Interrogating trauma- Towards a critical trauma studies

Interrogating trauma: Towards a critical trauma studies

Antonio Traverso a * and Mick Broderick

b

a School 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 of essays joins a critical trend in twenty-first-century

trauma studies to redress the balance (Blocker 2009; Douglas, Whitlock, and Stumm 2008;

Guerin and Hallas 2007; Ball 2007; Winter 2006; Bennett 2005; Hodgkin and Radstone

2005; Tumarkin 2005; Kaplan 2005; Kaplan and Wang 2004; Collins and Davis 2004;

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/10304310903461270

http://www.informaworld.com

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Vol. 24, No. 1, February 2010, 3–15

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.

4 A. Traverso and M. Broderick

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.

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 5

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 paradigm-

shifting impact of modernity on human life found in the writings of Walter Benjamin.

According to Anca Pusca, the German philosopher was not only one of the first to consider

the underlying significance of modern trauma, but his assessment of shock, which is for

him the basis of trauma, constitutes a revealing alternative to Freud’s negative perspective

on it (2007, 346). 8 Nevertheless, the comparatively lesser attention given in the field of

trauma studies to philosophical theories on angst, shock and death may perhaps be

explained by the greater historical influence that Holocaust studies have so far had on

trauma scholars.

The continuing historical and philosophical reflection initiated in the aftermath of the

Second World War has seen the field of Holocaust studies reach extraordinary proportions.

In fact, in the course of this development, other distinct fields have surfaced from within

the depths of the former, for example, the comparative field of genocide studies. Similarly,

it is possible to affirm that the emergence of trauma studies occurred when scholars

engaging critically with the concept of trauma within Holocaust studies began to apply

trauma-related debates – initially elaborated in unique reference to the Holocaust – to

other catastrophic historical experiences. 9 Since that development, the 1990s debates

about how historical and political events, in particular catastrophic ones, connect with

trauma and memory, both at the subjective and cultural levels, have increased in quantity,

intensity, and complexity. Thus, the specific study of cultural trauma appears today as a

critical, self-reflexive and vastly inter-disciplinary field. Still, what humanities scholars in

disciplines that range from history, anthropology and social science to philosophy, cultural

studies and media studies have in common is a vested interest in the problems that

traumatic memory and its cultural and political expression pose to critical theory at the

level of individuals, communities, nations and global networks. The broad range of

contributions to this collection is a sign of this expanding diversity.

Cultures of political memory and the limits of the trauma framework

As stated above, this collection’s specific focus is the way in which trauma is – or fails to

be – represented, for example, in direct-witness video testimonies, or in photography and

narrative film. This is in fact one of the most debated topics in trauma studies, and as such

it has triggered a series of productive intersections between trauma studies and other fields,

such as studies of literature, visual culture and film. In this context, it is not surprising that

the Holocaust, which has been given rapt attention in historical and philosophical works as

the key event of twentieth-century history, arguably continues to be the most depicted in

literature, art, and screen culture. By the same token, analyses of visual, narrative, poetic

and even musical engagements with the Holocaust are by far the most commonly found

examples in the critical literature. According to Guerin and Hallas (2007), the emphasis

given to the Holocaust in twentieth-century trauma scholarship may be the reason behind

the fact that until relatively recently ‘scholars have paid more attention to the written and

spoken word as the most appropriate communicative forms for bearing witness to and

remembering the suffering of the traumatised subject’ (7). 10 However, it is significant that

the sub-field of inquiry into trauma’s representation in visual culture has arguably begun to

6 A. Traverso and M. Broderick

displace the traditional attention given to written testimonials and reflections. In this sense,

the forms most commonly debated in the field of visual culture studies are sites such as

memorials and museums, 11

photography, 12

modern and contemporary arts, 13

the mass

media 14 and cinema. Perhaps cinema (film and video included) is the visual form that most

often, most vividly and through the most diverse range of approaches has represented and

explored the myriad ways in which trauma manifests in subjective experience and culture.

