Trauma Art And Memory In The Postcolony
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Trauma, Art and Memory in the Postcolony
This wide-ranging book provides a scholarly account of recent and contemporary memorial and counter-memorial practices occurring in the visual arts, across diverse postcolonial topologies and imaginaries. The emphasis is on commemorative creative practices and responses to traumatic events of recent times, within and beyond the Museum. This major survey encompasses discourses on perception, affect and trauma in the visual arts; commissioned civic art and memorial architecture; activist and socially-engaged art projects; creative praxis; and expressions of minority and First Nations cultural resilience. The book offers insights into contemporary exhibitionary practices; decolonial methodologies; and spatial politics, with a significant focus on art’s ability to reveal and reactivate silenced histories, sites and ‘non-places’. It will be of great interest to students, researchers and subject experts alike, across the fields of visual arts, architecture and urban planning; cultural and memory studies; and trauma and affect studies; contextualising the work of artists and curators within some of the most urgent socio-political, environmental and philosophical debates of the twenty-first century.
Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel
The contributions to this volume probe the complex relationship of trauma, memory, and narrative. By looking at the South African situation through the lens of trauma, they make clear how the psychic deformations and injuries left behind by racism and colonialism cannot be mended by material reparation or by simply reversing economic and political power-structures. Western trauma theories – as developed by scholars such as Caruth, van der Kolk, Herman and others – are insufficient for analysing the more complex situation in a postcolony such as South Africa. This is because Western trauma concepts focus on the individual traumatized by a single identifiable event that causes PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). What we need is an understanding of trauma that sees it not only as a result of an identifiable event but also as the consequence of an historical condition – in the case of South Africa, that of colonialism, and, more specifically, of apartheid. For most black and coloured South Africans, the structural violence of apartheid’s laws were the existential condition under which they had to exist. The living conditions in the townships, pass laws, relocation, and racial segregation affected great parts of the South African population and were responsible for the collective traumatization of several generations. This trauma, however, is not an unclaimed (and unclaimable) experience. Postcolonial thinkers who have been reflecting on the experience of violence and trauma in a colonial context, writing from within a Fanonian tradition, have, on the contrary, believed in the importance of reclaiming the past and of transcending mechanisms of victimization and resentment, so typical of traumatized consciousnesses. Narration and the novel have a decisive role to play here.
The Kaleidoscope of Gendered Memory in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Novels
Author: Nuha Baaqeel
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Release Date: 2019-07-12
Through its unique kaleidoscopic lens, this book analyzes the work of Algeria’s first postcolonial woman writer to publish a novel in Arabic, Ahlam Mosteghanemi. Her novels Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses return to the trauma of the Algerian War of Independence to address the lingering anxieties of national belonging and memory in postcolonial Algeria at a time when the nation is caught between two forces: entrenched bureaucratic-political elites and populist Islamists, who imagine a return to a pre-modern, utopian past. This book argues that Mosteghanemi’s polyphonic narratives reveal that national narratives are always multiple—“unity” is not one, all-encompassing narrative, but instead an ever-evolving Bakhtinian dialogism accommodating multiple perspectives, memories, and stories. The study interprets Mosteghanemi’s metaphor of the bridge as a powerful device for exploring tensions between reality and imagination, exile and belonging, and traditional concepts of gender in ways that reimagine nationhood and gesture towards a new, collective future.