#cathy caruth

[cor-ardens-archive]

cathy caruth | annie rogers

#fire #m. lit. #trauma #cathy caruth #annie g. rogers #the unsayable

[a-mag-a-day]

"It’s always nice to hear that my hometown is not entirely devoid of odd occurrences and eerie stories." Honestly, I believe him. Imagine being traumatised at a young age and no one ever believing you. Then you go into research mode and learn more, you're trying to understand it all. Then you learn that - yes - your hometown has had other occurrences as well. It must have been both horrible and validating to be confronted with the fact that there had always been more around. Overall, this episode had me think a lot about trauma theory, I had a recent class about it. It focused heavily on Cathy Caruth's approach that focused on the connections between trauma and memory. It's an interesting read and I'm excited to re-listen to this with this in mind. Let's be honest. Joshua Gillespie is a MVP and the example of what Jon had hoped to accomplish by denying every supernatural occurrence. In a way I think of it as validation for Jon's own endeavour and denial. However, I think the main differences is that Joshua also did not try to know or understand, while Jon kept searching for the answer. I really enjoyed this episode.

These are very good points I love the idea that Jon feels validated by Joshua Gillespie's experience here, I've never considered that before, thank you!

#a mag a day #tma #the magnus archives #episode asks #mod ashes #tma spoilers #mag 2

[writingwithsnails]

"why won't it stop?"; a web-weaving

“The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.”

— Claudia Rankine, from Citizen

“We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens, and it’s all part of the big picture.”

— Anne Lamott, from Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood—trail.”

— Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Before it happened, / it was never going to happen. / After it happened, / it was always going to happen.”

— Frank Bidart, from Against Silence

“The history that a flashback tells…is, therefore, a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood. In its repeated imposition as both image and amnesia, the trauma thus seems to evoke the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence.”

— Cathy Caruth, from Trauma: Explorations in Memory

“Do you still believe myths can save you? Foolish creature. Let me be clear: every version of the story ends with your being slaughtered.”

— Tory Adkisson, from Anecdote of the Pig

“She knows she’ll never see him again in this or any life to come. Yet she sees him wherever she looks. That’s life; the dead keep the living alive.”

— Richard Powers, from The Overstory

“According to Freud, mourning consists in carrying the other in the self. There is no longer any world, it’s the end of the world, for the other at his death. And so I welcome in me this end of the world, I must carry the other and his world, the world in me: introjection, interiorization of remembrance, and idealization.”

— Jacques Derrida, from Sovereignties in Question

“Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.”

— Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I / prayed first to God and then to you / first to God and then to you / then to you and next to God then / just to you.”

— Patricia Smith, from The Boss of Me

“And this slow spider which creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must we not all have already existed? And must we not return and run in that other lane out before us, that long weird lane—must we not eternally return?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spake Zarathustra

“There is a lion in my living room. I feed it raw meat so it does not hurt me. It is a strange thing to nourish what could kill you in the hopes it does not kill you. We have lived like this, it and I, for so many years. Sometimes it feels like we have always lived like this. Sometimes I think I have always been like this.”

— Clementine von Radics, from The Lion

“There is not much to tell. I lived. / I was broken. I lived some more. I died. / From the sky to the earth and back again. / Does it make a difference what I hunted / and ate and killed, was eaten and lived? / We are ants on the face of God, scratching / and grasping, asking for more, for more.”

— J. Bruce Fuller, from How to Drown a Boy

“In conclusion, we want things to matter. As much as we think we want to live in a world where we can do anything and never have to suffer consequences, we do want there to be consequences. We don’t want it all to have been for nothing. That’s why we want the hero to escape the loop. We want time to go on. It has to.”

— Katy, from Time Loop Narratives Are About Love

“And then the miracle happens. The sun comes up again.”

