The Past in the Present: Personal and Collective Trauma in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 146-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Miller
Keyword(s):  
Collective Trauma ◽  
The Past ◽  
Bitter Fruit

scholarly journals Narrative postmemories. The relationship between postmemory and narrative in „ Kica Kolbe’s Aegeans” and „ The Snow in Casablanca”

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 179-190
Author(s):  
Marija Gjorgjieva Dimova
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Narrative Conventions

Narrative Postmemories. The Relationship between Postmemory and Narrative in Kica Kolbe’s Aegeans and The Snow in CasablancaStarting from Marianne Hirsch’s thesis that the notion of postmemory can be generalised in various contexts of traumatic transfer, this paper aims to examine the interpretive validity of this con­cept in relation to the so-called Aegean Theme in Macedonian literature, which encompasses collective trauma caused by the exodus of Macedonians from Greece during the Greek Civil War 1944–1949. The paper focuses on two works — Egejci and Snegot vo Kazablanka by Macedonian authoress Kica Kolbe, a member of the so-called postgeneration. Considering that both books are of different genres an autobiography and a novel, the analysis is to offer a comparative presentation of the narrative conventions involved in the affirmation of their postmemorial dimension present in: the variant of postmemory, the elements of secondariness and of mediativeness of postmemory, as well as the post­memorial relation to the past through imagination, projection and creation. Нарративная постпамять Основываясь на тезисе Марианны Хирш о том, что понятие постпамять можно обобщить в различных контекстах травматического переноса, в данной статье мы ставим перед собой цель дать обоснование для использования понятия постпамять, относительно, так называемой эгейской темы в македонской литературе, т.е. темы коллективной травмы, вызванной исходом македонцев из Греции во время Гражданской войны в Греции 1944–1949. Предметом анализа являются два произведения Эгейцы и Снег в Касабланке македонского автора Кицы Кольбе, принадлежащего к так называемому постпоколению. Принимая во внимание тот факт, что книги разные по жанру — автобиография и роман — мы предлагаем сравнительный анализ данных произведений на уровне именно аспекта постпамяти, присуствующего в данных произведениях в виде собственно постпамяти, во второстепенных элементах, так или иначе касающихся постпамяти к прошлому через воображение, проекции и творчество.

scholarly journals Przestrzeń muzeum a polityka traumy

2009 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-87
Author(s):  
Adam Ostolski
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Yad Vashem

The article analyses how the representation of the traumatic past in a museum may affect the shaping of national identity. In the first part, which refers to several theoretical traditions (psychoanalysis, narrativism, critical theory), the author discusses the relations between the representation of the past and the interpretation of the collective trauma offered to the spectator. In the second part these phenomena are analysed on the basis of three museums: Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Terror Háza in Budapest and the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising.

scholarly journals Mourning the Troubles: Anna Burns’s Milkman as a Gendered Response to the Belfast Agreement

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela Santos Brigida ◽  
Davi Pinho
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Fresh Start ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The Past ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
The City

The past two decades have produced extensive criticism of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement’s (1999) progressivist logic in its proposal of a “fresh start” as the best way to honour the victims of the armed conflict that took place during the Troubles (1968-1998). In this paper, we argue that, by refusing to forget and to move on without exposing its grief, Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) mourns the Troubles in the public arena, undoing the Agreement. With special interest in Burns’s narrator and protagonist who evades the reality of violence by “reading-while-walking”, we read Milkman as a gendered response to this enforced forgetfulness. If walking the city frames this young woman’s trauma within the collective trauma of the Troubles, it also offers the nomadic possibility of refusing the sectarian identities available to her.

“Keep Your Mind in Hell and Despair Not”: Dealing with the Wounds and Complicities of 20th Century Orthodoxy in Estonia Through the Theology of St Sophrony (Sakharov) and Arvo Pärt

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-118
Author(s):  
Irina Paert
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
The Past ◽  
Christian Unity ◽  
Arvo Part

Abstract The story of Estonian Orthodoxy, as often told through the narrative of collective trauma, is not homogeneous and uncontested. The co-existence of two Orthodox communities in present-day Estonia, each insisting on exclusive canonical legitimacy and holding different views of the past, the incomplete work of transitional justice, and the untold story of political collaboration appear as irreconcilable differences that challenge the ideals of Christian unity. In order to address these unresolved problems of a traumatic past, the paper will turn to the ascetic theology of twentieth-century Orthodox saints St Silouan (1866–1938) and St Sophrony Sakharov (1896–1993) and to the musical oeuvres of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). The approach of these Orthodox ascetics, the article argues, provides an important perspective on Christian mission in a wounded world.

COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST: REWRITING HISTORY THROUGH A THERAPEUTIC PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN TURKEY

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 681-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duygu Gül Kaya
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
National History ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Therapeutic Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rewriting History ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Popular Texts

AbstractThis article examines the growing interest in questions of memory, trauma, and justice in Turkey, with a special focus on the notion of “coming to terms with the past.” Through an analysis of key academic and popular texts published between 2002 and 2013, it argues that “coming to terms with the past” is a therapeutic public discourse that rewrites national history through the temporality of trauma. In other words, this discourse reconfigures the sequence of past, present, and future as the beginning, development, and end of a case of collective trauma, applying the psychotherapeutic terminology of victimhood, healing, and forgiveness to social realities. The article offers new perspective on existing debates over “coming to terms with the past” by analyzing the limits of this therapeutic discourse and by exploring the potential and open-endedness of the politics of memory in Turkey.

scholarly journals Identity and Diasporic Trauma in Mira Jacob's “The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing”

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Jameel Alghaberi ◽  
Sanjay Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Stage Model ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Home Culture ◽  
First Generation Immigrants ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Loss

This article explores the assimilation politics in Mira Jacob’s Novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (2013). The intersection of memory, trauma, and mourning with reference to immigrant experience is discussed. In terms of assimilation, Barkan’s six stage model is critiqued, and diasporic ‘hybridity’ is proposed as an alternative to the notion of total assimilation. In the analysis of traumatic experience, the paper makes reference to Caruth’s formulations of the ‘abreactive model’. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (2013) is a transcultural text that represents the gap that truly exists between the first-generation immigrants and their offspring. It is a typical trauma novel featuring timeless and unspeakable experiences. The novel does not present a postcolonial collective trauma but invariably an example of diasporic imagined trauma. By presenting two contrasting generations in her novel, Mira Jacob attempts to highlight the dilemmas that baffle diasporas in the United States particularly of those that resist assimilation. Much of the narrative projects the haunting presence of home, and the anguish of personal loss experienced by first generation immigrants. Moreover, the novel questions the nostalgic and romantic engagements with the past and it promotes a bold affirmation of the culture of the adopted land. In other words, Mira Jacob calls for more genuine engagements with the new culture that the second and the third-generation immigrants are more exposed to than their home culture because their in-between status leaves them with no choice.

scholarly journals THE DISCURSIVE WALKS OF MIGRANT WORKERS AS A TRAUMA:FROM A COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE TO A FEELING OF NOSTALGIA

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 182-198
Author(s):  
Željko Milanović ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Dominant Discourses

The paper starts by tracing the shifts in the status of Anđelko Krstić in the framework of Serbian and Macedonian literature. We interpret the possibility of Krstić being unconditionally accepted as an author with more than one homeland as a non-ideological principle of literary history that could be involved in a de-traumatization of the past and the creation of a conflict-free future. The similarities in the depiction of migrant workers in the novels Trajanby Anđelko Krstić and Infidelityby Dejan Trajkoski are marginal when compared to the involvement of contemporary novelistic protagonists in the modernization processes which open the affected individuals to the experiences of the Other. However, we conclude with the observation that the discrete historical context of Infidelityreproduces memory narratives that perceive their subject solely as a victim of collective trauma in the past. Although Infidelitycontains elements of an invigorating relativization of memory, it is influenced by dominant discourses that abandoned multi-perspectives of the Balkan past and the inclusion of the Other. Such multifaceted perspectives which include the Other represent a prerequisite for a conflict-free future of the Balkan peoples and cultures.

scholarly journals Moral Elaboration of Collective Trauma (Based on the Belarusian Protest 2020–2021)

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-86
Author(s):  
E. V. Belyaeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Absolute Value ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Absolute

The article is devoted to comprehending the collective trauma of the Belarusian society, received during public protests against the falsification of the presidential elections in 2020–2021, and its moral elaboration, which takes place regardless of the political development of events. Moral study of the trauma is aimed at restoring moral values and social practices of their implementation. These values include: the absolute value of human life, truthfulness, non-violence, solidarity, fearlessness, justice, trust. Narratives and interpretations are created in advance, making possible subsequent models of reconciliation, realizing positive responsibility for the past, present and future of their country.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 146-152
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Second World

The conclusion to the book makes the case that there is a connection between the political, social, and cultural transformations of the French Revolution and current debates on transitional justice and collective trauma. It is common to trace current discussions about coming to terms with the past to the Second World War and especially to the aftermath of the Holocaust. This chapter argues that there is a longer and deeper history at play here, one that goes back to the eighteenth century’s Age of Revolutions, to the radical rupture with the past that it postulated, and to the new visions of the social world that it engendered. In other words, the conclusion to the book sheds light on what is distinctly modern about the question of what to do with difficult pasts.

scholarly journals Traumatized selves in Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing and A. L. Kennedy’s Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains

Ars Aeterna ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Ema Jelínková
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
The Past

AbstractThis paper presents the case of Scotland as a traumatized nation haunted by ghosts of the past. Scottish national identity has been profoundly influenced by the country’s loss of sovereignty in the 1707 Act of Union. As a result, the stateless nation deprived of agency built its literature on the foundations of idealized stories of its heroic past. It was not until the 1980s that Scottish literature started to tackle the collective trauma and gave rise to works focusing on the weak and the exploited rather than the brave. Janice Galloway and A. L. Kennedy both epitomize this new vein of literature of trauma and explore the links between national and individual experience and strategies for healing the trauma.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document