Trauma, Memorialisation and Intermediality in Jasmila Žbanić’s For Those Who Can Tell No Tales

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-162
Author(s):  
Katalin Sándor

This chapter discusses cinematic intermediality in Jasmila Žbanić's film, For Those Who Can Tell No Tales (2013) as a modality of addressing the traumatic memory of atrocities and mass rapes committed during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war. Traumatic memory is not primarily formed through symbols or narratives but rather resembles ?a wounded body’ (Broderick–Traverso), and therefore it may disrupt cultural strategies of memorialisation, narrativization and representation through which personal, collective or historical trauma is approached. In Žbanić's film, intermediality becomes a mode of addressing collective trauma by ‘acknowledging’ the unrepresentable within representation and by foregrounding the interstitial and corporeal aspect of traumatic memory. The intermedial cinematic discourse that incorporates photofilmic pictures, fragments of performance art and practices of non-cinematic image-making (such as amateur video diary) performs an irresolute and affective memorialisation of war trauma engaging the viewer in potentially transformative memory work.

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 47-48
Author(s):  
Kerry Hawk Lessard ◽  
Gregg Deal

Historical trauma is a term used to reflect the intergenerational losses experienced by American Indians and whose effects serve to depreciate the health, wellness, and resilience of a contemporary people. One of the lesser explored of these losses is that of identity, specifically the ways in which it is constructed and communicated. Using an image from the performance art piece The Last American Indian on Earth, authors consider the role of anthropology in creating a narrative of indigenous lives that while often at odds with a people's understanding of themselves, is privileged as being far more authoritative. Exploring this contested imagery, authors engage a decolonized viewing practice to deconstruct and critique the problematic nature of museumization and its impacts on Indians and non-Indians alike.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 309-323
Author(s):  
Gabija Bankauskaitė ◽  
Loreta Huber

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 72
Author(s):  
Siti Kurniati Rasad ◽  
Achmad Munjid

This article investigates how the trauma of 9/11 tragedy affects the lives of the characters in DeLillo’s Falling Man and shows how the trauma of 9/11 portrayed in the novel reflects American collective trauma. This investigation is qualitative research utilizing memory and trauma as the theoretical framework. The discussion in this article reveals that individual experience the trauma of 9/11 tragedy differs from one person to another. While other characters go through their mourning successfully, the main character in the novel becomes a perennial mourner and is ceaselessly haunted by his traumatic memory due to constant avoidance from his trauma. His continuous externalization of his trauma causes him to focus on the external threats and becomes a paranoiac. On a societal level, American society is also perpetually mourning and is haunted by post-traumatic paranoia continuously. American exceptionalism, biased orientalist perspective about the orient, and alleged prolonged quasi war between Islam and the west have framed the collective experience of the trauma in binary opposite narrative of a good versus evil war. The collective trauma perpetuates and many policies are born out of their paranoia.Keywords: 9/11 tragedy; memory; mourning; post-traumatic paranoia; trauma


Author(s):  
Sarka Kadlecova

Resumen: Este artículo trata de la memoria colectiva de un campo de concentración nazi para mujeres. El objetivo de este texto es examinar la posibilidad de la construcción de la memoria compartida por las supervivientes del campo de concentración Ravensbrück, sus descendientes y otras personas, principalmente mujeres, dedicadas al trabajo de memoria en torno a este dominio particular. A partir de la teoría social del trauma de Jeffrey Alexander, se presentarán unos ejemplos del intenso trabajo cultural y político necesario para crear un trauma compartido. Con base en el análisis de los datos creados durante la investigación etnográfica multisitio, el artículo explorará los aspectos éticos del proceso de recordar y la fabricación de un trauma colectivo.Palabras clave: Ravensbrück, teoría social del trauma de Jeffrey Alexander.Abstract: This article deals with collective memory of a women’s concentration camp in Nazi Germany. The objective of this text is to examine the possibility of the construction of a shared memory by survivors of the concentration camp Ravensbrück, their descendants and other persons, mainly women, engaged in the memory work around this particular site of memory. Drawing on Jeffrey Alexander’s social theory of trauma, a number of examples of the intensive cultural and political work necessary for creating a shared trauma will be presented. Based on the data created during multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, the article will explore ethical aspects of the process of remembering and the fabrication of collective trauma.  Keywords: Ravensbrück, Jeffrey Alexander’s social theory of trauma.


