Interrogating trauma- Towards a critical trauma studies
Interrogating trauma: Towards a critical trauma studies
Antonio Traversoa* and Mick Broderickb
aSchool of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University, Perth, Australia; bSchool 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: a.traverso@curtin.edu.au
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…
