Introduction: Mourning and memory

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 16-29

  Saunders, Rebecca ^a   Aghaie, Kamran ^b  

^a ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MEMORY;

EID: 25444496945     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-25-1-17     Document Type: Editorial

References (48)

1. Several recent collections that have explored traumatic memory in "non-Western" contexts include Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
2. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999);
3. and Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff, and Graham Dawson, Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1999).
4. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2.
5. According to the DSM-IV (1994), PTSD may result when a person has been exposed to an event that "involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others" and that produced in the individual a response of "intense fear, helplessness, or horror" (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 4th ed. [Washington, DC: American psychiatric Association, 1994], 467).
6. The characteristic symptoms, according to the manual, include "persistent reexperiencing of the traumatic event, persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness, and persistent symptoms of increased arousal" (463). Judith Herman organizes the symptoms of PTSD into three main categories: hyperarousal ("persistent expectation of danger"), intrusion ("the indelible imprint of the traumatic moment"), and constriction ("the numbing response of surrender"). See Judith Herman, Trauma an Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
7. Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community (New York: Norton, 1994), 230, 228.
8. Ibid., 233.
9. See Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
10. Ron Eyerman, Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.
11. Ibid., 2-3.
12. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
13. For an argument that memory is a practice inseparable from ethics, see Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
14. See, for example, the case studies presented in "Colonial War and Mental Disorders," Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963), 249-310.
15. Like Fanon, Erikson argues that "'trauma' has to be understood as resulting from a constellation of life experiences as well as from a discrete happening" (Kai Erikson, "Notes on Trauma and Community," in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995], 229).
16. Laura Brown lays out this problem in an important critique of the language of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which, until 1994, described PTSD as originating in an event "outside the normal range of human experience." Recognizing, quite rightly, that such a definition begs the question of what exactly delineates "normal human experience," Brown stresses that "'human experience' as referred to in our diagnostic manuals, and as the subject for much of the important writing on trauma, often means 'male human experience.' Or, at the least, an experience common to both women and men. The range of human experience becomes the range of what is normal and usual in the lives of men of the dominant class: white, young, able-bodied, educated, middle-class, Christian men. Trauma is thus that which disrupts these particular human lives, but no other." See Laura Brown, "Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma," in Caruth, Trauma, 101.
17. The term trauma first appears in its modern form in the nineteenth century, with attempts to treat "hysterical" symptoms, the anguish produced by train accidents and shell shock and, later, by concentration camp experiences and domestic abuse. On this history, see Leys, Trauma;
18. on the relation of trauma to modernity, see Rebecca Saunders, At God's Funeral: Lamentation and the Culture of Modernity (forthcoming), chap. 1.
19. Quoted by Eyerman, Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, 5.
20. See Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 51-99.
21. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2.
22. Two classic texts on collective memory are Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
23. and Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
24. See also Eyerman, Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, 5-10.
25. Eyerman, Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, 7.
26. See Leys, Trauma;
27. Herman, Trauma and Recovery;
28. and Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma," in Caruth, Trauma, 158-82.
29. For a recent study that makes use of some similar terms, see E. Alison Holman and Roxane Cohen Silver, "Getting 'Stuck' in the Past: Temporal Orientation and Coping with Trauma," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 1146-63.
30. Kardiner's symptom list became the major source for diagnosis of PTSD.
31. Quoted in Leys, Trauma, 239.
32. See also Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisath, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New York: Guilford, 1996);
33. van der Kolk and van der Hart, "Intrusive Past";
34. and Leys, Trauma, chap. 7.
35. Quoted in Leys, Trauma, 248. Leys has argued at length that this position "remains inadequately formulated and weakly supported by the scientific evidence" (265).
36. Freud's cathartic method (developed in conjunction with the hypnotic treatments of the 1880s) conceived recovery as the "reliving" of the traumatic event accompanied by emotional discharge, but increasingly gave way to "working through" or a process of narrative integration.
37. Eyerman, Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, 8.
38. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les lieux cle mémoire," Representations 26 (1989): 7. In late modernity, Nora argues, the material nature of memory has been tremendously dilated, multiplied, decentralized, and democratized, a process made necessary by the acceleration of history. Modernity's lieux de mémoire, he argues, are "the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it" (12). Huyssen makes a similar point in Twilight Memories: "I would argue," he writes, "that our obsessions with memory function as a reaction formation against the accelerating technical processes that are transforming our Lebenswelt (lifeworld) in quite distinct ways" (7).
39. See Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 8-22;
40. and Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th exp. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
41. Le Goff, History and Memory, xi. Nora is one who takes the view that "memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life.... History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past" ("Between History and Memory," 8).
42. Le Goff, History and Memory, xi.
43. Ibid., xii.
44. Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2002), 14.
45. See Le Goff, History and Memory, 68.
46. See Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). "If it were not for Achilles," Loraux remarks, "whose menis is in all Greek memories, I would readily say that we have here a female model of memory, which the cities try to confine within the anti- (or ante-) political sphere. And, in fact, wrath in mourning, the principle of which is eternal repetition, willingly expresses itself with an aei, and the fascination of this tireless 'always' threatens to set it up as a powerful rival to the political aei that establishes the memory of institutions" (98).
47. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 98.
48. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, introduction to "Memory and Counter-Memory," special issue, Representations 26 (1989): 2.