Traumatic Legacy Research Articles

Архангельское село Лявля как место насилия: между историей и мифом

The article examines the narratives, ideas and cultural practices that exist in the Arkhangelsk cultural space and represent to an external observer the pages of the Soviet history of the village of Lyavlya associated with the mass extermination of people in the 1920s–1950s. The cultural memory of Lyavlya as a place of violence was created by parishioners of the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the leadership of the Arkhangelsk diocese. The result of their activities was the formation of a narrative about the history of Lyavlya and the particularization of the memory of the victims of violence. For memory actors, the fate of modern Russia is inseparable from the fate of the Orthodox Church, and the people who died in Lyavlya appear as martyrs for the faith and “heroes of the spirit”. Processions of the cross to burial sites provide an opportunity for their participants to legitimize ideas about the special role of Russia in the Orthodox world and the exclusivity of the Russian people. The fate of the dead clergy and laity, according to memorial actors, serves as evidence of the uniqueness of the Russian nation and its special mission to preserve Orthodoxy. Recently, interest in the topic of the traumatic past has faded. The author shows how the memory of traumatic legacies is constructed through ceremonies, memorials and publications.

Disordered whiteness: A shape/an unwound sonnet late on the tide

AbstractThis paper is a multifaceted exploration of white subjectivity and the social phenomena of whiteness, about which there is a considerable body of psychoanalytic literature spanning decades. Hazel White's “unwound sonnet late on the tide” explores themes of traumatic legacies, family, shame, and mourning. Critical poetic inquiry is used to consider these themes and make links between the poetics of psychoanalytic processes and the psychoanalysis of poetics.

Walking tours as transcultural memory activism: Referencing memories of trauma and migration to redefine urban belonging

This article maps two grids of city walking tours, conceptualizing them as expressions of transcultural memory activism. The first are walking tours in Berlin, guided by Syrian refugees, which use memorials of local traumatic history to testify to the refugees’ current traumas. The second are walking tours in an impoverished neighbourhood of south Tel Aviv, that inter-weave African asylum seekers’ travelling memories as part of the story of those streets. Analysing these tours, the article probes how references to histories of urban migration and traumatic legacies might inform contemporary political projects asserting the rights of refugees, and redefine the parameters of urban belonging. It therefore proposes a dual theoretical contribution: (1) advancing the transcultural turn in memory studies by paying greater attention to the materiality and performativity of transcultural memory and (2) enhancing research on the agency of refugees by demonstrating how they affect and expand the public memory of the contested national and urban contexts in which they travel or inhabit.

Holocaust***Gulag: Repressing, Rescuing, and Regulating Recalcitrant Legacies

Abstract Is it possible to bring into conversation two different traumatic legacies that occurred in the twentieth century in Europe? How can we engage in productive conversation about two totalitarian systems that repressed, incarcerated, dehumanized, and murdered people deemed enemies of the state or unworthy of living? These were some of the challenging questions addressed in the roundtable symposium “Holocaust***Gulag: Repressing, Rescuing, and Regulating Recalcitrant Legacies.” The symposium aimed at addressing specific aspects of the difficult and painful histories of the Holocaust and the Gulag, and to probe how these long-lasting legacies intrude into contemporary society, culture, religion, and politics.

The Traumatic Mirror and the Asymptote: Cinematic Representations of American Intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan

This article explores cinematic representations of American military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, examining documentary and fiction films from American, Iraqi, and Afghan perspectives. The article argues that these films often fail to communicate meaningfully with domestic and international audiences effectively, instead remaining ‘asymptotic’ or ‘uroboric’ in their rhetorical and communicative impact. I highlight the ethical challenge faced by filmmakers, whether situated in the West or in the Middle East, of turning the ‘traumatic mirror’ back on themselves, and the difficulties in achieving successful communication and self-reflexivity. The post-9/11 era is marked by a complex intersection of realpolitik, public performatives, and moral commitments, with long-standing tensions between West and non-West persisting in new forms. Cinematic representations of these interventions serve as a window into the traumatic legacies of these conflicts and the ongoing struggle for ethical representation, as well as a lens on the rhetorics of cinema.