Thus, the critical literature on films about the trauma of the Holocaust and, more generally,

the Second World War, Vietnam and other European and US wars is, in the first place,

copious. 15

However, no less profuse is the developing literature that opens up the inquiry

to include cinematic representations of traumatic histories and experiences elsewhere. 16

In the midst of such abundance of scholarship, it is hardly surprising that the trauma

framework is sometimes presented as an all-inclusive master paradigm, a grand model that

would fit and fulfil all cases. Needless to say, such an approach is limited. The cultural

articulation of the human response to political oppression, abuse, and atrocity (as in

colonialism, war, concentration camps, torture, terrorism, and genocide) or other

overwhelming experiences, such as intra-family violence (particularly, rape and child

abuse) and environmental catastrophes (tsunamis, floods, earthquakes and fires) 17

is not

the exclusive territory of trauma studies. It is, as well, routinely approached from

alternative disciplinary perspectives: political science, ethics, historical studies, and

anthropology, to name just a few. These diverse approaches to what is basically the same

matter of study, that is, the cultural representation of human life as troubled by devastation

and mayhem, do not necessarily emphasize trauma and suffering, but often focus rather on

experiences of survival, resilience, struggle, and recovery. As Andreas Huyssen points out,

the preferential focus given to trauma ‘confine[s] our understanding of memory, marking it

too exclusively in terms of pain, suffering, and loss [denying] human agency and [locking]

us into compulsive repetition’ (2003, 8). Thus, to reduce all representation of memories

and experiences marked by conflict, violence and atrocity to trauma is problematic, as it

emphasizes a victim position and potentially fails to give due attention to the expression of

agency.

Whereas trauma discourses and cultures often constitute the way in which individuals

and communities work through their histories and memories of conflict, catastrophe and

suffering, at the same time, these histories and memories are often engaged from active

positions of political agency. This may involve the articulation of legal discourses that

emphasize the establishment of truth and delivery of social and institutional justice, or

ethical discourses that stress ideas such as witnessing, recognition, apology, reconciliation,

reconstruction and compensation. In this context, cultural representation naturally makes

use of all its discursive possibilities, from trauma and healing to truth and justice. Several

of the authors in this collection stress cultural processes and expressions that actively work

through trauma over those that endlessly insist on acting it out (see, for example, the essays

by Felicity Collins and Antonio Traverso). 18

Towards a critical trauma methodology

The development of a critical methodology for the study of cultural trauma involves the

recognition of the fact that the theory of trauma is not a single, homogeneous entity but

that, on the contrary, an array of perspectives has been developed within diverse

disciplinary traditions. Critical mappings of the field, which disallow the possibility of

collapsing diverse concepts of trauma into a single, undifferentiated one, have been

undertaken efficiently by many in the field (see, especially, Radstone 2007; Leys 2000).

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 7

A précis of the main theoretical and methodological approaches often identified in the vast

literature on trauma in the humanities would include the following: concepts of trauma

developed in psychoanalysis and, more broadly, psychology; 19

applications of post-

structuralist and deconstructive concepts and methods to psychoanalytic and neurological

models of trauma; 20

philosophical reflections on historical trauma; 21

psychoanalytic and

philosophical concepts of trauma reworked through the discipline of history; 22

and the

application of a sociological framework to the understanding of cultural trauma, as a

distinct category from psychological trauma. 23 While the differences among these various

approaches can be substantial, as pointed out above, often the concept of trauma used in a

context of cultural inquiry remains largely undefined. Despite some specific exceptions,

uses of the expressions ‘cultural trauma’ and ‘collective trauma’ are generally no more

than problematic analogical extensions of medical and psychological trauma concepts.

In a relatively recent article, Susannah Radstone, one of the contributors to this collection,

critiques the widespread use of a vocabulary developed to describe subjective memory to

refer to social and cultural phenomena (2005). The effect of this reifying use of language,

Radstone argues, is that it renders as literal ‘what might better be regarded as a series of

compelling metaphors – the “traumatisation” of a nation, for instance, or the “healing” of

a culture’ (137). At the same time, she stresses, it problematically diverts ‘attention away

from the processes of articulation through which past happenings and the meanings and

affects associated with them are discursively produced, transmitted and mediated’ (137).

In a similar vein, Jay Winter warns against the ‘loose usage of the term “collective

memory” [as it has been] framed to mean virtually anything at all – in every corner of the

arts and the humanities’ (2006, 4). Thus, the unproblematic use of metaphors of memory

and trauma in a cultural context invariably results in the avoidance of the task of

elaboration of a more adequate definition of cultural trauma. What does it mean to say that

a society or community is traumatized?

