This round-table, which featured literary critics Professor Stef Craps, Professor Bryan Cheyette and Dr. Alan Gibbs, was recorded as part of the “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” symposium organized by Dr. Sonya Andermahr and Dr. Larissa Allwork at The School of The Arts, The University of Northampton (15 May 2015). Convened a week after the University of Zaragoza’s “Memory Frictions” conference, where Cheyette, Gibbs, Andermahr and Allwork gave papers, the Northampton symposium and round-table was sponsored by The School of The Arts to coincide with Andermahr’s guest editorship of this special issue of Humanities. Craps, Cheyette and Gibbs addressed five questions during the round-table. Namely, does trauma studies suffer from a form of psychological universalism? Do you see any signs that trauma studies is becoming more decolonized? What are the challenges of a decolonized trauma studies for disciplinary thinking? How does a decolonized trauma studies relate to pedagogical ethics? Finally, where do you see the future of the field? While this edited transcript retains a certain informality of style, it offers a significant contribution to knowledge by capturing a unique exchange between three key thinkers in contemporary trauma studies, providing a timely analysis of the impact of postcolonial theory on trauma studies, the state of the field and its future possibilities. Issues addressed include the problematic scholarly tendency to universalize a western model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); the question of the centrality of the Holocaust in trauma studies and the implications of this for the study of atrocities globally; the vexed issues posed by the representation of perpetrators; as well as how the basic tenets of western cultural trauma theory, until recently so often characterized by a Caruth-inspired focus on belatedness and afterwardness, are being rethought, both in response to developments in the US and in answer to the challenge to ‘decolonize’ trauma studies.

On 18 March 2015 we had the rare opportunity to interview the celebrated American author Dave Eggers and Mimi Lok, co-founder with Eggers of the socially engaged oral history non-profit Voice of Witness, in front of a student audience at the Vooruit cultural center in Ghent, Belgium. The occasion for their visit was Eggers’s being awarded the 2015 Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University in recognition of his human rights work. The interview aimed to give the audience an overall sense of the various creative and charitable projects in which Eggers and Lok are involved and which have earned them widespread acclaim. This published version of it is an edited and condensed transcript. The interview consists of two parts. The first part deals with Eggers’s literary work, homing in on The Circle in particular. The second part focuses on Voice of Witness and on how this project relates to Eggers’s work as a writer.

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.

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 preexistent 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.

This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and Melanesia that takes place in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), the final installment of the much-lauded Regeneration trilogy. Published two years before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, which marked the unofficial end of the British Empire, and four years after the end of the neocolonial charade of the first Gulf War, The Ghost Road brings its readers back to the beginning of the twentieth century, cannily meshing a carefully researched portrayal of the First World War with its protagonist’s dreams and memories of a Melanesian society suffocating under the oppressive weight of colonial law. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia, we read the success of the Booker Prize-winning novel as reflecting a deep-seated anxiety about the downfall of empire(s) that continues to characterize political life in the West. The novel’s strength lies in the way it highlights the insidious workings of class prejudices on the front lines, the complex matrix of sexuality, duty, and friendship that defined relationships between men in the trenches, and the reshuffling of traditional gender roles that the war brought about both at home and abroad. In spite of its merits, however, the transformative and challenging confrontation with the human cost of Britain’s imperial  transgressions that The Ghost Road offers is consistently deferred and masked behind its more visible portrayal of the melancholic fantasy of a racially homogenous, tragic, and exclusively Western First World War.

In their article “McSweeney’s and the Challenges of the Marketplace for Independent Publishing” Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen argue that the artistic projects of the US-American author, activist, and editor Dave Eggers are marked by a tension between the desire for independence and the demands of brand-building. The article offers a close analysis of the materiality and paratexts of one particular issue of McSweeney’s, the literary magazine of which Eggers is the founding editor. Both the content and the apologetically aggressive tone of Eggers’s editorial statements betray a deep unease with the inability to inhabit a cultural and economic position that is untainted by the compromises that publishing requires. Still, this disavowed complicity with the market in fact sustains Eggers’s editorial practice in McSweeney’s, which, in marked contrast to his explicit statements, thrives on a dynamic of commodification.

Michael Chabon’s novella The Final Solution (2004), which first appeared in the Paris Review in 2003 with the subtitle A Story of Detection, lends itself to being interpreted as an allegory of man’s futile quest for understanding of the Holocaust. In this reading, the detective story that the novella recounts against the background of the Nazi extermination of the Jews illustrates the inaccessibility of the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust to rational inquiry. The Final Solution can thus be seen to abide by the demands of what Gillian Rose has called Holocaust piety; that is, devotion to the idea that the Nazi genocide is a radically unique event outside of human history, ineffable, beyond comprehension, and impervious to analysis. Our reading of The Final Solution, however, supplements and complicates the standard interpretation of the novella as an exercise in Holocaust piety by focusing on an “impious” subtext that appears to contradict some of the text’s more overt assumptions. We argue that the novella challenges the dominant conception of the Holocaust as an incomprehensible, ineffable, sacred event by returning the Nazi genocide to the realm of history – more specifically, the history of a colonizing Western modernity. The Final Solution breaks with Holocaust piety, we contend, through the proliferation of mirroring effects that suggest continuities and parallels between the Third Reich and the European colonial empires and between the plights of their respective victims.

