Postcolonial Trauma in the 21st-Century English Female Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Lilia F. Khabibullina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Psychological Problem ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Family Chronicle ◽  
White Teeth

The postcolonial fiction of the 21st century has developed a new version of family chronicle depicting the life of several generations of migrants to demonstrate the complexity of their experience, different for each generation. This article aims at investigating this tradition from the perspective of three urgent problems: trauma, postcolonial experience, and the “female” theme. The author uses the most illustrative modern women’s postcolonial writings (Z. Smith, Ju. Chang) to show the types of trauma featured in postcolonial literature as well as the change in the character of traumatic experience, including the migrant’s automythologization from generation to generation. There are several types of trauma, or stages experienced by migrants: historical, migration and selfidentification, more or less correlated with three generations of migrants. Historical trauma is the most severe and most often insurmountable for the first generation. It generates a myth about the past, terrible or beautiful, depending on the writer’s intention realized at the level of the writer or the characters. A most expanded form of this trauma can be found in the novel Wild Swans by Jung Chang, where the “female” experience underlines the severity of the historical situation in the homeland of migrants. The trauma of migration manifests itself as a situation of deterritorialization, lack of place, when the experience of the past dominates and prevents the migrants from adapting to a new life. This situation is clearly illustrated in the novel White Teeth by Z. Smith, where the first generation of migrants cannot cope with the effects of trauma. The trauma of selfidentification promotes a fictitious identity in the younger generation of migrants. Unable to join real life communities, they create automyths, joining fictional communities based on cultural myths (Muslim organizations, rap culture, environmental organizations). Such examples can be found in Z. Smith’s White Teeth and On Beauty. Thus, the problem of trauma undergoes erosion, because, strictly speaking, with each new generation, the event experienced as traumatic is less worth designating as such. Compared to historical trauma or the trauma of migration, trauma of self-identification is rather a psychological problem that affects the emotional sphere and is quite survivable for most of the characters.

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.

Ghost Meat

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Catherine Belling
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linear Topology ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
The Devil

Abstract The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain some paradoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are the ethical implications of horror elicited by fictional representations of historical suffering? This article engages these questions through the reading of Mo Hayder’s 2004 novel The Devil of Nanking. Hayder exploits horror’s appeal and also—by foregrounding the acts of representation, reading, and spectatorship that generate this response—opens that process to critique. The novel may productively be understood as a work of posttraumatic fiction, both containing and exposing the concentric layers of our representational engagement with records of past atrocity. Through such a reading, a spherical rather than linear topology emerges for history itself, a structure of haunted and embodied consumption.

scholarly journals Deconstructing the Text and (Re)Constructing the Past: History and Identity in Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
Ksenija Kondali
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Spatial Representation ◽  
Past History ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Diverse Cultures

This paper examines Geraldine Brooks’ latest novel People of the Book (2008) in light of postmodern critiques of history and the desire to explore and signify the past through processes of deconstructing male-centered dominance and (re)constructing histories. The paper highlights ethno-spatial representation that involves intercultural dynamics behind the fate and importance of the manuscript. Drawing on discussions of postmodern views of history and identity construction, I engage the novel against the background of these and other postmodern and postcolonial concerns, also considering intertextual effects stemming from the mixing of genres and sub-genres. Lastly, I offer a reflection about the potential of this fictional account, based on the real-life fate of a prayer book that has testified to the spirit of interfaith tolerance and mutual enrichment of diverse cultures, to provide a context for understanding contemporary preoccupations with heritage, history, memory and identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

scholarly journals Trauma, Narrative and History: Representation of Traumatic Experience in the Works of Algirdas Landsbergis

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 309-323
Author(s):  
Gabija Bankauskaitė ◽  
Loreta Huber
Keyword(s):  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Individual Event ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
The Past ◽  
Stressful Experience ◽  
Event Based ◽  
Trauma Fiction