Author(s):  
Rafael Pérez Baquero

The aim of this article is to address to what extent some institutional form of remembering the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) as a collective trauma could be considered an instance of Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelzer´s notion of ’cultural trauma‘. Or to put it in other words, in which sense the notion of cultural trauma may cast a new light on one of the different ways in which the Spanish Civil War was remembered and retold during the transition to democracy (1977-83). Spanish society remembered the war as a collective trauma, so painful that it encouraged society to promote a ‘pact of oblivion’ toward victims of Francoist repression. According to this traumatic memory, the Spanish Civil War was a ‘fratricidal struggle’, whose outbreak was a consequence of the tensions that underlie Spanish history. It led to the blurring of distinctions between victims and culprits because both sides were considered equally responsible. Therefore, everyone could claim the ownership of suffering. However, this representation did not fit in with the historical records; it was a consequence of the social influence of some ‘memory makers’ that developed new narratives and re-defined the ownership of suffering. Because of this divergence between the historical record of the war and society’s traumatic memory of it during the transition to democracy, I would like to analyse the possibility of studying the nature of the latter by means of the concept of cultural trauma. After all, Alexander´s critique of psychoanalytical insight into collective trauma could be useful when analysing traumatic historical experiences where it is not clear whether the traumatic nature of those memories come from the events themselves or from the cultural frames that attributed significance to those events.


2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-168
Author(s):  
Yvette Aparicio

This article focuses on Salvadoran-American poetry that explores Salvadorans’ national traumas of war and displacement. In these poems, war trauma evolves into a post-conflict, post-migration trauma that calls for reconciliation with war memories as well as with a violent, unstable present. This study focuses on the poetry of Jorge Argueta (1961), William Archila (1968), and Javier Zamora (1990), three poets born in El Salvador and immigrants to the US. Studies of trauma and reconciliation in post-conflict societies frame the analysis of poetry that digs up and reconstitutes the dead for a Salvadoran diaspora still un-reconciled with its trauma.


Author(s):  
Katarzyna Ancuta

The chapter offers a selective survey of twenty-first-century Asian Gothic. The main focus of the discussion is the most prominent contemporary trend involving reconfigurations of Asian folklore and the ghost story. More specifically, this chapter investigates literary and film narratives dealing with individual and collective trauma that revolve around the figure of the vengeful ghost, texts which reclaim animism as an inherent part of Asian modernity, and Asian Gothic’s interrogation of gender dynamics and empowered women. The first section of the essay discusses the emergence of the female vengeful ghost as the dominant figure of fear in Asian horror films. The second section examines the portrayal of ghosts in literature of the region and the way their haunting engages with historical trauma and socio-cultural anxieties of the time. The final part investigates narratives that highlight the connection of women to shamanism and magic and proposes to read female spirituality in terms of empowerment.


Author(s):  
L. Naydonova

Ukraine is in a situation of increased danger of emergencies in connection with a continuing international armed conflict on the territory of the country. This creates the need for specialized training of specialists in order to increase the psychological readiness and capacity of communities for effective action in emergencies. The aim is to establish the conceptual grounds for developing disasters community readiness by focused and informed social workers. Creation and approbation of the new high education learning course on the base of theoretical analysis is the proposed way. As the results of analysis are some schemas of dynamics of the communities coping processes during and after disasters and other extremal situations (fire, technological catastrophe, war captivity, historical trauma). It is grounded topics and educational principles of discipline for social rehabilitators professional prepare. The author singles out four approaches for understanding suffering community and collective trauma dynamics (enlightenment, psychoanalytic, socio-constructive and organizational psychological). It is proposed three scales for social psychological analysis of community: urgent, long-term and trans-generative time intervals. Because the content has potential for secondary trauma induction, it is necessary to improve some safe promotional didactic elements: reflexive validity, resourceness, and information ecology principles. Students can choice some additional traumatic situations in local or national communities for joint analysis in the auditorium, which gives empowerment and feelings of co-creation during learning process.


