Stef Craps Research Articles

Traumatogenic metaphors and religious motifs in Niger Delta ecopoetry

The Niger Delta has been a site of trauma as a result of decades of non-stop environmental pollution. Existing studies have explored the socio-political and economic implications of pollution and its quotidian impact on the lived experiences of the people. This study, however, focuses on ecopoetry as a genre that reflects, and reflects on, the trauma of ecological degradation and the spiritual implications for the Niger Delta. By doing so, it explores traumatogenic metaphors and religious motifs in ecopoetry from the region. This informs the purposive selection of two Niger Delta poetry collections—Tanure Ojaide’s Songs of Myself: Quartet (2015) and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky (2020). The poems are subjected to critical literary analysis, undergirded by Jacob Olupona’s perspective of ecology of religion and Stef Craps’ trauma theory, to examine how the impact of environmental degradation on the mental health and spiritual well-being of the people is poetically addressed. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘African ecologies: literary, cultural and religious perspectives’, edited by Adriaan van Klinken, Simon Manda, Damaris Parsitau and Abel Ugba.)

Bible Study as Postcolonial Witnessing

AbstractThis article contextualizes Stef Craps’ concept of postcolonial witnessing and Shelly Rambo's concept of the afterlife of trauma to offer a model of Bible study as a postcolonial witnessing to the afterlife. The aim is to identify the contextual and multilayered dimensions of Bible study as a witnessing practice embedded in an Indonesian local Christian community's story of post‐religious communal violence and cultural trauma and its rereading of the Bible as a narrative of the afterlife. The community's story unveils an intergenerational community of survivors witnessing life within the intersection of the rupturing presence of violence, mission history, and its collective memory. I argue that a contextual Bible study from the lens of the afterlife imbued with a local Christian community's story of trauma and witnessing exemplifies an intergenerational, intertextual, and intercultural witnessing of life – thus, a postcolonial witnessing – which is relevant to mission studies in the context of trauma history and interreligious relationships.

ARTICULATING TRAUMA IN SHAUN TAN’S THE ARRIVAL

As a “trans” form of literature, according to Knowles, Peacock and Earle, the graphic novel offers a suitable medium for narrating transitional experiences. Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) demonstrates this by telling a universal yet diverse story of migration and trauma, employing a dreamlike combination of realism and fantasy, and the immediacy of visual expression to represent precarious situations, states and emotions which are almost unrepresentable. A complex dialogue among images and pages, and the slow movement from panel to panel enable the reader to gradually understand the shifts inherent in migrant and traumatic experiences. As words would monopolise attention in Tan’s view and situate the narrative in a particular language, a conspicuous lack of words allows the narrative to communicate across cultures, simultaneously signalling the difficulty of verbally articulating trauma. Relying on studies of the graphic novel and trauma, this paper explores Tan’s narrative strategies for conveying trauma, and portraying migration as a shared and timeless experience. At the same time, the paper examines Tan’s promotion of cross-cultural and cross-species empathy and solidarity, thus avoiding what Stef Craps sees as one of the pitfalls of trauma theory.

Dictatorship, Trauma, and Scriptotherapy in Remi Raji’s A Harvest of Laughters

ABSTRACT: This article examines how Remi Raji, a third-generation Nigerian poet, reenacts the social pains and “dis-eases” of the military dictatorship era in Nigeria in A Harvest of Laughters as traumatogenic, as well as how the poet writes himself out of the trauma. While the article espouses the extant critical notion that the poet offers laughter to the victims of structural violence, social pains, and “dis-eases” of the military rule era in the country as a balm, it complicates the view by arguing that the poet’s versification in the volume and, more importantly, his infatuated exploration of laughter is readable as scriptotherapy. The poems titled “Introit,” “I rise now,” “Gift,” “Black Laughter,” “Silence,” “Silence II,” “Orphan Cry”, and “Harvest I–VI” are used to demonstrate this. The analysis draws anchor from Laura Brown’s and Stef Craps’s conceptions of trauma and Geri Chavis’s and some other psychological therapists’ insights on writing and therapy.