— Anne Lamott, from Bird by Bird

#web weaving #febuwhumpday8 #febuwhump2024 #*snailwriting

[jouissanceangel]

“Trauma is not a question of whether there is or is not representation but rather the question of whether there will or will not be (the possibility of) history.” - Cathy Caruth

#theoryposting #caruthposting #freud(ian)posting #psychoanalysisposting

[anya-hu-mirza]

Inside-Outside Spaces (2019)

"Inside-Outside Spaces" actualizes theoretical domains that I approach in an on-going project titled "In\Uncanny Valley/s." The film is a 00:05:02 compilation narrative and sublime re-enactment of childhood displacement trauma from the body-psyche. Please note the following content: physical abuse, emotional violence and secondary sexual trauma.

In his publication The Uncanny, Freud “repositioned the [term—in German, "unheimlich" was first coined by Psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906 to mean unhomely—] as the instance when something can be familiar and yet alien at the same time.” Encountering this in-real life différance often elicits what is largely understood as a negative affect. In deconstructing Freud’s uncanny, I question alternative states of positive affect that can be achieved from encountering the familiar in unfamiliar capacities, and vice versa. I call this phenomenon the in\uncanny, or the inverse of the uncanny’s psychic effects.

Like Cathy Caruth’s re-interpretation of Freud’s traumatic neuroses, I too define trauma as the simultaneous missed-encounter-with-death and survival.

"If 'fright' is the term by which Freud defines the traumatic effect of not having been prepared in time, then the trauma of the nightmare does not simply consist in the experience within the dream, but in the experience of waking from it. It is the surprise of waking that repeats the unexpectedness of the trauma. And as such the trauma is not only the repetition of the missed encounter with death, but the missed encounter with one’s own survival. It is the incomprehensible act of surviving– waking into life– that repeats and bears witness to what remains un-grasped within the encounter with death. (Caruth, Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival 23)

"What returns to haunt the victim, these stories tell us, is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known." (Caruth, The Wound and the Voice 6)

Here, the uncanny is re-positioned through visual and sonic-imagery to evoke a "survival-affect" attached to a series of liminal spaces. These spaces became sanctuaries for me during my lived traumatic experience, while also setting the stage for my trauma. In the video, both nostalgic and macabre tonalities are displaced onto the sanctuaries as they grasp for a "longing of something that never was." As such, the limens in the video serve as visual and auditory memory portals between life-space and death-space, where the act of survival becomes incomprehensible. Here, I confront and re-situate my trauma from a sublime vantage point, against an always already liminal landscape.

#Vimeo

[infpisme]

#Cathy Caruth #traumatised #trauma #life struggles #overcoming trauma #cptsd #complex trauma #road to recovery #overcoming abuse

[feuillesmortes]

— Cathy Caruth, "The Wound and the Voice"; Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996)

#many thanks to mari (@amourduloup) for the rec #<3 #trauma narrative #cathy caruth #essays and criticism #unclaimed experience: trauma narrative and history

[beguines]

Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History

#cathy caruth #unclaimed experience #trauma

[funeral]

Traumatic recall remains insistent and unchanged to the pre­cise extent that it has never, from the beginning, been fully integrated into understanding. The trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge—that cannot... become a matter of “intel­ligence”—and thus continually returns, in its exactness, at a later time. Not having been fully integrated as it occurred, the event cannot become...a “narrative memory” that is integrated into a completed story of the past. The history that a flashback tells...is, therefore, a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood. In its repeated imposition as both image and amnesia, the trauma thus seems to evoke the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence.

Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory

#psychology #trauma #ptsd #excerpts #quotes #p

[cor-ardens-archive]

“[He] hears in his dream the voice of his dead child pleading for him to see the fire by whispering the words, “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” It is this plea by an other who is asking to be seen and heard, this call by which the other commands us to awaken (to awaken, indeed, to a burning)...”

Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth

#to awaken to a burning #Cathy Caruth #m. lit. #witness is what you must bear #fire

[sajiaafrin]

Trauma

It took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you sawas you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t alwaysknow what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it nevermade it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. -Michael Herr, Dispatches

View On WordPress

#Cathy Caruth #Dispatches #Michael Herr #Photography #trauma

[brandonshimoda]

R.I.P. (Rest in PDFs), Part I

in progress ...