Mémoire, nostalgie et « la fin de l’utopie » à l’âge du « présentisme »

"Less than a decade after the proclamation of “the end of history”, the anxieties about “the end of utopia” are gaining ground in the intellectual field all over the world, in the context of both “the crisis of the future” and the haunting of the present by the painful pasts. The latter two are the main consequences of the fracture in the contemporary temporal order – occurred in the ‘70s and deepened after the fall of the Iron Curtain – which defines the “presentist regime of historicity”. These dynamics are counterbalanced, in the same period, by a “global epidemic of nostalgia”, including the commodified forms of “retromania”, that reveals the presentist “faces of utopianism”, from the non-instrumental “retrospective utopias” – as poles of “existential” types of reflective nostalgic practices – to the instrumental “retrotopias” based on the “restorative nostalgia”, which were mobillized in the contemporary memory wars, starting from the ‘80s. Reflecting the tensions between the fixation on the traumatic legacy of the “age of extremes” and the apprehensions about “the future of nostalgia”, the presentist dynamics of multidirectional memory discloses conflictual landscapes (social, cultural, and political), from the mnemonic turn of the ’70s and the ‘80s – which has arisen against the background of the decline of both welfare state and the nation-states, and of the global economic crisis – to the post–Cold War contests around “the divised memories” of “Europe’s Europes”, coexisting with the clashes of contradictory “faces” of nostalgia and utopia. Keywords: presentism, multidirectional memory, nostalgia, retrospective utopia, retrotopia"

1989: “Refolutions”, “Rebirths” and the Crisis of Utopias

"Having been seen, at first, as the foundation of a “rebirth”, both European and global, the “refolutions” of 1989 left a highly controversial legacy which is still subject of political memory clashes and a source of “cultural bipolarities”, but also of disillusionment and polarizations within multiple mnemonic communities. These contradictions, anchored in the ”traumatogenic changes” of the democratic transitions that engendered, at the end of the 90s, post-socialist nostalgia, are also related to a crisis of utopian thinking which characterized the moment 1989 itself and became a main feature of post–Cold War political-cultural paradigms, including the mnemonic ones, dominated by the traumatic legacy of the ”century of extremes”. Keywords: revolutions of 1989, political memory, social memory, utopia, post-socialist nostalgia "

‘Practices of self’: Embodied memory work, performance art, and intersectional activism in Namibia

Cultural commemoration in the form of embodied memory was practiced in Namibia long before German colonial occupation in the 1880s and the War of Independence against South Africa from 1966 to 1989. In recent years, Namibian artists have been offering alternative forms of embodied memory transmission related to these histories. I argue that much of this work is inextricably linked to a new wave of decolonial activism in the country. These practices highlight questions related to history and memory and are a counterpoint to state-sanctioned memorialization. Some of the recurrent themes are efforts to work through traumatic legacies connected to German colonialism and apartheid, but also to intersectional violence tied to contemporary patriarchy and identity politics. In these settings, queer and feminist methodologies provide a departure point for this embodied memory work in an attempt to go beyond colonial and tribal legacies and nationalized identity politics.

“Ready for the Homeland” in Croatian media: Commemorations, victory, and foundation

This article analyses the media discourse surrounding the WWII fascist salute Za dom spremni (ZDS) in the aftermath of two national commemorations that took place in Croatia in spring 2020: Jasenovac and Operation Flash (Bljesak). In spring 2020 Zoran Milanović, the newly elected President of Croatia, adamantly criticized the presence of the salute, associated with the collaborationist Ustaša regime, at the two commemorations, calling for its removal and ban. This led to heated reactions from war veterans and politicians who considered Milanović’s actions unacceptable and offensive towards the memory and legacy of the 1990s war, which triggered a wider debate regarding Croatia’s post-war national identity. The object of the analysis is the discourse surrounding the salute as it emerges in opinion pieces published in weekly and daily newspapers in April, May, and June 2020. With the salute becoming an increasingly prominent part of negotiating national identity and tailoring political agendas, investigating how it is justified, disapproved or otherwise challenged in the media is an aspect that deserves more attention. Relying on insights from discourse studies, the article sheds light on various statements that (de)legitimize the salute and consequently particular actors and actions associated with it. With the help of semiotics of culture wider signification tendencies and dominant discourse(s) upon which the national selfdescription has been built are identified. The article contributes to scholarship on hate speech and contested symbols in the post-Yugoslav space and their (mis)uses in societies struggling with traumatic legacies.

Hospitalidad, identidad y “transtierro” en el exilio español de 1939: El neologismo de José Gaos desde la teoría del trauma

This paper aims at delving further into historical and philosophical assumptions underlying Jose Gaos’s notion of “transtierro”. After going into exile and being settled in México in 1938, the Spanish philosopher coined the term “transtierro” so as to grasp the nature of Spanish diaspora in the new country. By bringing light into the extent to which the Mexican authorities support the arrival and settlement of the refuges after the Spanish Civil War, “transtierro” contributes to reframing the exile as a non-traumatic experience. Moreover, due to the bonds between Spain and Mexico, the experience “transtierro” is shaped by Gaos as the transition between one fatherland to the other. Against the backdrop of such reading, this paper goes further into the flaws and historical bias underlying the concept of “transtierro”. By echoing different readings and through the lens of trauma theory this paper provides both an interpretation and a critique of “transtierro”’s potentiality when it comes to underscore new collective identities in the exile and to overcome the traumatic legacies enforced migration use to bring about.