Perhaps the most deliberate effort to elaborate a definition of cultural trauma that

unambiguously differentiates it from psychological trauma is the sociological model

articulated by Jeffrey Alexander and his collaborators (2004). Their constructivist

proposition is that, against lay naturalistic understandings of trauma (which, according to

Alexander, pervade scholarly accounts, especially psychoanalytically inflected ones),

cultural trauma is not the naturally occurring response of a community or society to

cataclysmic events. Rather, a culture of trauma is activated by symbolic and imaginative

work and, therefore, is separate from the event that may have caused it. In this way, they

argue, cultural trauma can be studied in terms of its material and symbolic manifestations

in social processes and structures, while remaining separate from the vicissitudes of the

traumatic symptoms and experiences of individual sufferers. However, if trauma in its

socio-cultural dimension is to be generalized to such an extent as to broadly denote a

culture of memorialization whose content refers to specific politicized histories and

experiences of human suffering – which nevertheless always involve resilience and

struggle as well as trauma – then the use of the term trauma to refer to this culture seems

arbitrary. There are, in fact, other established sociological and anthropological models,

such as social suffering, conflict, violence and genocide studies, which consider the social

and cultural responses of communities to catastrophic events, while avoiding the

psychologizing connotations implied by concepts of trauma. 24

Thus, a radical

sociologizing and de-psychologizing of cultural trauma is not without its own

complications. 25

In addressing the methodological problem of analogical articulations between

concepts of psychological and cultural trauma, Dominick LaCapra radically suggests that

8 A. Traverso and M. Broderick

psychoanalysis could be a discourse that has more affinity with the social and cultural

realm than with the level of the individual psyche (LaCapra 1994, 173–4). Similarly,

Joshua Hirsch, who considers LaCapra’s suggestion, attends to this problem through the

category ‘discourse of trauma’, which

as one encounters it in conversation, in reading, in film – gives one a language with which to begin to represent the failure of representation that one has experienced [ . . . ] It is in the discourse of trauma that we can move from the notion of individual responses to traumatizing events toward the notion of collective responses. (2004, 18)

The present collection, therefore, is animated by a concern with conceptual and

methodological issues underlying the critical understanding of historical experiences of

conflict and suffering and their remembrance in various forms of collectively, that is,

discursively, produced representations.

At a time when important voices in the field (Radstone forthcoming; Bennett 2005;

Huyssen 2003) 26

are revealing a movement away from the persistent attention given to

traumatic memory in historical and cultural studies at least since the late 1980s, more than

ever there is an urgent need to reassess the study of the cultural engagement with historical

suffering caused by political conflict, in terms of new inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural

methodological perspectives. Thus, this collection of essays seeks to contribute to this

movement beyond trauma – not in the ethically and politically unsustainable sense of

turning away from a humanistic concern with social suffering and social justice but in the

sense of opening up the scope of interpretation most familiar to trauma studies. The

contributions to this collection aim at doing just this, by expanding the discussion regarding

artistic and media representations of the suffering of people in a diversity of political

contexts in South and North America, Southern Asia, Australia and Europe. At the same

time, each of the essays that follow takes in its own specific way a more or less pronounced

critical, theoretical and methodological distance from the conventional trauma theory,

while remaining faithful to the ethical and political concerns of a critical trauma studies.

This ‘Interrogating Trauma’ collection also shows the resolve of scholars in various

areas of the study of culture to reinvigorate the interest in trauma representation by

revalorizing the use of established disciplinary methodologies of analysis, as well as

traditional fruitful collaborations between dissimilar disciplines, such as screen studies,

history and anthropology. It also highlights two of the most important critical

considerations to be kept in mind when engaging with trauma from within the humanities.

Firstly, the perception that trauma studies – or the turn to trauma of many humanities

fields primarily concerned with cultural expression – would have allowed a critical (non-

naive) return to the real after the detour taken by post-structuralist and post-modern theory.

However, implicit in the collection is a call for caution that warns of the risks involved in

this perception, in the sense that this return could be just another illusion created by the

same metaphysical essentialism that post-structuralism sought to dethrone in the first

place. The second consideration alludes to the fact that with its pervasive medical

connotations, most probably due to its entrenched origin in the physical and psychological

health sciences, the expression trauma continuously tends to psychologize, and therefore,

potentially, depoliticize the discussion and analysis of socio-historical phenomena and

their representation.