Part II (N-Z) is here.

Also visit the PDF branch of the Hiroshima Library

Note: If you see your work on here and prefer that it not be made freely accessible, please email me at: [email protected], and I will remove it. Thank you!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics. Translated from the French by Libby Meintjes.

Achille Mbembe, The Power of the Archive and its Limits. Translated from the French by Judith Inggs

Adrienne Rich, Woman and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. Translated from the French by Joan Pinkham.

Aimé Césaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez. Translated from the French by Chike Jeffers.

Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated from the French by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the introduction to M Archive: After the End of the World

Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing

All Monuments Must Fall: A Syllabus, created/crowd-sourced by Nicholas Mirzoeff and many others

Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches

Amy Uyematsu, The Emergence of Yellow Power

Andaiye, Counting Women’s Caring Work: an interview with David Scott

Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

Angela Davis, Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition

Angela Davis, Women, Race, Class

Angel Dominguez, Black Lavender Milk

Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, Before Dispossession, or Surviving It

Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race

Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman

Anne Boyer, No, from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

Antonio Gramsci, The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935

Asian American Feminist Antibodies {care in the time of coronavirus}, a zine by Asian American Feminist Collective, in collaboration with Bluestockings NYC,

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

Audra Simpson, On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship

Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities

Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury

Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger

Aufgabe, Number 4, Fall 2004, feat. Japanese poetry in translation guest edited by Sawako Nakayasu

Aufgabe, Number 13, 2014, feat. poetry in translation from India guest edited by Biswamit Dwibedy & a special section of poetry from the Moroccan journal Souffles

Bayard Rustin, “Black Power” and Coalition Politics

bell hooks, all about love: New Visions

bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation

bell hooks, Feminism Is For Everybody: Passionate Politics

bell hooks, Feminist Theory from margin to center

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Bhanu Kapil, Reading Lauren Berlant in the Bath

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Calvin Warren, Black Care

Calvin Warren, the introduction to Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation

Carrie Lorig, The Book of Repulsive Women: Five Increasing / Rhythms

Cathlin Goulding, Walking the Places of Exception: The Tule Lake National Monument

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses

Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed

Christina Sharpe, Kara Walker’s Monstrous Intimacies (from Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects)

Christina Sharpe, The Wake (the first chapter of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being).

Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman

David J. Getsy and Che Gossett, A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History 

David L. Eng, The Value of Silence

Denise Ferreira da Silva, On Difference Without Separability

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Black Feminist Poethics

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race

Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas

Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters

Dionne Brand, An Ars Poetica from the Blue Clerk

Divya Victor, Ten Little Poets

Divya Victor, from Things To Do With Your Mouth

Dot Devota, T H E  D O G W O O D S

dusie 19: The Asian Anglophone issue (edited by Cynthia Arrieu-King)

Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated from the French by J. Michael Dash.

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Translated from the Spanish by Cedric Belfrage

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

Edward Said, Orientalism

Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir

Edward Said, Permission to Narrate

Edward Said, Reflections on Exile: & Other Literary and Cultural Essays

Elizabeth Castle, "The Original Gangster": The Life and Times of Red Power Activist Madonna Thunder Hawk

Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power

Ellen Wu, Imperatives of Asian American Citizenship (intro to The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority)

Epeli Hau’ofa, Our Sea of Islands

Eqbal Ahmad, Reader: Writings on India, Pakistan and Kashmir, ed. Sarthak Tomar 

Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, editors, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

Errico Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles 1924-1931

Etel Adnan, At Two in the Afternoon. Translated from the French by Sarah Riggs.

Etel Adnan, all the questions in Sitt Marie Rose. From Georgina Kleege’s translation from the original French.

Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose. Translated from the French by Georgina Kleege.

