Stef Craps

The Empire of Trauma

Today the concept of trauma is widely used to describe responses to extreme events across space and time, as well as to guide their treatment. However, as Allan Young reminds us in The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (1995), it is actually a Western artefact, “invented” in the late nineteenth century: “The disorder is not timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity. Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these efforts and resources” (5). Similarly, in the introduction to Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (2001), Paul Lerner and Mark Micale note that their volume—an edited collection providing a historical study of the concept of trauma—“calls into question the idea of a single, uniform, transhistorically valid concept of psychological trauma by demonstrating its cultural and social contingence through a series of historical case studies” (25). The origins of this “historical product” (A. Young 5) can be located in a variety of medical and psychological discourses dealing with Euro-American experiences of industrialization, gender relations, and modern warfare (Micale and Lerner, eds.; Saunders; Saunders and Aghaie).

Playing with trauma: interreactivity, empathy, and complicity in the walking dead video game

Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so the theme of trauma and its accompanying tropes have been seeping into video games over the last two decades. In spite of the discernible trauma trend within video games, however, and the potential they exhibit for representing trauma in new ways, they have received very little critical notice from trauma theorists. In this article, we argue that a trauma-theoretical study of games has much to offer our understanding of the ways that trauma can be represented, in addition to giving game studies scholars further insight into how games manage to elicit such strong emotions and difficult ethical quandaries in players. We demonstrate this by performing a close reading of one recent and much-discussed game, The Walking Dead: Season One, analyzing how it incorporates psychological trauma in terms of inter(re)activity, empathy, and complicity.

Wor(l)ds of grief: Traumatic memory and literary witnessing in cross-cultural perspective

Considering the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery can help the debate over the perceived monocultural bias of trauma theory in its ‘classical’, mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which the field prides itself. Insofar as the TRC mapped Euro-American concepts of trauma and recovery onto an apartheid-colonial situation, it was subject to the same problems and limitations faced by trauma theory—problems and limitations which post-apartheid literature has not been slow to confront. Sindiwe Magona’s truth-and-reconciliation novel Mother to Mother, for example, can be seen to supplement the work of the TRC by critically revisiting its limits, exclusions, and elisions—and thus also to suggest a possible way for ‘traditional’ trauma theory to reinvent and renew itself.

Nachträglichkeit: A Freudian perspective on delayed traumatic reactions:

The Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit is central to the psychoanalytical understanding of trauma. However, it has not received much attention within the contemporary field of trauma studies. This paper attempts to reconstruct the logic inherent to this concept by examining Freud’s remarks on the case of Emma. Furthermore, it is argued that Nachträglichkeit offers an interesting perspective on both (a) the well-established yet controversial finding that traumatic reactions sometimes follow in the wake of non-Criterion A events (so-called minor stressors or life events) and (b) the often-neglected phenomenon of delayed-onset PTSD. These two phenomena will appear to be related in some instances. Nachträglichkeit clarifies one way in which traumatic encounters are mediated by subjective dimensions above and beyond the objective particularities of both the event and the person. It demonstrates that the subjective impact of an event is not given once and for all but is malleable by subsequent experiences.

Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory

This essay explores a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies. Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), George Turner’s novel The Sea and Summer (1987), and Jan Zalasiewicz’s popular science book The Earth after Us (2008) all feature a historian, archivist, or geologist who looks back on our present moment from a distant vantage point in a dystopian, (almost) post-human future irrevocably marked by climate change. These works can thus be seen to respond to the challenge of the Anthropocene—an era that requires the future anterior tense for its very conceptualization— to consider human and inhuman scales in relation to one another. The preoccupation with anticipated memory and preliminary or proleptic mourning evident in fictional future histories of climate change, which subvert the customary parameters of memory in terms of both scale and directionality, resonates with recent calls for memory studies to become more future-oriented instead of merely backward-looking. Scholars typically seek to make memory studies relevant to the present and the future by forging more robust links between memory and transitional justice or human rights discourses. Climate fiction of the future-history variety—which mourns future losses proleptically in order for these losses not to come to pass in the first place—presents another promising avenue for further research in the same spirit.

Badiou's theory of the event and the politics of trauma recovery

There exists a conceptual parallel between psychological accounts of psychic trauma on the one hand, and French philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of the event on the other: both are defined by a relation of incommensurability or excessiveness with regard to the pre-existent context or system. Further development of this parallel, i.e., viewing trauma as an event in the Badiouian sense, enables us to pinpoint and clarify a logical fallacy at work in psychological theories of post-traumatic growth. By thinking of trauma recovery as a process of accommodating the pre-existent mental schemata to the “new trauma-related information,” these theories risk taking as a given that which must first be constituted by the subject: the “content” (i.e., “information”) of the trauma. By emphasizing the necessity of the activity of the subject for the development of a new context that allows the event to be “read,” Badiou’s theory of the subject offers a way around the aforementioned logical fallacy. In so doing, it re-introduces the essential yet generally neglected political dimension of trauma recovery. This is illustrated through the example of the speak-outs of the 1970s women’s liberation movement.

