridean standpoint of spectrality, Papastephanou explores divergences and convergences of Zembylas's critical emotional praxis, Ben‐Porath's counterposition of belligerent and expansive citizenship education, and Saltman's critique of educational programs that capitalize on natural disasters and wars. Papastephanou examines various operations of ontology in an interplay with hauntology (to use Jacques Derrida's terminology) and thus puts forward a critical approach to the contribution of each perspective.

Reviews: Deleuze and memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory, and the Politics of Trauma, along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, the Comfort of Things, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada, Bruno Latours

Reviews: Deleuze and memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory, and the Politics of Trauma, along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, the Comfort of Things, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada, Bruno Latours

WHR Rivers and the politics of trauma

WHR Rivers and the politics of trauma

Exploring the Disjuncture Between the Politics of Trauma and Everyday Realities of Women in Afghanistan

This article makes a case for public recognition of the quotidian and everyday realities of Afghan women. It argues that it is within these spaces that war-related trauma and social suffering can b...

The politics of trauma and reconciliation

This paper explores transitional justice as a way to bring an end to violence and consolidate peace. It approaches transitional justice as an expression of the 'never again' consensus to prevent or prosecute crimes against humanity. It explores transitional justice as an expression of globalizing law and the implications this has for the recovery of the 'rule of law' and 'political legitimacy' in the post conflict State. It takes Robert Meister (2002)'s formulation of the politics of victimhood, revenge and resentment in the relationship between the beneficiaries and the victims of injustice, as remaining at the centre of transitional justice politics in trying to decide on the balance between reconciliation and justice projects. It explores how human rights discourse has been used to de-politicise the 'victim' by adopting an individually embodied concept of violence as opposed to a structural one. It argues that transitional justice as an expression of globalizing law has been primarily directed at maintaining peace to achieve closure on past 'evil' but that the beneficiary-victim issue has re-emerged in the social justice movements and renewed desire for prosecutions.

After Utopia: Three Post-Personal Subjects Consider the Possibilities William E. Connolly (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, Durham and London: Duke University Press.Alexander García Düttmann (2007) Philosophy of Exaggeration, trans. James Phillips, London: Continuum.Adrian Parr (2008) Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory, and the Politics of Trauma, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

After Utopia: Three Post-Personal Subjects Consider the Possibilities William E. Connolly (2008) <i>Capitalism and Christianity, American Style</i>, Durham and London: Duke University Press.Alexander García Düttmann (2007) <i>Philosophy of Exaggeration</i>, trans. James Phillips, London: Continuum.Adrian Parr (2008) <i>Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory, and the Politics of Trauma</i>, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.