124071 VO Culture, Society and the Media (2015W)

Since the late 1980s, trauma from being merely a psychiatric category has turned into a cultural phenomenon in its own right. Kirby Farrell, for instance, speaks of current Western cultures as ‘post-traumatic cultures’ and argues that trauma in the Western world is nowadays as strong a trope as ‘the world as stage’ was during Renaissance times. Increasingly, we are facing a ‘memory culture’ obsessed with memory discourses and memorialisation processes. This unprecedented concern with questions of memory have led some critics to speak of a “memory mania”, the industry of “memory consumption and production”.

In this lecture we will look at different cross-cultural and trans-national discursive practices of historical trauma: War trauma, the Holocaust, Apartheid South Africa, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We will start by providing a critical genealogy of the term tracing the cultural context that shaped it and a brief history of the concept throughout psychoanalytic discourse: the shaping influence of the hysterical female body, followed by the image of the shell-shocked soldier in WWI and combat fatigue of WWII, up to the official birth of PTSD, which entered the official manual of mental disorders and the official cultural imaginary in 1980. We will then explore the different ways in which this psychiatric concept has been appropriated by political discourses to create hierarchies of trauma, essentialist identities and selective memorial practices – from monuments to museums to trauma as fetish and product of consumer culture.