The twentieth century witnessed an abundant number of traumatic events related to dark history. Trauma caused by war, occupation, exile, repression, gave rise to migration or mass murder. To rely upon Cathy Caruth (1996: 3), the concept of trauma is understood as a physical wound; however, subsequently in medicine and the literature of psychiatry, especially in Freud’s works, the concept of trauma came to be understood as a psychological wound. In addition, trauma is not only a disturbing or stressful experience that affects an individual physically or psychologically, it may also be based on other factors created by society. Over time the field of trauma in various contexts expanded so that today it is widely used in sociology when analysing historical and cultural events. Cultural traumatic memory is mirrored in trauma fiction that conveys the experience of loss and suffering, there is a space for memories, introspection, recollections, flashbacks and awful remembrances that are colored by pain. Apart from individual, event-based trauma, there is another category of trauma variously called cultural or historical trauma, which affects groups of people. Numerous studies have been conducted on the latter topic, however, trauma and its expression in Lithuanian literature has not yet been sufficiently documented. The aim of this study is to discuss the concepts of cultural and historical trauma and the way trauma is reflected in Algirdas Jeronimas Landsbergis’ works. The authors of the study claim that Landsbergis – one of many Lithuanian writers-in-exile – wrote texts that fill a cultural vacuum and invite a re-discussion of what was most painful in the past.

History on the Move: Reimagining Historical Change and the (Im)possibility of Utopia in the 21st Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhan Hellerma
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Current Regime ◽  
The Past ◽  
Main Ideas

Abstract In his meticulously researched and conceptually innovative book, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon aims to capture the historical sensibility emergent during the postwar period broadly conceived, spanning from the 1940s to our present moment. Attending particularly to the debates concerning ecological and technological outlooks, Simon theorizes that our historical horizon is increasingly shaped by the expectations of an unprecedented event that challenges the sustainability of the human subject as known today. Arguing that the concept of unprecedented change can best be explained against the backdrop of a modern processual temporal configuration originating in the eighteenth century, Simon likewise probes the same concept to illuminate a distinct relationship with the past. Elaborating on the main ideas of the book, the paper will interrogate critically Simon’s assertion whereby the novel postwar temporality is inherently dystopian, and will negotiate Simon’s engagement with presentism, which he questions as an inaccurate representation of our current regime of historicity.

Rewriting the memory of immigration: Samuel Zaoui’s Saint Denis bout du monde

2018 ◽  
pp. 212-231
Author(s):  
Mireille Le Breton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
North African ◽  
First Generation Immigrants ◽  
Migrant Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
African Immigration ◽  
Economic Boom

This article reflects on the memory of North-African immigration in twentieth-century France, and focuses more particularly on the fate of the chibanis, the first generation of immigrants who came from Algeria to work in France during the economic boom of the post WWII era. Grounded in the works of historians of memory Nora and Ricoeur, this chapter analyzes how Samuel Zaoui’s novel Saint Denis Bout du monde portrays first-generation immigrants in a new light. Indeed, moving away from the traditional, largely negative, stories of loss, the novel partakes of new narratives of regaining and repairing, what Susan Ireland calls ‘a kind of Narrative recovery.’ The novel can be read as the story of the forgotten generation, which repairs collective amnesia as it regains memory, in order to reconcile itself with the past. This article goes further to show how a new narrative of reconciliation is able to trigger the shift in the episteme of migrant literature.

Motyw choroby i dysfunkcji w powieści Marii Matios Słodka Darusia

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Marta Zambrzycka
Keyword(s):  
Economic Condition ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Dimension ◽  
Individual Human

The text concerns the subject of the disease in Ukrainian literature based on the novel by Maria Matios Sweet Darusia. The novel was published in 2003, has received many awards and is one of the most famous Ukrainian novels of the last decades. Many Ukrainian literary scholars have written about this novel, including Sofi a Filonenko, Jaroslaw Holoborodko, Nila Zborowska and Tamara Hundorowa. Maria Matios analyzes in Sweet Darusia an illness as a metaphor for social and cultural phenomena. In the fi rst part of my paper, I analyse the metaphor of a disease and dysfunction in Ukrainian literature. The second part of the text is about a disease as a consequence of the traumatic experience of the heroine, in which Maria Matios illustrates the problems of memory of the Ukrainian nation. Diseases, dysfunctions, and pathological states are quite popular motifs in the Ukrainian prose of the independence period. They appear, among others, in the texts of Yuri Andrukhovych, Stepan Procuik, Oksana Zabuzko, Yuri Gudz, and Yuri Izdryk. All mentioned authors combine a state of disease with the mental, political and economic condition of post-Soviet society. In Ukrainian prose, the disease is a posttraumatic symptom, manifested in both the individual plan – in the hero’s body and psyche – and also with a broader, over-individual dimension, allowing to diagnose the condition of post-totalitarian space residents. In the novel Sweet Darusia, physical suff ering and illness of the main character is an image of a historical trauma experienced by totalitarian society. The illness in this novel is the starting point for self-refl ection and the stimulus to construct new identifi cation, basing on what is individual, human, intimate but often painful and difficult to accept.

