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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'These chapters gathered from two special issues of the journal Life Writing take up a major theme of recent work in the Humanities: Trauma. Autobiography has had a major role to play in this ‘age of trauma’, and these essays turn to diverse contexts that have received little attention to date: partition narratives in India, Cambodian and Iranian rap, refugee letters from Nauru, graffiti in Tanzania, and the silent spaces of trauma in Chile and Guantanamo. The contexts and media of these autobiographical trauma texts are diverse, yet they are linked by attention to questions of who gets to speak/write/inscribe autobiographically and how and where and why, and how can silences in the wake of traumatic experiences be read. These essays deliberately set out to establish some new fields for research in trauma studies by reaching out to a broader global context, into various texts, media and artifacts, representing diverse histories with specific attention to different voices, bodies, memories and subjectivities. This collection addresses the contemporary circuits of trauma story, and the media and icons and narratives that carry trauma story to political effect and emotional affect.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
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This book was previously published as two special issues of Life Writing.
Contents
- Textual Traumata : Letters to Lindy Chamberlain, single work criticism (p. 109-126)
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Vulnerable Children, Disposable Mothers : Holocaust and Stolen Generations Memoirs of Childhood,
single work
criticism
(p. 127-150)'In recent years, historians have pioneered comparative research on the Holocaust and colonisation in Australia. This article seeks to demonstrate that a comparative reading of Stolen Generations and Holocaust memoirs can generate unique and challenging insights into the affective, material and psychological legacies of the assimilation of children across racial and ethnic divides. By placing Sarah Kofman's memoir, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, into dialogue with versions of the Rabbit Proof Fence narrative, the article considers how the gendered trope of suffering mothers and vulnerable children has been used to mediate the trauma of childhood assimilation, and reveals aspects of this legacy that remain unspeakable in Australia.' (Author's abstract, 161)
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Letters from Nauru,
single work
criticism
(p. 151-165)In the recent past, collection of letters exchanged between asylum seekers held as part of the Pacific Solution and their advocates on the Australian mainland have begun to enter the archives and become available to scholarly work. This article considers the Burnside/Durham collection of letters from Nauru recently acquired as part of the Fryer collection at the University of Queensland. It uses Stanley's concept of the epistolarium to examine how the letter operates as a particularly appropriate medium for these narratives of grief and loss; how they mediate processes of testimony and witnessing; and how Durham's art work, included in the collection, speaks to the situation of the second person.