Etel Adnan, To Be In A Time Of War

Eunsong Kim, Appraising Newness: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and the Building of the Archive for New Poetry

Eunsong Kim, Copy Paper: Ream 1

Eunsong Kim, Dear Machines

Eunsong Kim, Found, Found, Found: Lived, Lived, Lived

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, R-Words: Refusing Research 

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, What Justice Wants

Fay Chiang, excerpts from 7 Continents, 9 Lives

Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine

Frank B. Wilderson III, The Prison Slave As Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal

Frank B. Wilderson III, Sideways Between Stories

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Translated from the French by Charles Lam Markmann.

Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism. Translated from the French by Haakon Chevalier

Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution. Translated from the French by Haakon Chevalier.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated from the French by Richard Philcox.

Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 

Fred Moten, Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)

Fred Moten, from Day

Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

“from the river to the sea”: Collection of Palestine Solidarity Zines

Gary Okihiro, Is Yellow Black or White?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Gelare Khoshgozaran, Airgrams

George Jackson, Blood In My Eye

George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters

Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Translated from the French by Michael Richardson.

Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader

Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon. Translated from the French by Harry Mathews

Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

Ghassan Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine. 

Ghassan Kanafani, The Stolen Shirt. Translated from the Arabic by Michael Fares

Ginger Ko, Ghosts, Models, Visions

Glen Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography

Grace Lee Boggs, Reimagine Everything

Indefensible: A Decade of Mass Incarceration of Migrants Prosecuted for Crossing the Border. By Judith A. Greene, Bethany Carson, Andrea Black, for Grassroots Leadership and Justice Strategies (2016).

Haunani-Kay Trask, The Color of Violence

Hiromi Itō, The Thorn-Puller: New Tales of the Jizō Statue at Sugamo. Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles.  

Hortense Spillers, All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race

Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

The Huey P. Newton Reader. Edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise

Ibrahim Nasrallah, Gaza Weddings. Translated from the Arabic by Nancy Roberts

Ibrahim Nasrallah, Time of White Horses. Translated from the Arabic by Nancy Roberts

Immigration and Nationality Act, June 27, 1952. See especially SEC. 212: General Classes of Aliens Ineligible to Receive Visas and Excluded from Admission

#ImmigrationSyllabus. Created by immigration historians affiliated with the Immigration History Research Center and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, January 26, 2017

Interviews with Radical Palestinian Women, compiled by the Shoal Collective, 2018-2021

J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

Jackie Wang, Against Innocence: Race, Gender, & The Politics of Safety

Jackie Wang, On Being Hard Femme

Jackie Wang, Policing as Plunder: Notes on Municipal Finance and the Political Economy of Fees and Fines, from Carceral Capitalism

Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Translated from the French by Alan Bass

Jalal Toufic, Undeserving Lebanon

Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (essay)

James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

James Boggs, Pages From a Black Radical’s Notebook

Jean-Claude Michel, The Black Surrealists

Jean Genet, Four Hours in Shatila

Jennifer C. Nash, Feeling Black Feminism, the introduction to Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Notes from a Missing Person

Jennifer Tamayo, Poems are the Only Real Bodies

Jenny Zhang, Hags

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

John Gregory Dunne, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike

Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

Joy James, The Dead Zone: Stumbling at the Crossroads of Party Politics, Genocide, and Postracial Racism

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You

Julietta Singh, the introduction to Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements

Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice (from Roots)

Kamau Brathwaite, Nation Language

Karen Tei Yamashita, Literature as Community: The Turtle, Imagination & the Journey Home

Katherine McKittrick, the acknowledgments of and introduction to Dear Science and Other Stories

Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle

Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Chapter 7 of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

Keguro Macharia, Queering African Studies

The Kojiki: Record of Ancient Matters. Translated from the Japanese by Basil Hall Chamberlain

Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism

Lara Mimosa Montes, from The Somnambulist

Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary, as told to George Hajjar 

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education

Lisa Lowe, History Hesitant

Lisa Lowe, Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique (from Immigrant Acts)

Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents

Loss: The Politics of Mourning. (eds. David L. Eng & David Kazanjian)

Lynn Xu, Say You Will Die For Me

Lynn Xu, Tournesol

Mae Ngai, From Colonial Subject to Undesirable Alien: Filipino Migration, Exclusion, and Repatriation, 1920-1940

