Memory, Trauma, Asia

Recall, Affect, and Orientalism in Contemporary Narratives

Rahul K. Gairola, Sharanya Jayawickrama, Rahul K. Gairola, Sharanya Jayawickrama

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351378994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

The contributors to this volume re-think established insights of memory and trauma theory and enrich those studies with diverse Asian texts, critically analyzing literary and cultural representations of Asia and its global diasporas. They broaden the scope of memory and trauma studies by examining how the East/ West binary delimits horizons of "trauma" by excluding Asian texts.

Are memory and trauma always reliable registers of the past that translate across cultures and nations? Are supposedly pan-human experiences of suffering disproportionately coloured by eurocentric structures of region, reason, race, or religion? How are Asian texts and cultural producers yet viewed through biased lenses? How might recent approaches and perspectives generated by Asian literary and cultural texts hold purchase in the 21st century? Critically meditating on such questions, and whether existing concepts of memory and trauma accurately address the histories, present states, and futures of the non-Occidental world, this volume unites perspectives on both dominant and marginalized sites of the broader Asian continent. Contributors explore the complex intersections of literature, history, ethics, affect, and social justice across East, South, and Southeast Asia, and on Asian diasporas in Australia and the USA. They draw on yet diverge from "Orientalism" and "Area Studies" given today's need for nuanced analytical methodologies in an era defined by the COVID-19 global pandemic.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars invested in memory and trauma studies, comparative Asian studies, diaspora and postcolonial studies, global studies, and social justice around contemporary identities and 20th and 21st century Asia.

1 The “Asian Pandemic”

Re-Thinking Memory and Trauma in Cultural Narratives of Asia

Rahul K. Gairola and Sharanya Jayawickrama

In memory of Edward Said

Prelude: Embarking on Trauma Studies Today

Perhaps now more than at any other time in the 21st century, contemporary global culture has become “saturated” (Luckhurst 2008, 2) with experiences and expressions of trauma, which literally means “wound” in Greek. Diverse global calamities including disease, climate change, restricted migration, and refugee deaths have punctuated the world’s entry into the new decade during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our current historical moment hauntingly resounds with yet unfolds in stark contrast to Judith Greenberg’s contention that “The trauma of September 11 broke a collective protective shield” (Greenberg 2003, 23). The historical shift from the global trauma of 9/11 to that of the corona virus pandemic of 2020 has profoundly complicated the very definition of “trauma” with unimaginable historical complexities open to new scrutiny. Such interrogation globally expands into myriad conceptions of the private and collective body, historical periods marked by unprecedented phenomena, and geopolitical sites earlier imagined to be inaccessible without digital innovations in geographic information systems (like Google Earth, for example).

This scope proliferates into ever more diverse experiences and contexts that invoke criminalized refugees (Atak and Simeon 2018, 1), displaced diasporas, perpetual war, and desperate migrant workers; it moreover exercises aggregate socio-economic impacts on the daily lives of regular people. In plain terms, trauma’s ubiquity likely renders it less and less of a knowable register of human experience. Questions of what precisely traumatic experience is, who can claim it, and what constitutes an expression of trauma arise from the “democratization” of trauma as a global category of inquiry. At the same time, despite the proliferation of experiences, identities, and contexts defined as “traumatic,” theoretical frameworks have largely retained a limited Euro-American focus. Much of this concentrated focus on the West arguably reverts to situated notions of the ideal subject from the Enlightenment period (Eyerman 2019, 97). In other words, West-centric frames of reference of “memory” and “trauma” mark and shape identifiable, even commonsensical, articulations of trauma from the outset, and to this day, these aggressively endure.

