Indeed, words associated with trauma theory–not only “trauma” itself, but also “triggered,” “PTSD,” “witness,” and “survivor” are deployed so frequently they border on meaningless. (One most recent and very public incident took place after the Oscar ceremony, when Amy Schumer said that she is “triggered and traumatized” by the now infamous slap). We have reached a critical moment in trauma studies where trauma is both everywhere and nowhere. This panel explores the different challenges confronting those who write about trauma while proposing that the terms developed by trauma theory remain useful and should not be discarded, even as – or especially as – we begin to formulate a new understanding of the costs and benefits of the field.
Mikhal Dekel’s paper, “Refugee Memoir and the Politics of Trauma” argues that we have witnessed in the last two decades both conscious and perhaps inadvertent gatekeeping about what should be discussed as a trauma narrative. Dekel’s recent memoir, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugree Odyssey not only tells the personal family story of her father as a Holocaust refugee, but also redefines the idea of “Holocaust refugee” in and of itself in detailing the under-recognized flight of Polish Jews into the Soviet Union as they escaped from the Nazi occupation of Poland–a journey that leads through Russia, Uzbekistan and Iran. In her paper, Dekel will discuss the efficacy of the trauma model as a structural basis for her memoir. Simultaneously, she will discuss the political conditions that made it possible - or impossible - for the subjects of her book to define themselves as survivors, or trauma victims.
Aimee Pozorski’s paper, “Archive Failure: The Lost Children of the Global Refugee Crisis” looks to refugee literature published in the last five years as a guide for updating the theoretical discourse of trauma for the 21st century. One such novel, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive: A Novel (2019) reveals the impossibility of accounting for the lost lives of children during the present-day global refugee crisis. At the heart of this novel is the very question we must ask ourselves, that we must ask of trauma theory: How do we tell the story of those who are forever lost? In asking this question, Pozorski’s paper reads Derrida as a philosopher of trauma in light of his 1994 formulation of the archive in “Memory: The Question of the Archives,” where he theorizes a future possibility in the archive, the embodiment of new and productive ways to understand history. Whereas Derrida begins with the notion that archive (arkhē) means simultaneously “commencement” and “commandment,” such refugee literature as Luiselli’s turns this notion upside down. What would it mean to think of the archive not as a future or even a fever, but as a failure—the failure to keep safe even the histories of our collective pasts and to protect the children who are lost in our forgetting?
Sarah Senk’s paper, “Two Pandemics: Narratives of COVID-19 Trauma” builds on Pozorski’s notion of “archive failure” by exploring how the explosion of texts about the COVID-19 pandemic has tended to center “lockdown” stories - at the expense of stories about the dead and dying. Senk argues that the recent proliferation of lockdown texts (including Bo Burnham’s Inside, Charles Finch’s What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year, Gary Shteyngart’s, Our Country Friends, and Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays have already begun to shape public memory and a conception of what constitutes pandemic trauma. These texts tend to be generally philosophical or reflective, foregrounding people more detached from actual COVID deaths but nevertheless mourning the loss of abstracts – human connection, faith in the capacity of institutions to protect, a sense of security or normalcy, etc. At the heart of these texts are “big questions” about humanity and isolation, as well as meditations on contemporary technologies that mediate experience; but these stories supplant trauma narratives that could never be the subject of nostalgic longing.