The collection’s first four contributions are those of the scholars who delivered the

keynotes at the ‘Interrogating Trauma’ conference in Perth in 2008. In the first essay,

‘Caché: Or What the Past Hides’, Susannah Radstone produces a detailed analysis of

Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) (2005) – a film that through a mysterious narrative and

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 9

an unfathomable subversion of formal levels addresses the trauma of colonial history, in

particular ‘the dissociated memory of France’s ‘dirty war’ against Algeria’. Radstone uses

her discussion of Haneke’s film as an occasion to invite the humanities to consider Jean

Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory of the enigmatic signifier as a productive alternative to

dissociative trauma theory in the understanding of the relationship between subjective and

cultural memory. Radstone’s piece is followed by an essay by Suvendrini Perera,

‘Torturous Dialogues: Geographies of Trauma and Spaces of Exception’, which considers

historical, ideological, and geopolitical elements that contribute to the necro-political and

bio-political ordering of suffering and damage – whereby trauma becomes a transactable

currency – in the context of maritime disasters, in particular the Indian Ocean tsunami of

2004. Janet Walker’s essay, ‘Moving Testimonies and the Geography of Suffering: Perils

and Fantasies of Belonging after Katrina’, continues the exploration of the underlying

political structures of human suffering in the context of so-called natural disasters by

focusing on the use of testimonial documentary film and video to come to terms with

trauma and devastation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Felicity Collins’s

essay, ‘After the Apology: Re-framing Violence and Suffering in First Australians,

Australia, and Samson and Delilah’, complements Radstone’s and Walker’s focus on

cinematic media, as well as the critical attention that Perera gives to discursive

construction, by considering media images of remote Aboriginal communities that

normalize violence and the suffering of people positioned as ‘bare life’. Conversely,

Collins argues for the potential of three recent Australian cinematic texts to work through

the traumatic past.

Adam Brown’s ‘Confronting “Choiceless Choices” in Holocaust Videotestimonies:

Judgement, “Privileged” Jews, and the Role of the Interviewer’ explores the ethical and

political dilemmas involved in the production of Holocaust video testimonies in cases

where the survivor interviewees were prisoners who held positions involving benefits that

common prisoners did not have. In considering these dilemmas, Brown engages ethical

concepts from Holocaust studies, such as Lawrence Langer’s ‘choiceless choices’ and

Primo Levi’s ‘grey zone’. Moving the attention away from testimonial video and towards

commercial cinema, Mark Straw’s ‘The Guilt Zone: Trauma, Masochism and the Ethics of

Spectatorship in Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007)’ provides an analysis of this

controversial Iraq War veteran film. Straw discusses the screen construction of a

traumatized/masochistic male subjectivity by combining trauma cinema studies (Kaplan

and Wang 2004; Walker 2005; Elsaesser 1996) with Gilles Deleuze’s creative theoretical

reworking of the concept of masochism. In ‘When Places Have Agency: Roadside Shrines

as Traumascapes’ co-authors Catherine Collins and Alexandra Opie depart from cinematic

culture to consider one form of what Maria Tumarkin (2005) has denominated

traumascapes. Invoking Foucault’s concept of heterochronia for the purposes of trauma

studies, Collins and Opie reflect on the urban cultural phenomenon of roadside shrines that

proliferate on back roads of the United States. The reflection on the embodied performance

of traumatic memory, as well as a concern with the ethics of spectatorship of the suffering

of others, is continued in Sophie Oliver’s essay, ‘Trauma, Bodies, and Performance Art:

Towards an Embodied Ethics of Seeing’, where she discusses ways in which performance

art embraces a model of embodied, self-reflective and ethical spectatorship. David Carlin’s

contribution, ‘Poetic Witnessing in the Archive: The Database Narrative of Life after

Wartime’, considers the ethics of witnessing by returning to the analysis of screen arts –

this time neither documentary video nor narrative cinema, but an Australian interactive

database narrative project, which, as Carlin proposes, can be seen as a new model of

trauma text, one which avoids either narrative or therapeutic closure.