Literary and cultural studies of trauma have gradually developed incisive approaches over the past few decades to analyze subjectivities and societies that emerge in the wake of global experiences of suffering. Yet we would opine that oft-unquestioned, and even unconscious, Euro-American bias continues to undergird these critical heuristics. We would moreover call into question the critical utility of definitions, theories, and therapeutic modes that lie beyond the recognizable and validated “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977, 32) of which the West is routinely the privileged beneficiaries. That is, “feeling” is often linked to geographies of privilege that allocate who and what can validly feel and if such emotions are even recognizable. It is precisely the denial of feeling that justifies networks of bigotry throughout social entities including the church, state, schools, immigration authority, security apparatus, and even cyberspace to normalize anti-Asian sentiment designed to catalyze internalized racism and inter-Asian conflicts. This denial of humanity is routinely transferred by some Asians and Asian diasporas to Black communities, thus perpetuating white supremacy’s denial of humanity from one ethnic group to another rather than abolishing it.

For example, in the current atmosphere of COVID-19 racialized hysteria, during a time in which African American/Black and Hispanic/Latino people have been disproportionately impacted by the virus, Chinese Americans and East Asians have borne the brunt of open racism and xenophobia in and beyond the United States. We would, for example, point to a soul-rattling flier that was discovered by Fern Kwok, who lives in the South Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City, that rehearses some of the most reprehensible caricatures of people of Chinese descent which echoing the US President’s anti-Chinese jingoism. We note in the below flier that “unhygienic” Chinese subjects are “destroying [sic] Bay Ridge” by ostensibly assailing the material and ideological sites of “home” for “middle class homeowners” (read white flight of the bourgeoisie presented as exiled victims of Asian ghettoization) (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Photo Courtesy of Fern Kwok

As if the assault on the domestic comfort zone of bourgeois Brooklynites is not reprehensible enough, Chinese residents are moreover framed as the patrons and owners of businesses that tout “junk,” “prostitution,” and “dirty” eateries. Finally, “trashed” streets, “scavenging,” and “Corona virus spread” is attributed not simply to Chinese Americans, but to “Chinese immigration.” Perhaps the most ethnically insidious and historically ignorant aspect of this flier is its outlandish appeal to history: “The USA won World War II and The Cold War. Are we to succumb to these unhygienic people who spread this disease?” This statement ostensibly conflates Japan as a primary aggressor of the Axis Powers with China, which was united with the Allies. We point to this flier as but one of many examples of how people from Asia have been targeted at this juncture in what appears to be anti-Chinese jingoism that alarmingly predicts danger to home, business, neighborhood, and community at the local levels. It is designed to stoke fears of the “yellow peril” and encourage social and physical exile and violence; it is intended to trigger fear and trauma in the hearts of those who look different, “Asian.”

Like a latitudinal shadow, our critical observation in the age of COVID-19 casts major implications around the globe for the potential and timely urgency of trauma studies to inform and energize cultural and political debate in arenas of concern today. This urgency to re-think trauma studies increasingly recognizes life and death the world over, as well as the relationship between violence and power as an uneven and inequitable application of human rights and justice, the role of truth and reconciliation in post-conflict societies, the status of refugees in transnational politics, and the impact and management of natural disasters. Indeed, a certain “history of colonial trauma” seems to be shared between decolonized Asian and African nations (Rasulov 2017, 222). However, even the hopeful union of Asian and African nations during and after the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955 could not sufficiently shortstop the pain and suffering experienced by the people of newly independent nations. Perhaps this is because the promise of Bandung was betrayed by Western colonialism’s ongoing legacy of white supremacy despite ceding its territories.

As noted by African postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe, it is often the transgressive body, which we read as postcolonial and racialized, that is mired in “the context of extreme poverty, of the extreme racialization and of the omnipresence of death” that is first to be targeted in the crosshairs of hurtful affect (2008). Mbembe’s observation that the transgressive body is the target of economical and racialized exposures to death and destruction is socially undergirded by a vast array of Orientalist (Said 1978) stereotypes stretching from centuries past into the present moment. We are now in an era in which such stereotypes complicate the very notion of “memory” through a blurring of reality and fiction in the global crucible of “fake news.” Stereotypes of the Orient range from effete Asian males to lascivious concubines, from “yellow peril” to exotic other; from dusky savage to corner shop worker; from shady immigrant to loathed model minority. Our reading of Mbembe is supported by other critical readings and interpretations from the non-West that seek to render emotional agency to postcolonial others who are to this day racialized into the nexus of neoliberal capitalism as it has evolved over time.