Dictatorship, Trauma, and Scriptotherapy in Remi Raji’s A Harvest of Laughters

ABSTRACT: This article examines how Remi Raji, a third-generation Nigerian poet, reenacts the social pains and “dis-eases” of the military dictatorship era in Nigeria in A Harvest of Laughters as traumatogenic, as well as how the poet writes himself out of the trauma. While the article espouses the extant critical notion that the poet offers laughter to the victims of structural violence, social pains, and “dis-eases” of the military rule era in the country as a balm, it complicates the view by arguing that the poet’s versification in the volume and, more importantly, his infatuated exploration of laughter is readable as scriptotherapy. The poems titled “Introit,” “I rise now,” “Gift,” “Black Laughter,” “Silence,” “Silence II,” “Orphan Cry”, and “Harvest I–VI” are used to demonstrate this. The analysis draws anchor from Laura Brown’s and Stef Craps’s conceptions of trauma and Geri Chavis’s and some other psychological therapists’ insights on writing and therapy.

Unhousing the Archives Around theZong, Again

Unhousing the Archives Around the<i>Zong</i>, Again

The Midrashic Impulse

The Midrashic Impulse

Trauma by Lucy Bond and Stef Craps

Trauma by Lucy Bond and Stef Craps

Happiness, The Wound and the Word: Aminatta Forna Joins the Conversation on Trauma

Taking into account the interconnectedness of spaces, a number of theorists and writers have investigated the impact of trauma on subjectivities within their social, cultural, and political environments. In postcolonial studies, scholars such as Veena Das (2007)2, Antjie Krog and colleagues (2009)3, and Stef Craps (2012)4 have convincingly argued that postcolonial trauma survivors are not necessarily under the tyranny of the past; to the contrary, they may take advantage of the past event by immersing themselves in the trauma. Jay Rajiva gives the example of those survivors who cannot distance themselves from the past because they are compelled “to perform the grief of the community in both clothing and gesture. Such a submersion in past trauma becomes a way for a trauma survivor to expand and even renegotiate her relationship to that same community… . Essentially, the survivor inhabits the enforced retriggering of her trauma but finds the means—in daily life, over months and years—to make sense of her trauma.”5

Decolonizing cultural memory in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

ABSTRACTThis article examines Andrea Levy’s 2004 novel Small Island as a postcolonial trauma novel that revisions cultural memory of World War II and its aftermath. Utilising the insights of Stef Craps’s Postcolonial Witnessing, it explores the ways in which Levy’s text redresses the marginalization of non-western and minority trauma and addresses the under-explored relationship between First and Third World traumas. Eschewing classic western definitions of trauma as a point of rupture and fragmentation, the novel provides an alternative trauma aesthetic based on the power of storytelling and the use of humour to mitigate the traumatic losses of the past. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s notion of “multidirectional memory”, it argues that Small Island employs a notion of cultural memory as heterogenous to suggest strong continuities in the experience of Black and white men and women before and after the war in terms of the long history of colonialism.

Memory Studies Goes Planetary: An Interview with Stef Craps

Stef Craps is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative (CMSI). He is an internationally recognised scholar whose research focuses on postcolonial literatures, trauma theory, transcultural Holocaust memory, and, more recently, climate change fiction. He has published widely on these issues, including in the seminal Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He visited Warwick to deliver a public lecture and graduate workshop for the Warwick Memory Group in October 2017. In a wide-ranging interview, Stef Craps spoke about present and future directions in memory and trauma studies, the differences between transnational and transcultural memories, the ethics and politics of memory (studies), and the challenges faced by the field looking to the future.

Climate Change and the Metamorphosis of Memory: A Response to Stef Craps

Climate Change and the Metamorphosis of Memory: A Response to Stef Craps

Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen, editors. Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies.

Journal Article Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen, editors. Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. Get access Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen, editors. Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies.New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Pp. viii, 293. $110.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 3, June 2017, Page 972, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.3.972a Published: 08 June 2017

Roundtable on Moving Memory, with Stef Craps, Astrid Erll, Paula McFetridge, Ann Rigney and Dominic Thorpe. Convened by Charlotte McIvor and Emilie Pine

This roundtable brings together a group of academics and artists working throughout Europe to discuss the question of memory in theoretical and artistic contexts at a historical moment highly preoccupied with acts of commemoration and moving memory. As the convenors of this roundtable, we are working and writing within an Irish context. Hence, we ourselves are in the middle of the Irish State’s ‘Decade of Centenaries’, which marks events from 1912–1922 and the founding of the Irish Free State. At the time of coordinating this roundtable, we have been engaged in the yearlong celebration of the Easter Rising centenary in particular, celebrations that have raised anew debates about scales of commemorative practice in relationship to the representation of militarisation as a primary commemorative mode at state level and the need to animate and centralise marginalised voices, particularly those of women and children. The artists participating in this roundtable from both the Republic and Northern Ireland have engaged centrally with questions of national narratives, minority histories, and scales of remembrance as communal (or performative) acts; the academic participants are, likewise, informed by their work in diverse areas of memory studies, and particularly by their membership of the COST Action Network In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe (2012–16).