10 A. Traverso and M. Broderick

The final group of essays returns to cinematic culture. Vivien Fryd’s ‘Bearing Witness to

the Trauma of Slavery in Kara Walker’s videos: Testimony, Eight Possible Beginnings, and

I was transported’ discusses three cinematic works by the controversial African-American

artist Kara Walker. Fryd claims that through these works the artist forces her viewers to

witness the transgenerational trauma of slavery and racism in the United States by

embodying trauma’s disruptive potential. In ‘Depiction or Erasure? Violence and Trauma in

Contemporary Peruvian Film’, Iliana Pagán-Teitelbaum discusses three narrative films

made in this impoverished South American country. These films depict the traumatized

bodies of Indigenous people, thus exploring ‘the trauma of misery, racism, forced

migration, and dirty war’. The final essay, ‘Dictatorship Memories: Working through

Trauma in Chilean Post-dictatorship Documentary’ by Antonio Traverso, considers

Chilean documentary cinema made in the period after the military dictatorship. Traverso

claims that these documentaries, whose recurrent theme is the memory of that traumatic

past, work through Chile’s historical trauma by revealing ‘productive attributes of life under

dictatorship, such as the people’s agency, resilience and capacity to imagine the future’.

In summary, this collection contributes to the broader project of a critical trauma

studies by emphasizing – and also constituting – a set of aims and principles which

include thematic and cross-cultural epistemologies that deepen the discussion about the

relationship between individual memory/trauma and collective or cultural memory/-

trauma. It engages with the potential of established methodologies in fields such as screen

studies while embracing multi- and inter-disciplinarity, in recognition that there is not one

but numerous theories and concepts of trauma. These collected writings cultivate

methodological openings to alternative ways of approaching trauma representation,

besides the conventional psychoanalytic theory of subjective dissociation. Examples of

such openings, illustrated by the writings assembled here, include: Laplanchian

psychoanalysis; contemporary performance theory; philosophical theorizations (for

instance, concepts of the sublime, Benjamin’s reflection on shock, Foucault’s notion of

heterochronia, Deleuze’s theory of masochism, and Agamben’s theory of biopolitics);

Klein’s critique of disaster capitalism; critical human geography; and the sociology and

anthropology of social suffering, violence, conflict and resilience. As such, this collection

is testament to the diversity and richness of the field, and to the ongoing desire for the

continued analysis and application of theory to the representation of trauma and social

suffering around the globe.

Notes

1. By ‘the West’ and ‘the Third World’ we mean not only the geographical enclaves of hegemonic, wealthy Western nations, such as Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States, in opposition to the poor nations of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Oceania, but also the differing socio-cultural spaces that exist within national geographical boundaries, such as post- colonial Indigenous groups and disenfranchised racial and diasporic groups living in Western countries.

2. The concept of trauma based on a model of subjective dissociation – by virtue of which the traumatized subject’s sense of self is violently estranged from its relation with present experience by the constant, unannounced irruption into conscious experience of the traces of a painful past – has been developed, firstly, in psychoanalysis and other psychological approaches in relation to the war phenomenon of shell shock and, more recently, as the basis of the clinical definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

3. See Radstone and Hodgkin (2005), Radstone (2000), and the journals History & Memory, Memory Studies and Screening the Past (www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/).

4. See Walker (2005) and Leys (2000).

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 11

5. The conventional theory of cultural trauma as a ‘crisis of representation’ is conveyed by Cathy Caruth, one of its best-known exponents (see Caruth 1995, 1996); for a lucid explanation of Caruth’s theory, see chapter 8 in Leys (2000).

6. See Kaplan (2005), Kaplan and Wang (2004), Hirsch (2004), and Leys (2000). 7. Sharpe makes reference to the trauma or angst-inflected thought of some of the most iconic

European thinkers of the twentieth century besides Freud, including Heidegger, Levinas, Adorno, Benjamin, Lacan, Lyotard, Jameson, Žižek, and Derrida (2007, 1–2)

8. Also see Pusca (forthcoming 2010); and for two recent cases of engagement with Benjamin’s theories in the context of cultural trauma studies, see Kaplan (2005) and Collins and Davis (2004).

9. On the origin of trauma studies: ‘Trauma studies originated in the context of research about the Holocaust’ (Kaplan 2005, 1); on the origin of genocide studies: ‘early [genocide] literature drew upon more than a decade of intensive research on the Jewish Holocaust’ (Jones 2006, 14).

10. A recent double special issue of the journal Life Writing is devoted entirely to trauma as the theme of a ‘vigorous and widespread turn to the practice and theory of life writing (a term that covers biography, autobiography and variants and mutations of both)’; see Douglas, Whitlock, and Stumm (2008, 1).