Present-Tense Narration and Representing Trauma in Anne Enright’s The Gathering

KronoScope ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-227
Author(s):  
Karen Anne McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sexually Assaulted ◽  
Present Tense

AbstractIn this article, I engage with the present-tense narration in Anne Enright’s novel, The Gathering. The narrator, Veronica Hegarty, is tasked with assembling her family for a wake after the suicide of her closest brother Liam. What his death unleashes in her is a compulsion to write down an “uncertain event,” which may or “may not have happened,” in which Liam was sexually assaulted as a child. The narrative suggests that Veronica witnessed this “event” and, in line with the aporetic nature of traumatic experience, did not register it as such. The narrative temporal strategy, as this article will demonstrate, is key to the author’s representation of the “event” which, due to its traumatic nature, is always of the present, and never successfully relegated to the past. I also explore the ways in which the novel suggests a healing which can be neither contained nor enacted within the confines of this overtly present-tense narrative.

scholarly journals A JOURNEY TO (OWN) MEMORY: LVIV BETWEEN AND DURING WORLD WAR II IN CONTEMPORARY TEXT (BASED ON NOVELS "THE MUSEUM OF ABANDONED SECRETS" BY OKSANA ZABUZHKO AND "TANGO OF DEATH" BY YURII VYNNYCHUK)

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 278-355
Author(s):  
Khrystyna RUTAR
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Access Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ukrainian Text

In the article basing on theoretical framework of memory studies, two historical novels written by modern Ukrainian authors have been analyzed. The main references to the interwar Lviv and Lviv during the war in works are singled out and the importance of inclusion and comprehension of places of those two periods in modern Ukrainian text is indicated. The main strategies of returning to memory of interwar Lviv and its inhabitants are analyzed. The traumatized memory and ways of talking about the 20th century cultural traumas were analyzed in the 21st century novel, those traumas, which for more than a half of century were surrounded by curtain of fear, censorship and inability to speak openly about it. Attention is drawn to the names of streets are obtaining features of memory prosthesis and becomes an access memory tool. The author concludes that the novel, which had the opportunity to take a fresh look at the traumatic pages of the past, remains in the shadow of stereotypes and silence. The abilities of literature in memory studies is analyzed and are noted that literature can be both as a tool of memory and as an object of memory studies. Keywords memory, Lviv, Oksana Zabuzhko, Yurii Vynnychuk, Museum of abandoned secrets, Tango of Death, trauma, war, interwar period.

scholarly journals Experiencing Historical Trauma: Religious Models of Sublimation

2021 ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
S. V. Riazanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Question ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Teaching Principles ◽  
Life Saving ◽  
Role Of Religion

The article analyzes the approaches and methods of sublimation of cultural and social trauma among believers using the example of localized cases. The subject of research is the established mechanism of experiencing and rethinking the traumatic experience between generations of believers of different faiths. The research question is posed by determining the role of religion as a compensatory social institution that registers the negative elements of the past in a soteriological aspect. The research field includes a part of the Western Urals as a traditionally multicultural region, characterized by the traditional residence of representatives of the so-called “non-traditional” religious communities. The study involved members of the local ummah, as well as Christians included in the communities of “classical” Pentecostals and Baptists belonging to the so-called “Separated Brotherhood”. The method of collecting information was a semi-standardized interview, verified through an appeal to the memoir publications of one of the groups. The respondents included believers whose older relatives belonging to the second or third generation were subjected to repressive influences. The main attention was paid to prevailing techniques that have doctrinal foundations and contribute to a change in the emotional vector in assessing the resulting traumatic experience. The concept of injury soteriology is introduced, in which injury is perceived as a way of self-improvement and solving life-saving tasks. Three models of sublimation of a trauma of the past are identified, associated with confessional belonging and forming different strategies for working with this trauma. The influence of these models on the value system of an individual and a group and on the formation of markers for assessing events is determined. A correlation was revealed between the way of perceiving the negative past, the level of individual participation of believers in the processes of commemoration and the basic teaching principles of the community. The legitimate role of religion in relation to traumatic experience built into the pan-religious soteriological concept is established.

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