Author(s):  
Norman W. Spaulding

For much of the twentieth century, the connections between trauma, memory, and law have traditionally been represented as redemptive. Naming traumatic experience by recovering the memory of victims, typically privileging their first-person testimony, has been critical to the work of seeing justice done. Across the disciplines of history, psychoanalysis, law, psychology, and critical theory, a vast literature seeks to connect the testimony of traumatic memory in a metaphysically immediate way to justice and truth. In many of these accounts memory work itself—remembering, testifying—is the work of justice, just as in psychoanalysis, recovering traumatic experience, reducing it to first-person narrative, is the cure. But the valence of the trauma/memory/law circuit is complex. Law is, after all, frequently a principal source of traumatic experience, operating repressively, causing revictimization, refusing to recognize the claims of the injured, and, more ominously, providing the state opportunities for biopolitical and emergency intervention. This chapter provides a brief history of the entanglement of trauma, memory, and the law, emphasizing its links to the development of the field of psychoanalysis and to deeply gendered, physicalist assumptions about harm. The chapter also synthesizes an emerging critical literature and suggests that criticism (methodological, political, conceptual, and normative) reflects fundamentally unresolved questions about the meaning of traumatic experience—questions that both reflect and obscure profound anxieties about the challenges traumatic experience poses to assumptions about the nature of modern life. If there is a practice of justice equal to the problem of traumatic experience, it has not yet been named.


Author(s):  
Hordovska T.I.

Purpose is to explore the concept of moral trauma, as well as to carry out a comparative analysis with relevant concepts of collective trauma, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and traumatic stress.Methods. The study applies theoretical analysis of the literature and systematization of recent studies aligned with the concept of moral trauma, including of methods of analysis, synthesis, and generalization.Results. A review of the literature identifies key approaches to the interpretation of moral trauma concept in the context of military trauma research and research in the terms of morality and moral experiences.Conclusions. The main concept definitions, key characteristics, common and distinct conceptual features of the moral trauma, traumatic stress, PTSD and collective trauma concepts have been analyzed. The study reveals that moral trauma is often aligned with individual and collective context, while PTSD is always connected with individual trauma. Collective trauma often relates to historic trauma, trauma of identity and cultural trauma. The key difference of moral trauma in comparison with PTSD, collective trauma md and continuous traumatic stress is aligned with negative moral emotions, particularly feelings of guilt, shame, disgust, fear and anxiety. The traumatic stress concept covers physiological and psychological reactions of the body arising from security breaches and threats feelings, while moral trauma refers to damage of moral conscience and human values caused by subjective perception and experience in the individual backgrounds of the situation as traumatic.The results of theoretical analysis also indicate that moral trauma should be studied in the wider context of morality, namely moral standards, moral judgements, moral behaviour and moral emotions. Prospects for further research are the construct of moral trauma study in the context of the Psychology of Genocide as a collective and historical trauma, developing methodological basis for empirical research of moral trauma as a consequence of genocide.Key words: morality, moral trauma, PTSD, traumatic stress, collective trauma. Мета – дослідити поняття моральної травми, а також провести порівняльний аналіз із відповідними поняттями колективної травми, посттравматичного стресового розладу (ПТСР) та травматичного стресу.Методи. У дослідженні застосовується теоретичний аналіз літератури та систематизація досліджень останніх років, узгоджених із концепцією моральної травми, включно з методами аналізу, синтезу та узагальнення.Результати. Огляд літератури визначає ключові підходи до трактування концепції моральної травми в контексті досліджень військової травми з точки зору моралі та морального досвіду.Висновки. Проаналізовано визначення основних понять, ключові характеристики, загальні та чіткі концептуальні ознаки моральної травми, травматичного стресу, посттравматичного стресового розладу та концепції колективної травми. Дослідження показує, що моральна травма часто узгоджується з індивідуальним та колективним контекстом, тоді як посттравматичний стресовий розлад завжди пов’язаний з індивідуальною травмою. Колективна травма часто пов’язана з історичною травмою, травмою ідентичності та культурною травмою. Ключова відмінність моральної травми порівняно з посттравматичним стресовим розладом, колективною травмою та постійним травматичним стресом узгоджується з негативними моральними емоціями, зокрема почуттям провини, сорому, огиди, страху та тривоги.Поняття травматичного стресу охоплює фізіологічні та психологічні реакції організму, що виникають через відчуття порушення безпеки та загрози, тоді як моральна травма стосується ушкоджень моральної совісті та цінностей людини, спричинених суб’єктивним сприйняттям та переживанням в індивідуальному досвіді ситуації як травматичної.Результати теоретичного аналізу також указують на те, що моральну травму слід вивчати у ширшому контексті моралі, а саме через моральні стандарти, моральні судження, моральну поведінку та моральні емоції. Перспективами подальших досліджень є вивчення конструкту моральної травми в контексті психології геноциду як колективної та історичної травми, що становить методологічну основу емпіричного дослідження моральної травми як наслідку геноциду.Ключові слова: мораль, моральна травма, ПТСР, травматичний стрес, колективна травма.


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