11. See Winter (1995), Young (1993) and Samuel (1994). 12. See Butler (2009), Khun and McAllister (2006), Sontag (1977, 2003) and Zelizer (1998). 13. See Trezise and Wake (2009), Saltzman and Rosenberg (2006) and Bennett (2005). 14. See Randell and Redmond (2008) and Michalski and Gow (2007). 15. See Winter (2006), Torner (2005), Hirsch (2004), Hornstein and Jacobowitz (2003), Vice

(2003), Walker (2005), Zelizer (1998, 2001), Sturken (1997), Elsaesser (1996), Caruth (1995), Reimer and Reimer (1992), Avisar (1988) and Insdorf ([1983] 1989).

16. Kaplan (2005), Lowenstein (2005), Kaplan and Wang (2004), Collins and Davis (2004), Douglass and Vogler (2003), Stacey (2003), Radstone (2000, 2001) and Rosenstone (1995).

17. The contributions by Perera and Walker to this collection, which respectively discuss the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005, make it clear that the separationbetween ‘natural’ and ‘human-induced’ disasters is a problematic one because the inner structure of human suffering is invariably political. See also Giblett (2009) and Pearson (2008).

18. This emphasis on working through trauma texts and strategies is noticeable in the work of many established trauma scholars, among whom one of the most influential is Dominick LaCapra (1997, 2001).

19. See Kaplan (2005) and Walker (2005), among many others. 20. See Caruth (1995, 1996) and Felman and Laub (1992). 21. See Sharpe et al. (2007); this is an edited collection of essays originally presented at the

Australian Society for Continental Philosophy conference, Deakin University, 2006; also see Collins and Davis (2004), where the authors use ‘Benjamin’s theories of history, modernity and shock’ (8) in their discussion of what they call ‘post-Mabo cinema’, that is, recent Australian films that engage with the history of race relations in this country.

22. See the extensive work of LaCapra (1994, 1998, 2001) on trauma and history. 23. Best illustrated by the work of Jeffrey Alexander, Neil Smelser and others at the Centre for

Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences at Yale University; see Alexander et al. (2004) and Eyerman (2001).

24. See Das (2007), Jones (2006), Wilkinson (2004), Hinton (2002), Das et al. (2000), Das et al. (2001), Kleinman, Das, and Lock (1997) and Fein (1993).

25. Alexander et al. seem to discard important aspects – for example, that the analogy between psychological trauma and cultural trauma is not a fortuitous one. On the contrary, it is because there are actual traumatized individuals – generally survivors and direct witnesses – within those communities where a trauma culture purportedly develops, that this culture represents and often resembles the traumatic symptoms of sufferers. Additionally, the argument of a complete separation between the cultural elaborations produced in response to a catastrophic event and the event itself contains crucial political implications, as it may provide theoretical tools to genocide and atrocity deniers.

26. As indicated by Radstone in her biographical note, ‘she is currently completing a project on new approaches to trauma, to be published as Getting over Trauma’; Bennett toys with the idea of trauma culture’s passing out of fashion within the art world (2005, 149); and Huyssen suggests that the privileged attention hitherto given to trauma has resulted in ‘a thick discursive network’ that stresses ‘repression, spectres, and a present repetitively haunted by the past’ (2003, 8).

12 A. Traverso and M. Broderick

Notes on contributors

Antonio Traverso is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. He was born in Santiago, Chile, where he studied philosophy in the early 1980s and has lived in Australia since 1987. Traverso has published essays on political cinema and in 2009 was guest editor (with Suvendrini Perera) of a special issue of Social Identities entitled ‘Living Through Terror: (Post)Conflict, (Post)Trauma and the South’. He is currently working on a monograph about Chilean cinema and the military dictatorship. As a film practitioner, he has written, directed and produced several short experimental and documentary films, including the award-winning Tales from the South (1997). Traverso was co-convenor of the ‘Interrogating Trauma: Arts & Media Responses to Collective Suffering’ conference, Perth, 2–4 December 2008.

Mick Broderick is Associate Professor and Research Coordinator in the School of Media, Communications & Culture at Murdoch University, where he is Deputy Director of the National Academy of Screen & Sound (NASS). His major publications include editions of the reference work Nuclear Movies (1988, 1991) and, as editor, Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (1996, 1999), and his scholarly writing has been translated into French, Japanese and Italian. In 2007 his experimental screen installation concerning the Rwandan genocide, Exhale, was exhibited at Revelation 10: the Perth International Film Festival. Currently, Broderick’s curated exhibition of Cold War material culture artefacts is touring Hiroshima and other Japanese cities and will do so throughout 2010.

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