The afterlives of Yi Gwangsu: Narrating the trauma of colonial collaboration

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies ◽

10.1017/s0041977x21000690 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-21

Author(s):

Michael D. Shin

Keyword(s):

Traumatic Event ◽

Collective Trauma ◽

South Korean ◽

War Effort ◽

Postcolonial Writers

Abstract This article seeks to examine the repeated appearance of Yi Gwangsu (1892–1950) in South Korean postcolonial fiction as a sign of collective trauma. Yi was a pioneering novelist who was a nationalist hero to his readers, but later became a collaborator who supported Japan's war effort. This article focuses on depictions of Yi in the works of three postcolonial writers – Choe Inhun, Seonu Hwi, and Bok Geoil – whose works bore witness to how traumatic his collaboration was. Their works displayed many of the defining characteristics of trauma such as delayed experience and transmission to others. They were also marked by narrative rupture as represented by Yi's mutually incompatible identities as both a nationalist and a collaborator. Rather than repeating the traumatic event, these stories employed various strategies to create new narratives that attempted to heal the trauma.

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A Culture of Healing

Advances in Human Resources Management and Organizational Development - Role of Leadership in Facilitating Healing and Renewal in Times of Organizational Trauma and Change ◽

10.4018/978-1-7998-7016-6.ch008 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 140-169

Author(s):

Aurelia Ortiz ◽

Maia K. Johnson ◽

Pascal P. Barreau

Keyword(s):

Traumatic Event ◽

School Shooting ◽

Collective Trauma ◽

School Environments ◽

School Closures ◽

Childhood Experiences ◽

Workplace Trauma ◽

Adverse Childhood ◽

Organizational Trauma ◽

Trauma Responses

The authors of this chapter contextualize terms such as individual trauma, collective trauma, and toxic stress; discuss how trauma impacts school environments; and propose steps to triage traumatic effects among faculty, staff, and students. Based on existing research and studies conducted by the authors of this chapter, strategies are introduced to help school leaders and teachers to overcome the effects of trauma and create a safe culture of healing during and after a traumatic event. While the context surrounding immediate trauma responses may default to macro-level discussions like violence, school shooting incidents, and school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is noteworthy to underscore less-publicized traumatic events such as adverse childhood experiences, adult workplace trauma, and collective organizational trauma. The authors provide case studies to help practitioners process organizational trauma scenarios.

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Myth therapy. Notes on collective traumatology

Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University Philosophy and Conflict Studies ◽

10.21638/spbu17.2021.202 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 37 (2) ◽

pp. 208-216

Author(s):

Alexander I. Brodsky ◽

Keyword(s):

No Value ◽

Traumatic Event ◽

Psychological Trauma ◽

Collective Consciousness ◽

Collective Trauma ◽

Individual Level ◽

Logical Connection ◽

The Social ◽

The Masses ◽

Important Form

The article analyzes the mechanisms for the formation of social myths, as well as their functions pertaining to collective trauma, and puts forward three theses. Firstly, the characteristics which turn text into myth depend not on its formal or essential features, but rather on its perception (how the audience interprets the meaning of its constituent statements). Anything can become a myth. Usually, a myth consists of depictions, statements, and explanations, that is, descriptive utterances. However, to understand a myth is to know the preconditions not for the truth and/or falsity of its constituent statements, but instead the implementation of certain rules of conduct. A myth is a description interpreted as a prescription. This approach makes it possible to understand how various scientific or philosophical theories, initially aiming to describe and explain the world, turn into myths determining the social behaviour of the masses. Secondly, a myth turns descriptions into prescriptions through “storytelling”. A myth is a narrative which inevitably uses certain tropes essential for all narratives. The form of the narrative makes it possible to establish a pseudo-logical connection between various “elementary statements” capturing real or fictional events. Without such a connection, there is no value and, therefore, no normative perception of these events. Thirdly, the transformation of a description or explanation of a traumatic event into imperatives is the most important form of the therapy of collective consciousness. A description of a traumatic event turning into a call for action and construction of a new reality presents perhaps the only way to get rid of the destructive consequences of psychological trauma, both at the collective and individual level.

