This panel investigates how postcolonial authors, filmmakers, and artists have experimented with aesthetic and narrative forms to represent trauma in ways that defy conventional representational strategies. It brings together four papers that interrogate the limits of language, visibility, and spectatorship in relation to colonial and postcolonial violence. Working across diverse media — film, graphic narrative, and experimental literature — and geographies ranging from the Caucasus and Kashmir to Southeast Asia and France, the session foregrounds how trauma is not only represented but formally embodied, silenced, fragmented, and made to exceed representation itself.
In the current global moment, marked by resurging nationalisms, ongoing colonial violence, and ideological polarization, it is crucial to turn toward voices, forms, and aesthetics that exceed Western paradigms. This panel proposes that experimentation is not merely stylistic but politically urgent. By engaging with marginalized cultures and formally innovative responses to trauma, we insist on the necessity of opening up scholarship to non-hegemonic epistemologies and aesthetic practices. The MLA, as a global forum, must now more than ever amplify the languages, bodies, and silences that dominant narratives have historically excluded. In this sense, the panel reflects an intentional turn toward global and cross-cultural dialogue as both an ethical imperative and an academic necessity in a moment when the demand for decolonized and inclusive knowledge production is more pressing than ever.
The rationale for organizing a session on this topic lies in the increasing interest across literary and cultural studies in how postcolonial contexts produce aesthetic representations of trauma that resist easy narrative resolution or visual codification. Trauma studies, while deeply informed by psychoanalytic and Western models, must be rethought when engaged with postcolonial histories of occupation, marginalization, censorship, and violence. This panel seeks to contribute to that rethinking by focusing on aesthetic experimentation as a site where trauma and resistance converge.
Each presentation offers a distinct approach to postcolonial trauma through formal innovation and critical frameworks:
- "Unwatchable Footage, Coerced Spectatorship, and Imperial Forms in Kantemir Balagov’s Closeness" draws on the work of Ariella Azoulay and Nancy Condee to analyze the insertion of real massacre footage into a fictional narrative. The paper explores how Russian imperial legacies shape both the narrative and the gaze, and how coerced spectatorship destabilizes traditional modes of cinematic empathy.
- "Representing Trauma in Temsüla Ao’s Oeuvre" engages with Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence" and indigenous feminist theory to examine trauma as experienced by Indigenous communities in Nagaland, India. Through what the presenter terms "testimonio poetics," the paper traces ecological, intergenerational, and gendered trauma, articulating how oral tradition and matriarchal memory reshape trauma discourse beyond Western paradigms.
- "Trauma in Muslim Comics" draws on visual culture studies, trauma theory, and postcolonial media analysis to explore how artists such as Leila Abdelrazaq and Malik Sajad utilize the graphic novel form to portray collective trauma among Muslim communities in Palestine and Kashmir. The paper argues that comics generate a counter-archive through their synergy of text and image, challenging both the limits of language and stereotypical representations of Muslims in dominant visual cultures.
- "Marguerite Duras and the Language of Silence" focuses on the aesthetics of silence, interruption, and sensory excess in L’Amant, Duras’s explicitly colonial novel set in French Indochina. Through the figure of the young white female protagonist entangled in a relationship of economic, racial, and sexual asymmetry, the paper explores how the colonial body becomes a site of trauma, desire, and unspeakable memory. Engaging with postcolonial feminist theory (Spivak, Trinh T. Minh-ha) and the concept of opacity (Glissant), the presentation investigates how Duras constructs an anti-narrative form that resists Orientalist legibility and operates within a necropolitics of desire. The paper situates L’Amant at the intersection of postcolonial memory, traumatic silence, and the limits of representation, emphasizing Duras’s refusal of narrative mastery and her commitment to aesthetic and ethical experimentation.
The panel format will include four 12-minute presentations, followed by 15 minutes of open discussion. This structure is designed to encourage in-depth engagement among panelists and attendees. Visual material will be incorporated into the presentations, particularly for the papers on cinema and comics.
This session reflects a commitment to diversity in multiple dimensions: geographical (Russia, India, Palestine, France), medial (film, literature, comics), and theoretical (trauma studies, postcolonial theory, feminist, indigenous, and decolonial frameworks). The aim is not only to present original research, but to create an inclusive and generative space for thinking together about how trauma is represented, and reimagined across postcolonial forms.