Speaking territories in the cultural landscape: Challenges of transformation in the Central Europe

<abstract> <p>Cultural landscape is a concept that characterizes the diversity of forms, urban structure, historical value and symbolic function, reflecting the fact that a cultural landscape is a materialized system that carries a variety of verbal, visual and physical aspects of human existence. This scientific paper is based on a definition of cultural landscape that consists of cultural layers which are often associated with the memory of place, and our research is based on Taylor's definition and exploration of cultural landscapes. In terms of the linear dimension of human history, cultures interact, sometimes destroy and forget, but at the same time, the cultural layers are stacked, layered and acquired in various forms and features. The methodology is based on a qualitative case study with focus on challenges connected with transformation and recovery of area that carries traumatic legacy of the past. In the conclusion, the state of historical revitalization is presented.</p> </abstract>

Memory, Trauma and Affect: The Implicated Subject in Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North

In A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam invades the consciousness of the protagonist to reveal the subliminal enmeshed spaces of the personal and the political. The distance between the traumatic events of the Sri Lankan civil war and the alienated individual who has apparently remained aloof, is obliterated through the refracted memories that have embedded the subject in the matrix of his country’s political history. The individual memory thus coalesces into the fabric of collective memory as the narrative unfolds. The concatenation of the traumatic realities and the sequestered psyche, untethers the individual from its ensconced private sphere and situates it within the macrocosmic and pervasive sociopolitical structure. The transmutation of subjectivity is attuned to the affective sites of collective trauma. The dichotomy of proximity and distance elucidated by the apprehensive reflections of the survivor is symptomatic of the subterranean intensities that elude corporeal presence and agency. The memories of the individual become resonant with the affective (un)lived experiences of traumatic violence, that deconstruct the tension of presence/absence, and consequently reconfigure the preconceived notions of subjectivity. The theoretical framework of this paper would foreground Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of the implicated subject, to limn the trajectory of identities who are indirectly implicated in traumatic legacies. This paper argues that the trauma of the genocidal war and its aftermath is transcribed into affective memories, that bear the potential to reconstitute identity by recognizing and transcending the state of implication.

Introduction

Introduction

Community-Based Research with Immigrant Families: Sustaining an Intellectual Commons of Care, Resistance, and Solidarity in an Urban Intensive Context

This article draws from a decade-long community-based research partnership oriented toward learning from and supporting immigrant youth and families as they advocate for themselves in the face of educational inequity. In particular, we focus on examining the trajectory and insights of the partnership in light of ongoing educational, health, and sociopolitical crises during the pandemic and the racial uprisings against police violence. We sought to understand how the work shifted in response to these global crises and also what sustained our collaboration during these times. As we showcase through representative examples of our inquiries, members of different immigrant communities in our partnership drew on their individual and collective experiences to engage in research as an act of care, to address pragmatic and immediate needs in their schooling, and to contend with traumatic legacies of oppression. Expanding networks of care and the intellectual legacy of the collaboration itself–what we refer to as an intellectual commons–created the foundation to sustain and amplify our work together during a time of social transformation.

The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination

For certain groups, particularly the disprivileged, the apocalypse is not something to anticipate and fear—an imagined future event—but something that has already happened or continues to happen. In recent living memory, for example, disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and earthquakes in Haiti in 2010 and 2021 have exacerbated existing inequalities in parts of the USA and the Caribbean. Black people have also been disproportionately affected by the painful history of exploitation and violence represented by the apocalyptic events of the Middle Passage, slavery, and the plantation economy. The collective traumatic legacy that results is addressed in the Black women’s postapocalyptic fiction discussed in Maxine Lavon Montgomery’s book. Lavon Montgomery argues that history is part of the future. There cannot be a revision and reappraisal of the past without incorporation of it but, that must involve a challenge to the standard accounts of history offered by the powerful. In the contexts...