For example, Lucia Villares observes,

It is not enough to simply blame colonial history or the pathology it has caused; one has to inquire into how this process takes place inside the construction of subjectivities and identities…For the excluded, trauma and pathology are a constant presence that cannot simply be erased from memory

(2017).

Bodies that are prone to trauma due to racialized histories of colonialism more­over experience layered forms of trauma in the context of disability. In developing a heuristic that examines the interface between disabled bodies and contemporary literary studies, for example, Ato Quayson writes, “Aesthetic nervousness is seen when the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability” (2007, 15). Here, Quayson compels us to acknowledge how disability circulates within literary texts as a means for disrupting normative character identifications and hegemonic reading practices as routine business. We would moreover add that certain types of bodies in literary and cultural texts are prone to exposure to traumatic situations that normalize the conditions that produce such trauma while pathologizing the affected subject.

The invidious link of Asia and contagion in the age of COVID-19, for example, is not the very orientalism of, say, the literary representations of Sax Rohmer or Oscar Wilde. This is true even in the context of “social distancing” in 2020, for as powerfully stated by Rodney McKenzie, Jr., “We’ve been socially distanced for decades. It’s called racism” (2020). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this particular type of racism has disproportionately targeted Asians, with Human Rights Watch Advocacy Director John Sifton observing, “Racism and physical attacks on Asians and people of Asian descent have spread with the COVID-19 pandemic, and government leaders need to act decisively to address the trend” (Human Rights Watch, 2020). However, the global pandemic is hardly an exceptional instance of anti-Asian racism. The world over has experienced a range of anti-Asian sentiments ranging from the rise of “Yellow Peril” (die Gelbe Gefahr) ideology in Imperial Germany from 1870; the racially codified Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the USA; anti-Sikh exile from Bellingham, USA, in 1907; the Komagatu Maru incident of 1914 in Vancouver, Canada; Koreans under Japanese imperialism (1910–1945); and the Japanese Internment in the USA and Canada throughout the 1940s to name a few xenophobic instances of Asian trauma.

We acknowledge these differing yet connecting framings, with respect to the aforementioned scholars, since they contribute theoretical shape and historical context, through shared experiences of colonialism, to our resolute responsibility of comparatively examining trauma in Asian cultural productions. Asia as such offers alternative testimonies to varying historical and material realities that have been systemically neglected by a field of studies that could formidably expand by urgently re-centering Asia. Much is at stake if these Asian genealogies of recall and pain are not or have not been re-centered for they render Asians, in both literature and material life, as perpetually dehumanized subjects upon whose backs racism and xenophobia are systemically inscribed by Western discourses. We would argue that this would expose them to physical, emotional, institutional, and epistemic violence of epic proportions. This volume emerges from the conviction of the co-editors and contributors that Asian voices and experiences constitute a critical gap in trauma studies, as well as the closely related field of memory studies, that critically interrogates both global history and human agency.

Contemporary Asia is a region in which traumatic legacies of colonialism persist and military regimes and dictatorships have forcefully wrought untold human suffering that is punctuated by conspicuous silence in the field of trauma studies. Countless lives have been lost due to revolution, civil war, and genocide, and natural catastrophes have rendered existing social and political tensions ever more volatile. More recently, global threats of disease have galvanized the flames of xenophobia while the rhetoric of citizenship and exclusion continue to tag Asians as “foreign,” “other,” “diseased,” “alien,” “offensive,” to the service of rapacious capitalism braided with xenophobic white supremacy. It moreover catalyzes inter-Asian racism that invidiously tags the “other”: the darker-skinned migrant worker in rapacious, capitalist centers of Hong Kong and Singapore, stranded migrant workers in northern India during the COVID-19 crisis, and the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. Thus, while white supremacy has often been a dominant aspect of both settler colonialist and cultural imperialist violence and we focus on it throughout this essay in a range of historical contexts, we fully acknowledge that white supremacy is not the sole functionary of bigotry.

As a mutually constitutive discourse, white supremacist xenophobia is often, if not usually, stoked by th...