Mae Ngai, Illegal Aliens: A Problem of Law and History (intro to Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America)

Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, edited and translated from the Arabic by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche (with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein) 

Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

Manifesto: A Century of Isms, edited by Mary Ann Caws

The Manyōshū, the Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai translatton

Mariame Kaba, Toward the Horizon of Abolition: John Duda in conversation with Kaba

Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory

Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, the introduction to Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory

Mari Matsuda, Planet Asian America

Mari Matsuda, Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim's Story

Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-­Determination

Mercedes Eng, Mercenary English

Merle Woo, Stonewall Was a Riot—Now We Need a Revolution

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality). Translated from the French by Robert Hurley

Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, The Power in the Story

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, An Unthinkable History: The Haiti Revolution as a Non-Event

Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Empire of Freedom (the introduction to The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages)

Mishuana Goeman, Gendered Geographies and Narrative Markings; “Remember What You Are”: Gendering Citizenship, the Indian Act, and (Re)mapping the Settler Nation-State, from Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations

Mitsuye Yamada, Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman

Mizna 19.2: The Palestine Issue, 2018

M. Jacqui Alexander, Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves

Mu'in Basisu, Palestinian Notes from Cairo's Military Prison, translated from the Arabic by Saleh Omar

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Part II (N-Z) is here.

The PDF branch of the Hiroshima Library is here.

[tbtntrauma2550]

Trauma Theory: A Feminist Tool

By Emmy Wagner

In the field of feminist studies, scholars analyze the ways systems of power, such as white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, work together to form unique experiences of oppression. Because these systems of power have such influence on the lives of marginalized communities like people of color, the LGBTQ community, and immigrants, they live with constant stress due to the discrimination they face for their identities. Sometimes this discrimination can be small scale. For example, a white woman commenting on the texture of a black woman's hair, however, discrimination can be far more dangerous than that. The prejudice against black people that is held by many police officers has led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent men and women. These violent tragedies have created serious trauma which affects the entire black community scared and angry. The trauma of being targeted by authority figures is so severe that words cannot adequately describe the feeling. This is where trauma theory comes into play. Trauma studies explore the impact of life-altering experiences and can be a handy tool in the feminist scholar's toolbox.

To understand how trauma studies can be useful to the feminist scholar, it is important to have a clear understanding of the foundations. Trauma is defined as "a severely disruptive experience that profoundly impacts the self's emotional organization and perception of the external world" (Mambrol). Trauma can be on an individual basis, or large enough to affect an entire community, as with the case of regular police brutality throughout America. Trauma studies analyze the psychological, rhetorical, and cultural significance of the specific example of trauma as well as how it changes the individuals' comprehension of the world around them. This area of scholarly analysis developed in the 1990s and drew upon neurologist Sigmund Freud's theory of traumatic experiences on the human person. In his early work, Freud hypothesized that "traumatic hysteria" stems from an earlier, repressed, experience of sexual assault (Mambrol). Freud emphasizes the event itself was not traumatic, but it is the remembrance of or reflection upon the experience that is traumatic. This latency period "delays the effects and meaning of the past," but once a present event brings forth the memory of the traumatic event, the painful process of remembering, also known as "pathogenic reminiscence," ascribes value to said event (Mambrol). This can cause trauma-induced symptoms such as "exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation… and blunted affect" (Center). The relational process of remembering trauma can cause a splitting of the ego or dissociation, thus creating an abnormal state of consciousness. In his later work, Freud states that the "extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli" is the cause of this traumatic neurosis. (Mambrol). Freud viewed the brain as an organism with many layers, one with an outer "protective shield," but when an individual unexpectantly goes into "fight" mode of "fight or flight," there is no anxiety to act as a defense mechanism. This lack of internal defense is what leaves the brain vulnerable to attack. Thus, trauma is both "an external agent that shocks the unprepared system and an internal action of defense" (Mambrol). One marker of traumatic neurosis is the "'compulsion to repeat' the memory" as a way to overcome and master the unpleasant feelings it evokes (Mambrol). Because our brain often reproduces memories in a way that is slightly off from the actual experience, Freud believes that the narrative of the event is crucial to recovery. As such, abreaction or talking about the event, is critical to allow the individual to gain a better understanding of the past (Mambrol).

