Interventions
This issue of the Interventions Section of Caesurae (Vol 6: 1) focusses on “Translating Trauma”. Trauma is basically psychological which extends to the physical, for the mind and body are inseparable from one another. Prolonged distress, accidents, wars, unexpected occurrences of violence, leave deep scars which one must battle with in a lifetime and as Brian Weiss would suggest, through many lives, many rebirths too. How to handle trauma? This pertinent question has led to the development of Trauma Studies as a specialized discipline which connects psychology and physiology. It connects with Memory Studies as well, as the personal memory is enmeshed with collective memory in a sweep of history. Freud and Breuer’s theories focus on ‘remembrances’ and effects of repressed sexual experience. Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman in the 1990s re-explored the concept of trauma to arrive at a notion that trauma is an unrepresentable event which cannot find adequate expression through language and leads to contradictions. Bouston and Vickroy in the 21st century, focus on the narrativization of trauma and the socio-cultural implications associated with it. Since then, Trauma Studies has taken on a post-structuralist approach as a traumatic experience can lead to disruptive remembrances which are always pluralistic in expression. Research in this field continues to explore socio-cultural implications of trauma and the semiotics of such disruptive experience find expression in art, architecture, literature, music and films.
Here in this section, we have three essays which write about translating trauma in art and architecture, in literature and films. While the Feature Essay by Oly Roy focusses on the architecture prompted by the trauma of the Second World War and racial violence in America and Cambodia, Payel Ghosh’s essay explores the semiotic dimension of a film adaptation of a novel by Thomas Kenelly as “Schindler’s List” by Spielberg based on the holocaust. Meeraz Hoque’s essay focusses on personal trauma and how that affects the individual and his family. Trauma because of the holocaust has led to articulation largely semiotic, in art and architecture, in literature and films. Personal trauma too finds expression in literature and a cinematic adaption. In sum, the three essays in their own ways analyze the semiotics of translating a traumatic experience, collective and individual. They also foreground the fact that articulation pluralistic as it is so, leads to re-articulation (s) through different mediums of expression - for history is not be forgotten, for history has a futuristic dimension of a “projective past”.
---- Jayita Sengupta
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