A Response

A Response Bryan Cheyette (bio) I am grateful to the editors of Philip Roth Studies for giving me the chance to respond to the review of Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (2014), published in Fall 2016 by Professor Henry Schwarz. I realize that this is an unusual commission given that the book has been comprehensively reviewed elsewhere in literary, scholarly, Jewish, and postcolonial journals. The readers of Philip Roth Studies might understandably prefer another voice rather than the author’s and all of these alternative reviews are readily accessible. So why has the author been invited to respond to this particular review? A clue might well be the fact that Diasporas of the Mind contains a chapter on Philip Roth which is not considered by Professor Schwarz for the following reason: “I will limit my comments to discussion of postcolonial writers for readers of Philip Roth Studies, for whom presumably the Jewish writers are better known” (106). And there’s the rub. No discussion of the chapters on Primo Levi and Jean Améry, nor Philip Roth (not that I would want to call any of them “the Jewish writers”). There is nothing on Muriel Spark (a Catholic “Jewish writer”) whose chapter locates her work in colonized Africa. This, in turn, leads to a criticism that there is no mention of “feminism and gender” (108), which structures the Spark chapter. A lack of reading leads to a misreading which leads to a review. But that is not the main issue. By dividing the book into “Jewish” and “postcolonial,” which are intertwined throughout, the review fails to address the main point of Diasporas of the Mind, which is to explore the extent to which Jewish and postcolonial literatures and histories are in dialogue. Amusingly enough, the review is a perfect illustration of the “disciplinary thinking” highlighted in the book, which separates out histories and cultures into specialized areas. Readers of Philip Roth Studies need not read a new account of Roth as he is already “known”— a rather odd criterion for a scholarly journal. I was expecting some flak, from full-blooded Rothians, as the Roth chapter goes against the current whiggish orthodoxy that his work has steadily improved and culminates in the American Trilogy and subsequent twenty-first century novellas. The literary half of the book, in fact, pivots around the chapter as I trace the turn in Roth’s fiction from his diasporic middle period to his national late period and argue that this “national turn” restricts [End Page 119] Roth’s late novels and novellas. What interests me is the gap between Nathan Zuckerman’s diasporic sense of being separated from European history—“war, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, literature on which the fate of a culture hinges”—compared to his American “dwarf drama” (550–51), as he puts it in Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (1985). By the time of the American Trilogy this ironic gap is closed—as “war, destruction, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism” comes home to America—with, I contend, the fiction suffering as a result. A lack of engagement with Levi and Améry in the review means that the book is criticized for “not approach[ing] the psychological richness of Trauma Studies in dealing with the Holocaust nor other colonial tragedies” (108). My reading of these “Jewish writers,” however, is in critical dialogue with trauma studies and this discussion, in relation to Diasporas of the Mind, has recently been reprised in an on-line round-table: “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” with Stef Craps, Alan Gibbs, Sonya Andermahr, and Larissa Allwork (http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/4/4/905). Of more concern is my supposed take on Israel/Palestine, which bears no resemblance to anything in the book. Diasporas of the Mind is an account of different kinds of diasporas, and interpretations of diasporas, not least those of Philip Roth. For that reason the book does not aim to “reimagine a sense of Jewish nationhood that would not be overtly Zionist, racist and presumably anti-Palestinian” (105). Israel/Palestine is discussed in relation to the work of Hannah Arendt, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, Stuart Hall, and Edward...