Now that the foundations of trauma theory have been laid out, one can direct her attention to what is known as "the First Wave" of trauma studies. The first wave of trauma studies flourished in the 1990s with prominent scholars such as Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman at the forefront of the research. It popularized the notion that trauma is an "unrepresentable event" that reveals the inherent contradictions between language and experience (Mambrol). Because trauma is viewed as an event that splits the ego, it prevents easy articulation. This fragmentation or dissociation is seen as the direct cause of trauma, which supports the concept of transhistorical trauma; that is to say that the universality of trauma, past, present, and future, allows for the opportunity to connect individual and collective traumatic experiences (Mambrol). In the first wave, trauma studies analysts formed a model of trauma that says trauma creates a negative, persistent pathological effect on the consciousness and memory in a way that prevents it from being incorporated properly into one's life story. As a result of this model, trauma theorists emphasize the external stimuli as an event of suffering that brings about dysfunctional internal processes (Mambrol). Because the trauma creates a fractured ego, the experience is not able to be logically vocalized. Thus, a strange dichotomy of silence and chaos is created.

As a result, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, Cathy Caruth argues that experiences of trauma are never truly known directly, but instead are pieced together from the narratives of those willing to discuss the event. Furthermore, because trauma neurosis is defined by the delayed remembrance of a repressed traumatic event, Caruth says that trauma is not easily locatable, but is identified "in the way it is precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on" (Mambrol). Because traumatic events enter the psyche in a different way than a normal experience, an abnormal memory is formed, meaning this remembrance is only a particular recall and not definite knowledge. On a greater scale, Caruth writes "history, like trauma, is never simply one's own, that history is precisely the way we were implicated in each other's traumas" (Mambrol). This implies a shared responsibility across time and illustrates how trauma can be transhistorical and intergenerational. The experience of collective trauma is not easy to escape. It sends ripples out across the generations of families, marking an important event in that group's history. As a result, certain beliefs and responses are inherited by descendants which exposes them to knowledge that fosters a unique mindset in which the individual and collective view the world around them. The inherent irrepresentability of trauma highlights how history is not always a 100% accurate source.

Like most schools of thought, trauma theory continued to develop, and the second wave of trauma studies challenged the typical model of its predecessor. The Pluralistic model as it came to be known, challenges the notion that trauma is entirely unspeakable by analyzing the cultural dimensions of trauma and the diversity in narrative expression. It suggests that traumatic experience exposes new knowledge of the "relationships between experience, language, and knowledge that detail the social significance of trauma" (Mambrol). This model emphasizes how the reorientation of consciousness due to traumatic events creates diverse memories and meaning for different people. Furthermore, the pluralistic model focuses on the discernable values of trauma and challenges the importance of the demand for a complete dissociation and an altered point of reference regarding trauma (Mambrol). By relying upon the external stimuli that caused the trauma response, one can demonstrate how it occurs in specific people, periods, and geographical locations which influence the meaning of the event to the individual and the collective. This implies that the traumatic event in question is created and recreated anytime it is reflected upon, even by the same individual. The unique experiences of each human, their identities, and their view of the world shape how they think and behave. Therefore, what the survivors of trauma articulate, and what they do not articulate, can partly be attributed to their cultural context instead of the claim that trauma is inherently unspeakable (Mambrol). Because the pluralistic model challenges the unspeakability trope of trauma, it highlights how language can illustrate various meanings of traumatic experience and how shifting values over time inform the diverse understandings of said event.