Memory studies and the Anthropocene: A roundtable:

The essays gathered here are slightly revised versions of the position papers presented as part of the roundtable on “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene” at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in January 2017. What sparked this roundtable is the increasing currency of the Anthropocene, on the one hand, and the observation that the field of memory studies has lately begun to grapple with its implications in earnest, on the other. The participants, all of them leading scholars in the fields of memory studies and/or the environmental humanities, had been asked to respond to the following questions: “What are the implications of the notion of the Anthropocene for memory studies? How, if at all, does the awareness of living in a new geological epoch defined by the actions of human beings affect the objects of memory, the scales of remembrance, and the field’s humanist underpinnings?”

Towards an Understanding of Drone Fiction

Since the end of the twentieth century, strike-capable military drones have rapidly evolved from an ominous near-future technology, seldom discussed outside of science fiction or top-secret military contexts, to a burgeoning multi-billion dollar international industry at the centre of public scrutiny and interest. Meanwhile, the figure of the drone has saturated Western public consciousness to the point that it can be described as a trope. Sparking the interest of artists, writers, and filmmakers, drone warfare has begun to feature in a wide range of films, books, and art installations, and this flood of drone-related media seems unlikely to peter out. To date, however, little academic work has looked in depth at cultural interpretations of drones and the role they serve in fictional(ized) narratives. What is urgently needed to better our understanding of the drone, we argue, is a cultural studies perspective that is able to assess the drone as a fictional, narrative construct, while still taking account of its very real, material consequences for both pilots and victims. This article aims to introduce readers to the nascent field of drone fiction, providing a jumping-off point for future research into the figure of the drone. Here, we explore how drone warfare is mediated through three different drone-fictional works: the semi-autobiographical book The Drone Eats with Me by Atef Abu Saif, the experimental video game Unmanned by Molleindustria, and the short film 5,000 Feet Is the Best by Omer Fast. Through close readings of these varied works, we draw attention to what each particular mode of mediation reveals about the effects of drones on those who work with or live around them.

On not closing the loop: empathy, ethics, and transcultural witnessing

That an empathic response to testimonies can lead to altruism is a key assumption of much cultural research on trauma and witnessing, which prides itself on its ethical commitment. Most trauma theorists also agree that empathy is to be distinguished from forms of affective involvement that do not recognize and respect the otherness of the other, and which are variously referred to as sympathy, projective identification, incorporation, or crude empathy. While this caveat against imperialism and appropriation is meant to prevent empathy from turning into a closed-loop process, canonical trauma theory itself has been plagued by Eurocentrism from its inception, as it tends not to adequately address the sufferings of members of non-Western or minority groups. In this essay, I will discuss the challenges that transcultural witnessing poses for empathic understanding and ethical thinking, using both theoretical and literary texts as examples, and focusing specifically on Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What. Published by McSweeney’s in 2006, What Is the What, subtitled The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, is a collaborative first-person testimony that tells the story of a refugee from the second Sudanese civil war. I argue that in this book Eggers manages both to stay true to the continuing cultural demand for empathy with distant others and to defuse or counter the prevailing scepticism about the morality of empathic identification that tends to find such efforts hopelessly wanting. What Is the What does not resolve all the moral ambiguities surrounding transcultural witnessing, but it is unafraid to confront them and refuses to be paralysed by them. The novel harnesses feeling in the face of suffering while continually reminding the reader that Deng’s experiences are not his or hers to inhabit. Rather than solidifying an already existing community, it calls a community of otherwise distant and disconnected people into being for the purposes of alleviating suffering.

Entangled Memories in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay

This chapter will examine the mnemonic connections established between the Holocaust and histories of (post)colonial suffering in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1998 [1988]), another novel which reflects and elicits a relational understanding of trauma. Baumgartner’s Bombay recounts the tragic life and violent death of Hugo Baumgartner, a Jew who emigrates from Nazi Germany to India in the late 1930s, thus escaping the Holocaust in which his mother will be killed—or so we infer from the fact that the last sign of life he receives from her is a postcard sent from a Nazi concentration camp dated February 1941 (his father gassed himself to death before Baumgartner’s departure following temporary detention in Dachau). However, he finds himself imprisoned as an enemy alien in a British internment camp for the length of the war. When finally released, he is delivered into the chaos and escalating violence of pre-Partition Calcutta. He flees to Bombay, where he spends the rest of his life, only to have Germany catch up with him in the end: in the late 1980s the elderly and impoverished Baumgartner is stabbed to death in his apartment by Kurt, a young German drug addict.