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Cultural Amnesia: Memory, Trauma, and War Author(s): Janice Haaken Source: Signs, Vol. 28, No.

1, Gender and Cultural Memory (Autumn, 2002), pp. 455-457 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175727 Accessed: 08/05/2009 14:39
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lethal impulses of a masculinity shored up by a homophobia that is also a disavowed identification? And is this only about "sexuality"? Department of Literature Department of Women'sStudies University of California, Santa Cruz I

Cultural Amnesia: Memory, Trauma, and War


Janice Haaken

hile I was doing researchin Guinea in the summer of 1999, a village woman informed me of a legend told throughout West Africa. "It is not good to send your children to America,"she said, "forin America, they bury Africansin shallow graves." Long after returning to the United States, this image of Africans buried in shallow graves haunted me. As a metaphor the image evoked American amnesia over slavery and colonial exploitation-the refusalto mourn and make reparationover America'spart in the massive suffering of third-worldpeoples. After returning home with my videotaped interviewsof women in refugee camps, I was caught between the impulse to forget and a moral mandate to find a means of representing the experiencesof women who had entrusted me with their stories. Among other dilemmas, I struggled with how to avoid the colonizers' habit of extractingresources from the third world and producing them in the West. Much like other raw material, trauma stories are open to a wide range of interpretationsand social uses, including exploitive ones. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, feminists confront difficult questions of how to frame victim/perpetrator relations in a way that goes beyond moral outrage and simple gender dichotomies. A related issue concerns the limits of trauma theories that overlook the ways in which accounts are socially influenced as opposed to emerging in situ from horrific events. By definition, traumatic events overwhelm existing meaning systems. But this very disruption of normalcy invites storytelling as people attempt to make sense of what has happened. The hypnotic power of the images-bombings, corpses, the palpable horror of those on the scene-may
[Signs: Journal of Womenin Culture and Society2002, vol. 28, no. 1] ? 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2801-0025$10.00

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Roundtable

blind us to the psychological and political processes shaping the construction of the story. The widespread currency of posttraumatic stress disorder in framing the responses of New Yorkers-or America in general-to the September 11 attack is itself a symptom of cultural amnesia in that it narrowly focuses on concrete dramaticevents while neglecting context. The idea that planes can become bombs, that the fabric of daily life may become inflammatory, is not destabilizing as a result of the terrorists' attacks alone. The "posttraumatic" responses are intimately related to "pretraumatic"currents in U.S. society. The concept of a syndrome obscures the social symbolic uses of trauma imagery and how dramatic events become the focal point for more ambiguous anxieties. Unlike the chronic suffering of daily life, such as overwork, alienating work, low wages, or poor health, acute episodes break through the numbing threshold of unresponsiveness to suffering in U.S. society. At the same time, they may reinforce hysterical modes of storytelling-a reliance on dramatic, emotional accounts to communicate distress. In the political choreographing of the war on terrorism, Muslim men are cast in the role of the "bad" patriarchsand the United States in the role of the "good" protectors, the guardians of women's freedom. This is an old melodrama under patriarchy,based on what psychoanalysts call splitting, or separating the world into all-good and all-bad categories. Projective identification is an elaboration of this defensive splitting, where disturbing feelings of destructiveness within the self or the group are kept at a distance by projecting the "bad" onto an external other. Feminism, no less than other political formations, may engage in forms of splitting and projection in maintaining a sense of goodness and group cohesion. The casting of men as violence prone and women as peace oriented does not take us very far into the complex determinants and dynamics of war. Western feminist campaigns also may inadvertently support neocolonial forms of domination if representations of male "savagery" are stripped of their wider context, including how more remote playersare implicated in the suffering. By decontextualizing male violence, the role of U.S. foreign policy and international capital in generating the massive suffering on display remains on the periphery of our vision. At the direct point of violent contact, perpetrator/victim relationships are viscerallyunambiguous. The further one moves from "ground zero," however, the more complex and murky the picture becomes. Under conditions of crisis, it is difficult to hold this wider picture in view, particularly as graphic images in the media hypnotically fixate on the bad boys on the

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ground. Victimized women and children are introduced as silent props, present to vivify the barbarismof dark men cast as threatening other. Western feminists are not responsible for this racist melodrama. But we do carry some responsibility for breaking the hypnotic trance, a delirious state that becomes particularlyacute during epidemics of war fever. Department of Psychology Portland State University I

The War of the Fathers: Trauma, Fantasy, and September 11


Susannah Radstone

ell before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it was already commonplace to suggest that the twentieth century would be "remembered as the century of historical trauma."' On this account, the twentieth century emerged as a century'markedby events of previously unimaginable "nature, scope and implications."2 From the perspective of "traumatheory," such events short-circuit (defensive) sensemaking capacities. Instead of passing through processes of narrativization and memory making, they pierce those defenses, lodging in the mind or in the culture as the shrapnel of traumatic symptomatology. This view is contestable on two grounds: on the claims that it makes for the unprecedented impact of events of the recent past and on the theory of trauma that it associates with the impact of catastrophic events. To speak of September 11 in the context of traumaprompts analysesof the hidden wounds etched on culturalmemory by these attacks.But trauma proposes a passive, "acted-on"victim or culture whose wounds become the focus. According to traumatheory, the impact of catastrophicevents blocks free association, that creative process through which experience, memory, and fantasyarewoven into the texture of a life-or a culture. Traumatheory
Suzette A. Henke, ShatteredSubjects:Trauma and Testimonyin Women's Life Writing (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1998); see also Hayden White, "The Modernist Event," in The Persistenceof History: Cinema, Televisionand the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 17-38, esp. 20-22. 2 White, 20. in and Society [Signs: Journalof Women Culture 2002, vol. 28, no. 1] 0 2002 by The University Chicago. rightsreserved. of All 0097-9740/2003/2801-0032$10.00

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