Decolonizing Trauma Studies Round-Table Discussion

This round-table, which featured literary critics Professor Stef Craps, Professor Bryan Cheyette and Dr. Alan Gibbs, was recorded as part of the “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” symposium organized by Dr. Sonya Andermahr and Dr. Larissa Allwork at The School of The Arts, The University of Northampton (15 May 2015). Convened a week after the University of Zaragoza’s “Memory Frictions” conference, where Cheyette, Gibbs, Andermahr and Allwork gave papers, the Northampton symposium and round-table was sponsored by The School of The Arts to coincide with Andermahr’s guest editorship of this special issue of Humanities. Craps, Cheyette and Gibbs addressed five questions during the round-table. Namely, does trauma studies suffer from a form of psychological universalism? Do you see any signs that trauma studies is becoming more decolonized? What are the challenges of a decolonized trauma studies for disciplinary thinking? How does a decolonized trauma studies relate to pedagogical ethics? Finally, where do you see the future of the field? While this edited transcript retains a certain informality of style, it offers a significant contribution to knowledge by capturing a unique exchange between three key thinkers in contemporary trauma studies, providing a timely analysis of the impact of postcolonial theory on trauma studies, the state of the field and its future possibilities. Issues addressed include the problematic scholarly tendency to universalize a western model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); the question of the centrality of the Holocaust in trauma studies and the implications of this for the study of atrocities globally; the vexed issues posed by the representation of perpetrators; as well as how the basic tenets of western cultural trauma theory, until recently so often characterized by a Caruth-inspired focus on belatedness and afterwardness, are being rethought, both in response to developments in the US and in answer to the challenge to ‘decolonize’ trauma studies.

A Journey across Multidirectional Connections: Linda Grant’s The Cast Iron Shore

Among the numerous groups that have negotiated their fragmented identities through various literary practices in the last few decades, the Jewish collective has come to symbolize the epitome of diaspora and homelessness. In particular, British-Jewish writers have recently started to reconstruct their fragmented memories through writing. This is an extremely interesting phenomenon in the case of those Jewish women who are fiercely struggling to find some sense of personhood as Jewish, British, female, immigrant subjects. Linda Grant’s novel The Cast Iron Shore will be analyzed so as to unveil the narrative mechanisms through which many of the identity tensions experienced by contemporary Jewish women are exhibited. The different stages in the main character’s journey will be examined by drawing on theories on the construction of Jewish identity and femininity, and by applying the model of multidirectional memory fostered by various contemporary thinkers such as Michael Rothberg, Stef Craps, Max Silverman, and Bryan Cheyette. The main claim to be demonstrated is that this narration links the (hi)stories of oppression and racism endured both by the Jewish and the Black communities in order to make the protagonist encounter the Other, develop her mature political self, and liberate her mind from rigid religious, patriarchal, and racial stereotypes. The Cast Iron Shore becomes, then, a successful attempt to demonstrate that the (hi)stories of displacement endured by divergent communities during the twentieth century are connected, and it is the establishment of these connections that can help contemporary Jewish subjects to claim new notions of their personhood in the public sphere.

Stef Craps. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds

Stef Craps’ Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Boundsis a brilliant and important book, a book that one hopes will initiate a new phase in postcolonial and trauma studies. In a highly theoretical area such as postcolonialism, the clarity and concreteness of Craps’ approach is extremely refreshing. What is inspiring about this study is how it addresses the importance of the textual rendering of the traumatic experience as well as the relevance of testimony and of the ethical responsibility...

The Bloomsbury companion to Holocaust literature

Contents Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction Current research 1. A Genre of Rupture: The Literary Language of the Holocaust Victoria Aarons 2. Questions of Truth in Holocaust Memory and Testimony Sue Vice 3. After Epic: Adorno's Scream and the Shadows of Lyric David Miller 4. Relationships to Realism in Post-Holocaust Fiction: Conflicted Realism and the Counterfactual Historical Novel Jenni Adams 5. Theory and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation Michael Bernard-Donals 6. 'Don't you know anything?' Childhood and the Holocaust Adrienne Kertzer 7. Holocaust Postmemory: W. G. Sebald and Gerhard Richter Brett Ashley Kaplan and Fernando Herrero-Matoses 8. Narrative Perspective and the Holocaust Perpetrator: Edgar Hilsenrath's The Nazi and the Barber and Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones Erin McGlothlin 9. The Holocaust and the Taboo Matthew Boswell 10. Holocaust Literature: Comparative Approaches Stef Craps 11. Depoliticizing and Repoliticizing Holocaust Memory Richard Crownshaw New Directions in Holocaust Literary Studies Annotated bibliography Glossary of Major Terms and Concepts Index

Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds by Stef Craps (review)

Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds by Stef Craps (review)