An essential tool for healers, therapists, activists, and trauma survivors who are interested in a justice-centered approach to somatic transformation The Politics of Trauma offers somatics with a social analysis. This book is for therapists and social activists who understand that trauma healing is not just for individuals—and that social change is not just for movement builders. Just as health practitioners need to consider the societal factors underlying trauma, so too must activists understand the physical and mental impacts of trauma on their own lives and the lives of the communities with whom they organize. Trauma healing and social change are, at their best, interdependent. Somatics has proven to be particularly effective in addressing trauma, but in practice it typically focuses solely on the individual, failing to integrate the social conditions that create trauma in the first place. Staci K. Haines, somatic innovator and cofounder of generative somatics, invites readers to look beyond individual experiences of body and mind to examine the social, political, and economic roots of trauma—including racism, environmental degradation, sexism, and poverty. Haines helps readers identify, understand, and address these sources of trauma to help us bridge individual healing with social transformation.

Grassroots memorials have become major areas of focus during times of trauma, danger, and social unrest. These improvised memorial assemblages continue to display new and more dynamic ways of representing collective and individual identities and in doing so reveal the steps that shape the national memories of those who struggle to come to terms with traumatic loss. This volume focuses on the hybrid quality of these temporary memorials as both monuments of mourning and as focal points for protest and expression of discontent. The broad range of case studies in this volume include anti-mafia shrines, Theo van Gogh’s memorial, September 11th memorials, March 11th shrines in Madrid, and Carlo Giuliani memorials in Genoa.

In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.

This book is a collection of essays offering an inside view into the inner analysis of traumatic literary studies wherein language is used as a medium of expression so as to interpret man, psyche and memory. By making literature the partner of a dialogue with psychology, in order to better comprehend the psyche, it serves to alter the way of understanding the literary phenomenon. Featuring relevant coverage on topics such as literary production, psychology in literature, identity, and traumatic studies, this book provides in-depth analysis that is suitable for academicians, students, professionals, and researchers interested in discovering more about the relationship between psychology and literature and their effects on thinking.

The Politics of Trauma and Integrity uses the lenses of gender and trauma to tell the stories of narratives testified by two contrasting Japanese "comfort women" survivors. Through an innovative interdisciplinary study of the politics of gendered memory and trauma in historical context, with numerous primary sources for analysis including diaries, interviews, letters and oral testimonies, this book uncovers the life-or-death struggles of Japanese survivors in pursuit of public recognition as the victims of state violence against women. It is set within a gender history of modern Japan, supplemented by feminist activist methodology premised upon political agency that seeks social justice. The author’s analysis draws upon three key concepts: trauma, coherence of the self, and integrity. Focusing upon the role of gender and trauma as the nexus between memory construction and identity formation in modern Japan, the author reveals these women’s relentless quest for their recovery and creation of new identities. This book provides a better understanding of the victims of sexual violence and encourages readers to listen to the voice of trauma, as well as making a significant contribution to the existing research on the ongoing history of sexual violence against women in Japan, the rest of Asia and beyond. It will be of interest to scholars, researchers, activists and all who are interested in the issue of women’s human rights. It provides supplementary reading and research material for history and politics courses relating to Japan and East Asia, memory, identity, trauma, gender, war and feminist activism. This book will also be beneficial to victims of sexual violence as well as the counsellors/psychologists engaging with them.

Memory, Trauma and World Politics focuses on the effect that the memory of traumatic episodes (especially war and genocide) has on shaping contemporary political identities. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book is an incisive treatment of the ways in which the study of social memory can inform global politics analysis.

Public commemorations of various kinds are an important part of how groups large and small acknowledge and process injustices and tragic events. Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma looks at the roles music can play in public commemorations of traumatic events that range from the Armenian genocide and World War I to contemporary violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the #sayhername protests. Whose version of a traumatic historical event gets told is always a complicated question, and music adds further layers to this complexity, particularly music without words. The three sections of this collection look at different facets of musical commemorations and reenactments, focusing on how music can mediate, but also intensify responses to social injustice; how reenactments and their use of music are shifting (and not always toward greater social effectiveness); and how claims for musical authenticity are politicized in various ways. By engaging with critical theory around memory studies and performance studies, the contributors to this volume explore social justice, in, and through music.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, has long been defined as a mental trauma that solely affects the individual. However, against the backdrop of contemporary Israel, what role do families, health experts, donors, and the national community at large play in interpreting and responding to this individualized trauma? In PTSD and the Politics of Trauma in Israel, Keren Friedman-Peleg sheds light on a new way of speaking about mental vulnerability and national belonging in contemporary Israel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at The Israel Center for Victims of Terror and War and The Israel Trauma Coalition between 2004 and 2009, Friedman-Peleg’s rich ethnographic study challenges the traditional and limited definitions of trauma. In doing so, she exposes how these clinical definitions have been transformed into new categories of identity, thereby raising new dynamics of power, as well as new forms of dialogue.

Aftershocks studies how meanings of shellshock and imagery presenting the traumatized psyche as shattered contributed to Britons' understandings of their political selves in the 1920s. It connects the force of emotions to the political culture of a decade which saw extraordinary violence against those regarded as 'un-English'.

During the late 1970s and 1980s speaking out about the traumatic reality of incest and rape was a rare and politically groundbreaking act. Today it is a ubiquitous feature of popular culture and its political value uncertain. In Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma, Jane Kilby explores the complexity and consequences of this shift in giving first-hand testimony by focusing on debates over recovered memory therapy and false memory syndrome, the spectacle of talkshow disclosures, discourses of innocence and complicity as well as the aesthetics and affect of shock. In counterpoint to the frequently cynical readings of personal narrative politics, Kilby advances an alternative reading built around the concept of unrepresentability. Key to this intervention is the stress placed by Kilby on the limits of representing sexually traumatic experiences and how this requires both theoretical and methodological innovation. Based on close readings of survivor narratives and artworks, this book demonstrates the significance of unrepresentability for a feminist understanding of sexual violence and victimisation. The book will of interest to those working in the areas of Cultural, Literary, Media and Women's Studies as well as Memory and Trauma Studies.Key Features* Provides a topical discussion of the debates generated by a mass culture of speaking out about violence and victimisation* Offers an interdisciplinary case-study analysis of survivor testimony* Applies cutting-edge developments in trauma and testimony theory to a feminist analysis of women's incest testimony* Makes accessible the significance of unrepresentability for a cultural politics of trauma