Interrogating Trauma

Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media

Mick Broderick, Antonio Traverso

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415845328
• eBook ISBN: 9781317986669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

Throughout the past century, traumatic experiences have been re-enacted frequently by evolving media and art forms. Now there is a significant body of theory across academic disciplines focused on the representation of cataclysmic European and US historical events. However, less critical attention has been devoted to the representation of havoc outside the West, even though depictions of Third-World disasters saturate contemporary media and art around the globe.

This book considers traumatic histories internationally in a broad range of creative arts and visual media representations. Deploying diverse applications of the conventional theories of trauma, it examines the theoretical limitations at the same time as considering alternative methodologies. Interrogating Trauma is concerned with the examination of the concept of trauma, and how it is (often unproblematically) used to theorise the cultural representation of disaster and atrocity. It offers a theorisation of trauma, in order to reappraise the relationship between cultural representation and the socio-historical processes which are marked by violence, conflict and suffering.

This book was published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

Interrogating trauma: Towards a critical trauma studies

Antonio Traverso^a and Mick Broderick^b

^aSchool of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University, Perth, Australia; ^b School of Media, Communication and Culture, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia

In a French arthouse film an Algerian man draws out a large kitchen knife and cuts his own throat. In a short Sri Lankan art video the goddess of destruction, Kali, and a woman soldier surface from the ocean and walk towards a small seaside village. Shaky images of a video documentary bear witness to the muddied streets and flooded buildings of a poor, black neighbourhood of the Southern United States. In a low-budget Australian film written and directed by an Indigenous filmmaker two homeless, petrol-sniffing Aboriginal youths walk aimlessly on the streets of an outback town. We encounter the modern world and its history via depictions of catastrophe, atrocity, suffering and death. During the past 100 years or so, traumatic historical events and experiences have been re-imagined and re-enacted for us to witness over and over by constantly evolving media and art forms. Perhaps due to the ubiquity and multiplication of such images and narratives in modern and post-modern culture, questions about the impulse to behold and depict both the suffering of others and of the self, as well as more general questions about the ontological status of the representation of trauma, have increasingly been raised within intersecting, inter-disciplinary fields of study over the past two decades.

However, while these ongoing debates have produced a body of theoretical and testimonial literature of vast dimensions, their focus has been markedly restricted by an interest in the narrative and visual traces of cataclysmic European and US historical events, such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, 9/11 and the post-9/11 war on terror. In contrast, substantially less theorization has been devoted, by and large, to the representation of suffering as a result of political conflict outside the West, even though depictions of Third World disasters saturate contemporary media and art around the globe.¹ In addition, when critical attention has been given to the latter, largely the same conventional theory of trauma developed in Holocaust and trauma studies, namely a theory of subjective dissociation initially derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, has been used, with only limited attempts to develop alternative conceptualizations applicable to localized, culturally specific representations of suffering.²

Consequently, this collection joins a critical trend in twenty-first-century traumastudies to redress the balance (Blocker 2009; Douglas, Whitlock, and Stumm 2008; Guerinand Hallas 2007; Ball 2007; Winter 2006; Bennett 2005; Hodgkin and Radstone 2005; Tumarkin 2005; Kaplan 2005; Kaplan and Wang 2004; Collins and Davis 2004; Bennett and Kennedy 2003; Douglass and Vogler 2003; Huyssen 2003; Eyerman 2001; Weibel and Kaltenbeck 2000; Robben and Suárez-Orozco 2000). Firstly, the collection focuses on media and artistic representations of political conflict and disaster in a diversity of regions around the world. Secondly, it seeks to interrogate the methodological limits of the dominant theory of trauma as a way of critically engaging with diverse expressions and depictions of political conflict and the representation of the personal and social suffering the latter produces.

It is important to clarify at the onset that the phrase ‘interrogating trauma’ in this collection's title implies neither a sociological nor historical analysis of specific events and experiences of trauma, nor the intent to relativize the past and continuing suffering of human groups around the world as a direct effect of political conflict and violence. Rather, the essays in this collection indirectly consider traumatic histories and experiences by focusing more specifically on a broad range of representations of political conflict and suffering realized through creative arts and visual media. In this sense, the interrogation of trauma alluded to in our title refers more precisely to the examination of the concept of trauma used – often unproblematically – to theorize the cultural representation of human suffering and atrocity.

Furthermore, this collection's ‘interrogation’ of the significance of the dominant theory of trauma for artistic and media representation does not involve a blind rejection of this theory. On the contrary, most of the contributions assembled here engage in varying degrees with a wide range of uses and applications of the theory of trauma. At the same time, each essay examines the potential limitations of this theory's use, while considering alternative conceptual and methodological possibilities. The effect of this, we hope, is a critical opening – rather than abandonment or rejection – of the conventional theory of trauma, as a means to facilitate the critical reappraisal of the relationship between cultural representations and their referent in socio-historical processes marked by violence, conflict and suffering.