The pluralistic model of trauma provides feminist scholars a great framework to analyze systems of power that create an environment where large-scale instances of injustice are interwoven in the fabric of our history. For example, the United States of America was built off the backs of black slaves. The white European settlers that enslaved, tortured, and many times killed their slaves did so on the grounds of supremacy. White supremacists believe that they are the ideal species of man and those who are not like them (white, male, cisgender, able-bodied, and educated) have less inherent human value. Up until the 1940s, science even "supported" this assumption that black people are less intelligent humans with scientists like Frances Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, who popularized eugenics in the United States and England. His eugenic practices aimed to create a "more suitable race" that was not plagued with human "defects." This goal was not achieved through genuine efforts to protect human life, such as regular water testing and treatment for example, but rather through the erasure of the people who embodied the characteristics heteropatriarchy and white supremacy saw as less than.

One way the endeavor to erase the presence of marginalized groups was carried out was through the unethical medical experiments that were conducted on black slaves. Black men and women were used as lab rats to test various hypotheses of curious white doctors and scientists. Women were under-went forced sterilization, oftentimes with little to no pain killers or anesthesia. This history of the forced sterilization of black women continued until the 1970's well into the evolution of medical practice and ethics. However, white supremacy is so deeply ingrained in our culture that doctors actually agreed that sterilizations should be conducted.

Despite all the efforts and lives that went into creating a more just world, prejudice within the U.S. medical system is still prevalent in 2021. Black and other women of color report negative experiences with doctors who dismiss their health concerns and, consequently, experience far greater infant and maternal mortality rates than white women. Out of every 1,000 black infants born, 11.3 will die, compared to only 4.9 white infants. For every 100,000 live births, 12.7 white women will not survive. In contrast, a grand some of 43.5 black women die after childbirth (Vox).  This early history of physical, mental, and emotional trauma, combined with modern-day prejudice and bias against the black community, within the medical field has prevented black men and women alike from receiving the medical attention they need. The history of trauma for the black community by the hands of white perpetrators has created a viewpoint that recognizes the ways the United States has institutionalized racism and continues to act with flagrant disregard for black lives.

Trauma theory is a valuable asset to the feminist scholar in that it helps create a foundation for knowledge production. The irrepresentability of trauma is complex in that both hinders and improves our understanding of how trauma affects the minds of victims. Because it is so devastatingly disruptive, people have difficulty finding the right words to describe their thoughts and emotions.

#1

[intimatum]

intertextuality

desire / eating disorder / hunger: «to be the girl who lunges at people−wants to eat them» (letissier) / «a way to take all hungers and boil them down to their essence–one appetite to manage–just one» (knapp)

trauma / trauma theory / visceralities of trauma

writers

ada limón, adrienne rich, agnès varda, alana massey, alejandra pizarnik, alice notley, ana božičević, anaïs nin, andrea dworkin, andrew solomon, angela carter, angélica freitas, angélica liddell, ann cvetkovich, anna akhmatova, anna gien, anne boyer, anne carson, anne sexton, anne waldman, antonella anedda, aracelis girmay, ariana reines, audre lorde, aurora linnea

barbara ehrenreich, bell hooks, bessel van der kolk

carmen maria machado, caroline knapp, carrie lorig, cat marnell, catharine mackinnon, catherynne m. valente, cathy caruth, césar vallejo, chris kraus, christa wolf, clarice lispector, claudia rankine, czesław miłosz

daniel borzutzky, daphne du maurier, daphne gottlieb, david foster wallace, david wojnarowicz, dawn lundy martin, deirdre english, denise levertov, detlev claussen, dodie bellamy, don paterson, donna tartt, dora gabe, dorothea lasky, durs grünbein

édouard levé, eike geisel, eileen myles, elaine kahn, elena ferrante, elisabeth rank, elyn r. saks, emily dickinson, erica jong, esther perel, etty hillesum, eve kosofsky sedgwick

fanny howe, félix guattari, fernando pessoa, fiona duncan, frank bidart, franz kafka

gabriele schwab, gail dines, georg büchner, georges bataille, gertrude stein, gilles deleuze, gillian flynn, gretchen felker-martin

hannah arendt, hannah black, heather christle, heather o'neill, heiner müller, hélène cixous, héloïse letissier, henryk m. broder, herbert hindringer, herbert marcuse

