Traumatic Pasts in Asia

History, Psychiatry, and Trauma from the 1930s to the Present

Mark S. Micale, Hans Pols

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781805391500, 9781800731837
• eBook ISBN: 9781800731844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.

Table of contents

• Traumatic Pasts in Asia
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Tropical Stupor?
• Chapter 2. Male Hysteria in Modern Japan
• Chapter 3. Atomic Trauma
• Chapter 4. “Yankee-Style Trauma”
• Chapter 5. “No PTSD in Vietnam”
• Chapter 6. Psychological Trauma and Suffering in Long Distance Friendships Involving Political Prisoners in Indonesia
• Chapter 7. Haunting and Recovery in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia
• Chapter 8. A Field of Happiness
• Chapter 9. Performing Songs as Healing the Trauma of the 1965 Anti-Communist Killings in Indonesia
• Chapter 10. Healing our Sacrifice
• Chapter 11. Beyond PTSD
• Chapter 12. War Memorials
• Afterword
• Index