Trauma and repair in the museum: an introduction

Despite its considerable investment in questions of memory, attachments between subjects and objects, and trauma and its treatment, psychoanalysis has been largely sidelined in the unfolding reassessment of museums. This introduction to the special issue on ‘Trauma and Repair in the Museum’, which aims to reintroduce psychoanalytic perspectives in these debates, outlines the issues around reparation that surround the modern museum due to the traumatic legacies of coloniality. Timothy P. Brown’s notion of how the trauma of displacement and dissociation effects both objects and communities is key to our consideration of the museum as symptomatic of trauma, as is Cathy Caruth’s reading of history as trauma. Referring to several artists’ practices, such as Lisa Reihana, Erika Tan, and especially Kader Attia’s concept of repair, as well as a number of museological approaches to restitution, we expand on the complexities of ongoing coloniality and its implication with museums as institutions, practices of collection and display, and highly charged psychoactive spaces. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s rereading of Melanie Klein’s notion of reparation allows us to posit a form of decolonial repair that involves the assembling of damaged part-objects into ‘something like a whole [but] not necessarily like any preexisting whole’ (2003, p. 128, original emphasis). This approach enables a reckoning with trauma and its legacies that keeps them visible without ruling out processes of reparation. We follow our outline of trauma and repair in the museum with summaries of our contributors’ articles, which expose and unpack the mutual implication of collections, institutions and displays with patriarchy, colonialism and racial capitalism through the critical discourse of contestation, while also acknowledging the potential of museums to overcome their traumatic origins.

Wearing Trauma on Her Sleeve: A Jumlo as a Witness and Recorder of Colonial Boundaries

The RISD Museum recently displayed a jumlo (dress) made by a Nuristani woman, an ethnic group native to land that borders modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. The jumlo shows a deep connection to the geographic and cultural past of the region, with traditional embroidered solar and geometric motifs that mirror local pre-Islamic rock art. The textile also reveals how the maker is embedded in the cultural transitions of the mid-twentieth century, displaying coins that date from both before and after the British partition of India. As the British, Indian, Afghan, and Pakistani political interests were all involved in the delineation of political borders in the wake of British colonialism’s collapse, the shifting and dividing boundaries left a traumatic legacy visible in the material culture. Now part of a museum collection, the jumlo continues to find these political borders unstable; as it—and other textiles from the same people—are variously labeled as Nuristani, Kohistani, Pakistani, Afghan, Indian, or Dardic. This continued confusion of attributions replicates and risks reinscribing the trauma of the imposition of political boundaries without regard to the cultural, geographical, and historical realities of the women who made the garment. Over 70 years later, this jumlo acts as a witness and documentor of violent processes in Central and South Asia, and can perhaps spark dialogue on personal choices, lives, and trauma within the area today.

Bridging the Gap of the Afri-Eurocentric Worldview Divide in a Postcolonial South Africa.

Background: This paper is an attempt to bridge the gap between Africentric and Eurocentric worldviews through the lens of positive psychology’s second wave of attaining pathways to well-being. Methods: The overcoming of existential suffering with indigenous understandings has been addressed through photo-elicitation in retrospective timelines with students Lihile+, Tanaka+, and Diana+, +Pseudonyms to protect identity Thematic analysis with semi-structured virtual interviews has also been utilized to gain insights into Africentric and Eurocentric worldviews. All students come from different contexts of cultural complexity. Lihile was raised by her maternal Xhosa family, with a traditional Sotho father. Tanaka is Shona, born and schooled in Zimbabwe, studying in South Africa. Diana was born in England and is now living in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Findings: Students’ worldviews were shaped by their primary caregivers’ multicultural influences, as well as their exposure to educational and religious contact zones. Despite having to survive the traumatic legacy of social injustices, the students managed to pursue positive goals and transcend challenges and achieve well-being. Conclusions: This study attempted to transcend the divide of Afri–Eurocentric worldviews towards a shared responsibility to develop an improved social science in Africa. Positive psychology offered a space to accommodate well-being as a healing process, not only for the oppressed but also the oppressors of past social injustices.

A Modernist Education in Pandemics

A Modernist Education in Pandemics

Deepening the Postcolonial Theological Gaze: Frantz Fanon and the Psychopathology of Colonial Christianity

Postcolonialism is not simply an optic, but also a particular practice, a way of reading texts and contexts that sees the interconnections of the psychological, cultural and theological nature of the traumatic legacies of colonialism and empire. In this article, I reflect on postcolonial theology suggesting that any postcolonial gaze pay particularly attention to the psychological dimension of coloniality that continues to operate within Christian discourses. I engage Franz Fanon, African Caribbean postcolonial or rather, anti-colonial, radical and revolutionary intellectual whose academic work and activist lifestyle have embodied this attention to the psychological.