E. Ann Kaplan explores the relationship between the impact of trauma on individuals and on entire cultures and nations. Arguing that humans possess a need to draw meaning from personal experience and to communicate what happens to others, she examines the forms that are used to bridge the experience.

The contributors to this volume look to the future of feminist theory and practice, specifically in terms of their complex relationship with the global and local configurations of postmodernity. It focuses on political issues and on questions of the body.

Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television debates the ways in which melodrama expresses and gives meaning to: trauma and pathos; memory and historical re-visioning; home and borders; gendered and queer relations; the family and psychic identities; the national and emerging public cultures; and morality and ethics.

This book examines recent cinematic representations of the traumatic legacies of national and international events and processes. Whilst not ignoring European and Hollywood cinema, it includes studies of films about countries which have been less well-represented in cinematic trauma studies, including Australia, Rwanda, Chile and Iran. Each essay establishes national and international contexts that are relevant to the films considered. All essays also deal with form, whether this means the use of specific techniques to represent certain aspects of trauma or challenges to certain genre conventions to make them more adaptable to the traumatic legacies addressed by directors. The editors argue that the healing processes associated with such legacies can helpfully be studied through the idiom of ‘scar-formation’ rather than event-centred ‘wound-creation’.

This volume addresses the relation of trauma to transnational modern mass media. The first of its kind, Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations provides ten essays which explore the ways trauma works itself out as media — in images in (and as) film, photography, and video — in global cultural flows. The focus of our volume on the matrix of trauma, visual media and modernity seeks to engage and go beyond current tendencies in trauma studies. The book discusses how trauma presented in the media spills over national boundaries and can be found in images across divergent cultures in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and America. From the Holocaust to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, from Taiwan’s colonial experience to the catastrophe of Hiroshima, from attempted annihilation of Australian Aborigines to attempted reconciliation in South Africa, these essays offer the reader a plethora of images of trauma for comparison and contrast.

In this book, Tarja Laine provides insights into how traumatic cinema invites profound affective engagement with the pathology of memory that lies at the heart of trauma. The author reveals that traumatic cinema communicates the inability to process a traumatic event by means of its aesthetic specificity as a time-based medium.

Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television debates the ways in which melodrama expresses and gives meaning to: trauma and pathos; memory and historical re-visioning; home and borders; gendered and queer relations; the family and psychic identities; the national and emerging public cultures; and morality and ethics.

In Popular Trauma Culture, Anne Rothe argues that American Holocaust discourse has a particular plot structure—characterized by a melodramatic conflict between good and evil and embodied in the core characters of victim/survivor and perpetrator—and that it provides the paradigm for representing personal experiences of pain and suffering in the mass media. The book begins with an analysis of Holocaust clichés, including its political appropriation, the notion of vicarious victimhood, the so-called victim talk rhetoric, and the infusion of the composite survivor figure with Social Darwinism. Readers then explore the embodiment of popular trauma culture in two core mass media genres: daytime TV talk shows and misery memoirs. Rothe conveys how victimhood and suffering are cast as trauma kitsch on talk shows like Oprah and as trauma camp on modern-day freak shows like Springer. The discussion also encompasses the first scholarly analysis of misery memoirs, the popular literary genre that has been widely critiqued in journalism as pornographic depictions of extreme violence. Currently considered the largest growth sector in book publishing worldwide, many of these works are also fabricated. And since forgeries reflect the cultural entities that are most revered, the book concludes with an examination of fake misery memoirs.

Essays exploring the role of trauma in modern art.

This book examines how drama therapists conceptualize and respond to relational and systemic trauma across systems of care including mental health clinics, schools, and communities burdened by historical and current wounds. This second edition of Trauma-Informed Drama Therapy: Transforming Clinics, Classrooms, and Communities offers a broad range of explorations in engaging with traumatic experience, across settings (clinical, educational, performance) and geographies (North America, Germany, Sri Lanka, South Africa, India, Belgium), and methodologies (Sesame, DvT, ethnography, performance, CANY, Self Rev). Each effort runs into obstacles, resistances, biases, and random events that highlight the authors’ passion and courage. No solutions are to be found. No grand schemes are proposed. Just hard work in the face of impenetrable truth: we are still at the beginning of understanding how to achieve an equitable, moral, accountable, healthy collective being-with. Confronting trauma, listening to victim testimonies, sitting with unsettling uncertainty, understanding the enormity of the problem, are difficult tasks, and over time wear people down. The chapters in this book belie this trend as they illustrate how the passion, creativity, faith, and perseverance of drama therapists the world over, each in their own limited way, can help. In each of these chapters you will read about people who have been pushed to the margins of existence, and then, how drama therapists have worked to remind them of their immutable, unique value that can transcend and transform those margins into spaces of care, power, and possibility. It will be useful for creative arts therapists, mental health professionals, educators, students and many others interested in the role of the drama and performance in the treatment of trauma.