Trauma, memory and culture

Trauma has progressively become a key notion in discussions that interrogate the links between social history, subjective experience, and cultural representation. Several decades ago, humanities scholars became interested in the outcomes of research about traumatic memory conducted within the confines of psychology and psychiatry, with many concepts developed in the mental health sciences being translated into the study of history, society, and culture. Since then, a constantly evolving, multidisciplinary field known as trauma studies has grown to great proportions. A broad look at the field of trauma studies shows that while the application of the notion of trauma to the analysis of history, culture and politics is widespread, the methodological distinction between this term's original psychological denotation and its analogical use in relation to the socio-cultural realm is often ambiguous if not altogether obscure. This is particularly so in debates concerning the representation of trauma in media such as photography and film. In this regard, Robert Rosenstone observes that ‘[u]nlike the word, the filmic image cannot abstract and generalize. The screen must show specific images … not the working class but a specific British family grappling with the problems of depression, unemployment, war, and recovery’ (1995, 8). However, in their specificity, images also possess the capacity to generate abstract meaning and, in fact, more often than not the visual and narrative rendition of the pain of individual characters is interpreted as a synecdoche for the suffering of a people, culture or nation.

Trauma studies has developed in close partnership with memory studies, a field that has also increased its size and influence exponentially in the last couple of decades. Reflecting a broader cultural interest – an obsession some may say – in memory as a phenomenon at once neuronal, psychological, cultural, and socio-political, the academic study of memory has seen scholars from diverse disciplines attempt to understand a subject that constantly challenges the traditional disciplinary boundaries on which academic research is based. Indeed, the past two decades have seen the emergence of hundreds of new publications about memory, not only books and articles but journals and editorial series, as well as seminars, conferences, and both undergraduate and graduate courses. All of them seem to be articulated by a common central focus on the multiple ways in which memory comes to be expressed and known and, more broadly, on how the personal and cultural worlds come to be constituted through memory. A quick look at the contents of many memory studies publications immediately shows that the discussion of trauma, both in its psychological and cultural forms, is a recurrent sub-topic.³ Conversely, the same can be said for trauma publications, courses and projects where memory normally features as a key category.⁴ Thus, this interpenetration of trauma studies and memory studies makes the boundaries of these two fields difficult to draw, and it is, in fact, virtually impossible to separate them out; their underlying difference being more of emphasis than any intrinsic specificity to be delineated from a historical, thematic or methodological perspective.

The fact that trauma studies and memory studies constantly intersect each other is possibly due to an inherent affinity between their subjects: although not all memory is traumatic, trauma generally is described as a kind of memory (from this view, trauma studies would have to be postulated as a department of memory studies). Even though some clinical definitions of trauma stress the traumatic event or experience, as opposed to its aftermath, that is, its belated manifestation, most approaches appear to agree in understanding trauma as a kind of memory. At the same time, most also concur that this is an exceptional form of memory; not a memory formed through symbols and narratives but one closer to the nature of an injury, a fact that is further supported by the Greek etymology of the term trauma, which means wound. Thus, essentially understood as a form of damage, traumatic memory is often described as a wound: a painful mark of the past that haunts and overwhelms the present. Significantly, it is the analogical physicality of the traces left by the past in traumatic memory – a violent latency of the past in which memory is imagined as a wounded body – that complicates attempts to understand trauma in terms of cultural representation. This is so because trauma's inherent nature would be to neutralize the habitual processes of symbolization and narrativization through which personal, family and cultural memories and identities are woven.⁵

Initially coined in physical medical science, this notion of a past, latent wound was then analogically transposed to case studies of psychiatric patients, notably in the late nineteenth century.⁶ In this way, trauma became a key concept in clinical psychology, particularly in Freudian psychoanalysis, as it analogically described a psychological injury produced by the experience of an external event that damaged the individual's sense of self, and continued to produce belated negative effects that manifested themselves in the form of involuntary symptoms, for example, as disturbing nightmares and flashbacks. This way of understanding psychological trauma in terms of dissociation (between the subject and its present, conscious experience), due to the pervasive, involuntary irruption of disturbing, incomprehensible memories, thus became hegemonic in psychological discourses of trauma, and greatly contributed to the dominant conception of trauma in a socio-cultural sense.

The adoption and adaptation of the notion of trauma into debates about history and culture between contemporary Western thinkers in the humanities took place at significant moments during the twentieth century, often as a response to the morbid spectacle of war. According to Matthew Sharpe, since ‘the last century as a whole was arguably a century of traumas … [a] sense of trauma, unsurprisingly, pervades much of twentieth century European thought’ (2007, 1).⁷ An early and notable case is the reflection on the paradigmshifting impact of modernity on human life found in the writings of Walter Benjamin. According to Anca Pusca, the German philosopher was not only one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Abstracts
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Interrogating trauma: Towards a critical trauma studies
• 2 Caché: Or what the past hides
• 3 Torturous dialogues: Geographies of trauma and spaces of exception
• 4 Moving testimonies and the geography of suffering: Perils and fantasies of belonging after Katrina
• 5 After the apology: Reframing violence and suffering in First Australians, Australia, and Samson and Delilah
• 6 Confronting ‘choiceless choices’ in Holocaust videotestimonies: Judgement, ‘privileged’ Jews, and the role of the interviewer
• 7 The guilt zone: Trauma, masochism and the ethics of spectatorship in Brian De Palma's Redacted (2007)
• 8 When places have agency: Roadside shrines as traumascapes
• 9 Trauma, bodies, and performance art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing
• 10 Poetic witnessing in the archive: The database narrative of Life after Wartime
• 11 Bearing witness to the trauma of slavery in Kara Walker's videos: Testimony, Eight Possible Beginnings, and I was transported
• 12 Depiction or erasure? Violence and trauma in contemporary Peruvian film
• 13 Dictatorship memories: Working through trauma in Chilean post-dictatorship documentary
• Index