Cultural Trauma

Amer J Sociol, 2002

In this book, Ron Eyerman explores the formation of the African American identity through the theory of cultural trauma. The trauma in question is slavery, not as an insti -tution or as personal experience, but as ...

2010

2000

How do we conceptualise the African diaspora? The forced migration through the slave trade and its impact on the cultures of origin that slaves brought with them to the Americas has constituted an important area of academic research since the pioneering work of Melville Herskovits and Roger Bastide. Prior to their studies, it was assumed that slaves in the Americas quickly lost their own language and cultures whereas Herskovits and Bastide argued that African cultural influences were retained and persisted into the 20th century.(1) In contrast, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price (1976), prioritised the ways in which ethnically fragmented slaves created new creole cultures.(2) Revisiting these debates over African retentions, Ira Berlin and John Thornton argued that slaves were far less heterogeneous than Mintz and Price suggested. Slaves, argues Thornton, came from only three diverse linguistic and cultural areas, Upper Guinea, lower Guinea and Angola and this fostered communication and common cultural understandings and practices amongst slaves.(3) Thus evolved a contentious and ongoing debate regarding the persistence of cultural links between Africa and the Americas to which Identity in the Shadow of Slavery contributes in extending the analysis of diasporic links to include the areas of West Africa that many slaves were drawn from.

This paper focuses on the current and ongoing engagement with slavery as a space for traumatic remembrance and explores how one’s sense of self and identity might be transformed by applying ethics to the remembrance of slavery. I reject the ideas central to trauma theory purported by Cathy Caruth (1991) that considers cultural trauma to be rooted in the tragic episode itself, arguing that it is driven by the strategic, practical and political interests of both nationalist discourses and the Black diaspora. By engaging with new thinking in cultural trauma proposed by Jeffrey C. Alexander (2004), I maintain that trauma is evoked through the effects of stories, narratives and images which are adopted and accepted as our history and attempt to look past the constructed slavery narratives premised on death and victimhood to reveal subjectivities that expose tropes of renewal, creative energy and agency. I further criticise trauma theory’s denial of unconscious fantasies and psychopolitical forces behind the representation of traumatic memories and consider the importance of applying psychosocial thinking to the impact of this cultural atrocity on a post-slavery generation. The paper attempts to fashion an ethical mode of remembrance by engaging with postcolonial thinkers such as Franz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman and Toni Morrison and includes literary pieces by Caryl Philips, Octavia Butler and William Blake. In addition, Judith Butler’s (2005) theory of ‘opacity’ is used to reveal the fragmented nature of slavery and slave subjectivity. Overall, I argue that applying ethical thinking to the memory of slavery is of critical importance not only for the creation of black subjectivity and political lives, but also for the future of multicultural relations in the UK. Keywords: Memory, Slavery, Cultural Trauma, Psychopolitical, Ethical Remembrance.

Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2021

This article provides a much needed inquiry into the legacy of slavery from an interdisciplinary perspective, including the historical, socioeconomic, political, and the epistemic. It makes an important distinction between the legacy of slavery and its persisting damages. By investigating this legacy’s effects on peoples, communities, and societies, it highlights the imperative of situating the pains and sufferings of historical traumas within contemporary structural oppression and institutional discrimination that have perpetuated these harms. The article consists of four sections: it first outlines the legacy of slavery, comprised in instrumentalizing black bodies for economic gains, employing political aggression to colonize both lands and minds, applying racialized discourse to demean and dehumanize, and oppressing people of African descent through structural violence. It then discusses the legacy’s injuries as transgenerational and cultural traumas, and how these wounds are exp...

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2021

The people of Africa were dragged to the New World, where they were enslaved and put to work and starved to death. The atrocities that African people witness are ongoing even today. This paper aims to take a journey through the history of African people. The article is divided into two parts: the first part is a concise history of the Atlantic Slave Trade and of its cultural and sociological aftermath in the New World, where the struggle between the South and the North exploited African Americans even after the Civil War. The second part focuses on the literary production of the African people, in order to connect these with experiences defined by pain, agony and nostalgia.