ingeborg bachmann, iris murdoch

jacques derrida, jacques lacan, jade sharma, jamaica kincaid, jean améry, jean baudrillard, jean rhys, jeanann verlee, jeanette winterson, jenny slatman, jenny zhang, jerold j. kreisman, jess zimmerman, jia tolentino, joachim bruhn, joan didion, joanna russ, joanna walsh, johanna hedva, john berger, jörg fauser, joy harjo, joyce carol oates, judith butler, judith herman, julia kristeva, june jordan, junot díaz

karen barad, kate zambreno, katherine mansfield, kathrin weßling, kathy acker, katy waldman, kay redfield jamison, kim addonizio

lacy m. johnson, larissa pham, lauren berlant, le comité invisible, leslie jamison, lidia yuknavitch, linda gregg, lisa diedrich, louise glück, luce irigaray, lynn melnick

maggie nelson, margaret atwood, marguerite duras, marie howe, marina tsvetaeva, mark fisher, martha gellhorn, mary karr, mary oliver, mary ruefle, marya hornbacher, max horkheimer, melissa broder, michael ondaatje, michel foucault, miranda july, miya tokumitsu, monique wittig, muriel rukeyser

naomi wolf, natalie eilbert, natasha lennard, nelly arcan

ocean vuong, olivia laing, ottessa moshfegh

paisley rekdal, patricia lockwood, paul b. preciado, paul celan, peggy phelan

rachel aviv, rainald goetz, rainer maria rilke, rebecca solnit, richard moskovitz, richard siken, robert jensen, roland barthes, ronald d. laing

sady doyle, sally rooney, salma deera, samuel beckett, samuel salzborn, sandra cisneros, sara ahmed, sara sutterlin, sarah kane, sarah manguso, scherezade siobhan, sean bonney, sheila jeffreys, shoshana felman, shulamith firestone, sibylle berg, silvia federici, simone de beauvoir, simone weil, siri hustvedt, solmaz sharif, sophinette becker, soraya chemaly, stephan grigat, susan bordo, susan sontag, suzanne scanlon, sylvia plath

theodor w. adorno, thomas brasch, tiqqun, toni morrison

ursula k. le guin

valerie solanas, virginia l. blum, virginia woolf, virginie despentes

walter benjamin, wisława szymborska, wolfgang herrndorf, wolfgang pohrt

zadie smith, zan romanoff, zoë lianne, zora neale hurston

#tags

[islandwrites]

texts that I will be reading today on the relationship between the uncanny, trauma, and memory:

“the uncanny” by sigmund freud (1919)

“‘the times in which we live’: freud’s the uncanny, world war I, and the trauma of contagion” by john zilcosky (2018)

selected chapters from unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history by cathy caruth (1996)

ch 1, “trauma and the possibility of history” 

ch 3, “traumatic departures: survival and history in freud” 

#grace reads #gradblr

[infpisme]

The accident, that is, as it emerges in Freud and is passed on through other trauma narratives, does not simply represent the violence of a collision but also conveys the impact of its very incomprehensibility. What returns to haunt the victim...is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known. ... The story of trauma, then, as the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality--the escape from a death, or from its referential force--rather attests to its endless impact on a life...The crisis at the core of many traumatic narratives--as I show concretely in my readings of Freud, Duras, and Lacan--often emerges, indeed, as an urgent question: Is the trauma the encounter with the death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?

At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a 'crisis of death' and the correlative 'crisis of life': between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival. ... What Freud encounters in the traumatic neurosis is not the reaction to any horrible event but, rather, the peculiar and perplexing experience of survival. If the dreams and flashbacks of the traumatized thus engage Freud's interest, it is because they bear witness to a survival that exceeds the very claims and consciousness of the one who endures it. At the heart of Freud's rethinking of history in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," I would thus propose, is the urgent and unsettling question: What does it mean to survive?

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience

#cathy caruth #trauma #traumatised #flashbacks #can’t forget #emotional abuse #emotional trauma #cptsd #road to recovery #survival mode #overcoming abuse #complex trauma #narcissistic abuse #life struggles