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Trauma Unending

Journal of Religion and Violence ◽

10.5840/jrv20181543 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 274-290

Author(s):

Abby Kulisz ◽

Keyword(s):

Traumatic Event ◽

Traumatic Events ◽

Collective Trauma ◽

Muslim Population ◽

Small Minority

This paper explores the ways communities reexperience traumatic events. Previous studies have made important contributions by observing that communities, in contrast to individuals, often use a traumatic event to construct their identity; and trauma is not always painful but sometimes desired. To further investigate these dimensions of traumatization, I focus on the performance of mātam or self-flagellation, which is practiced by a small minority of the world’s Shīʿī Muslim population on the Day of ʿĀshūrāʾ. For many Shīʿa, particularly Twelvers, Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī’s death at the battle of Karbala in 680 C.E. is a collectively traumatic event. Not only does Karbala embody a collective tragedy for Shīʿī Muslims, it defines and shapes their interpretation of history. During the practice of mātam, the mourner enacts the trauma of Karbala on one’s body, thus reliving and preserving the collective trauma.

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Collective Trauma and Mystic Dreams in Zabuzhko’s “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets”

Genealogy ◽

10.3390/genealogy3010004 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 4

Author(s):

Mariia Lenherr

Keyword(s):

Traumatic Event ◽

Fractal Theory ◽

Projective Identification ◽

Traumatic Experiences ◽

The Novel ◽

Collective Trauma ◽

Cumulative Trauma ◽

Totalitarian Regimes ◽

Large Groups ◽

Psychoanalytic Theories

The 20th century of human history was overshadowed by the horrifying events of world wars and totalitarian regimes, with their traumatic experiences becoming the very focus of today’s modern globalized society. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is one of the ways of dealing with this overwhelmingly violent phenomenon. This article will discuss an historical traumatic event through literature, using psychoanalytic theories of trauma. The problem is discussed on the level of the actual theoretical landscape including the relation between transgenerational transmitted trauma, collective trauma, and cumulative trauma inscribed in a “foundation matrix” (Foulkes). As a clinical vignette, the novel “Museum of Abandoned Secrets” by modern Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko is used. The author addresses the functions of dreams, scrutinizing the psychodynamics of the novel using concepts of projective identification, mourning, the need for repair, and epigenetic and fractal theory. It is suggested that the novel facilitates the characters’ journey through trauma and its integration by the large groups (of readers).

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Historiography in Photo-textuality: The Representation of Trauma in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants

Synthesis an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies ◽

10.12681/syn.16215 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 99 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Angeliki Tseti

Keyword(s):

Traumatic Event ◽

Reciprocal Relationship ◽

Visual Narrative ◽

Collective Trauma ◽

Catastrophic Events ◽

Definition Of

This paper springs from the issues raised with reference to the historiographical representation of limit events and the challenges presented in the attempt to address collective trauma, and wishes to contend that fictional works of photo-textuality —in other words novels which consist of verbal as well as visual (photographic) components—carry the potential to place such ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘indescribable’ events among the historically narratable. While focusing predominantly on word-image interactions, this paper reads W. G. Sebald’s photo-text The Emigrants (1992) as an example of photoliterary narratives of trauma, to examine the ways in which these bimedial structures enable the surfacing of memory in multidirectionality. This is achieved, I argue, via the employment of the valuable functions of testimony and witnessing, the establishment of polyphony and multi-perspectivity—consequent, predominantly, to the reciprocal relationship between verbal and visual narrative— and the ensuing involvement of the respondent viewer/reader in the production of meaning. Within this context, the insertion of the photograph in the verbal narrative, and the aporias raised by the interaction of the two components, allows for an affective mode for addressing the singular traumatic event to be developed, and for historic calamity to be approached in a manner that echoes the experiences of other victims and/or survivors of catastrophic events. Thus, the traumatic past may be re-constructed by analogy and, while singular, also meet Paul Ricoeur’s definition of the historical as contributing “to the development of a plot.”

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