Considered in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery, the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked shed an interesting light on debates currently being waged by scholars in the field of trauma studies 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. In Writing History, Writing Trauma Dominick LaCapra reflects that the TRC “was in its own way a trauma recovery center” (43). The TRC attempted to uncover the truth about the gross human rights violations committed during apartheid and to promote national unity and reconciliation through a collective process of working through the past. I will demonstrate that, 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. The novelist André Brink has famously declared that “unless the enquiries of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) are extended, complicated, and intensified in the imaginings of literature, society cannot sufficiently come to terms with its past to face the future” (30). I will show that Sindiwe Magona’s truth-and-reconciliation novel Mother to Mother (1998)—a fictionalized account of the Amy Biehl killing—assumes just this task: it 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.

The poetry of Eavan Boland, Ireland’s leading woman poet, is marked by an acute awareness of the problems attendant on the recovery of the experience of subaltern or oppressed women. Rather than usurping the place of the other and presuming to speak for her, Boland’s work stages the poet’s attempt to gain access to the experience of the other and ponders the difficulties and contradictions involved in this endeavour. It does not so much perform an act of ventriloquism—it does not make the subaltern speak, to invoke Gayatri Spivak’s notorious question— as interrogate her silencing and bear witness to an experience that remains fundamentally irrecoverable. Through an analysis of a number of poems which commemorate the victims of the Famine (‘‘The Achill Woman,’’ ‘‘Outside History,’’ ‘‘The Journey,’’ and ‘‘Fever’’), I argue that at the heart of Boland’s testimonial project is an ethics of love—love, not as self-serving benevolence, narcissism, or fusion, but as a non-appropriative encounter with the other which calls the self into question. This ethical love manifests itself not in the poet’s recovery of the voices of subaltern women, but in her invention of a mode of writing that bears witness to its own incapacity of recovering what lies outside history.

This paper presents a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) which explores the author’s struggle with the question of how art might remember suffering without forgetting it. Against claims that he “abstains” from or “holds himself clear” of history, I argue that Coetzee does engage with history in his work, albeit not in any straightforward manner. Waiting for the Barbarians does not recover history as a fully narratable subject, but bears witness to it by refusing to translate the suffering engendered by colonial oppression into historical discourse. The barbarian girl with whom the novel’s protagonist becomes involved is a figure of alterity that embodies a material, unverbalizable history of suffering. Rather than attempting to gain imaginative access to the experience of the other and thereby reducing the other to the same, Coetzee insists on the need to respect the irreducible otherness of the other. Only by opening itself up to a radical experience of abjection, of becoming other, can the self truly witness the suffering of the other.

While Waiting for the Barbarians offers little in the way of resolution or redemption, the text does seem to me to affirm the ground of a certain solidarity. The antihistoricist ethics of remembrance which Coetzee’s novel can be seen to embrace points towards the creation of a more inclusive collectivity, a community that would not be dependent on the affirmation of identity or sameness but founded on a recognition of our infinite difference. This desire to redraw the boundaries of community aligns Coetzee’s novel with the ethico-political project undertaken by Giorgio Agamben in the Homo Sacer series. I will consider Waiting for the Barbarians in the light of Agamben’s analysis of the contemporary biopolitical conditions of existence, which the novel graphically dramatizes, and of his account of testimony as a quintessentially ethical practice in relentless opposition to sovereign power’s reduction of human life to bare life.

The events of September 11, 2001 caused a rupture not only in the normal order of things, but also, and perhaps especially, in the signifying systems underwriting that order. The Naudet brothers’ remarkable 9/11 documentary, which aired on CBS on March 10, 2002 and on TV stations around the world on the first anniversary of the attacks, seeks to re-institute the authority of the conventions and constructions of a culture whose limits the events of September 11 had painfully exposed. The film – entitled 9/11 – is marked by a fundamental tension between the revelation of an abysmal crisis of meaning on the one hand and the desire to bring this crisis under control on the other. The film-makers attempt to mitigate the traumatic potential of their unique atrocity footage by sanitizing it and integrating it into a Hollywood-style coming-of-age drama tracing a probationary firefighter’s perilous journey from innocence to experience. Thus, the focus shifts from a disorienting and overwhelming sense of loss to comforting, ideologically charged notions of heroism and community which perpetuate an idealized national self-image and come to function as a moral justification for retaliation. In its drive to obtain mastery over trauma by rendering it legible in terms of existing cultural codes, 9/11 appears to disregard what Cathy Caruth calls “the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding” (154). Yet, for all its investment in a classical realist aesthetic, the film remains haunted by a traumatic history that exceeds and breaks down accustomed habits of thought, narration and visualization.