Abstract
The introduction conceptualises the notion of Post-Conflict Hauntings to foreground the globally pressing question of how countries deal with the traumatic aftermaths of mass violence. Historically this question has been theorised through the important psychodynamically informed work of trauma theory in the post-Holocaust context. However, the chapters of this book, as introduced in this opening chapter, seek to draw on, rethink and expand the trauma concept using the lens of haunted memory as reflected through a range of different historical case studies and disciplinary perspectives. We explain the structure of the book as comprising three different parts: “Towards an Ethics of Haunted Memory”, “Local Expressions of Collective Haunting and Healing” and “Transforming Haunted Memory Through Artistic Interventions”. Together the chapters offer theoretical, empirical and practical insights into the nature of historical trauma and practices of collective healing that include embodied, artistic and culturally relevant forms of wisdom.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abraham, N., & Torok, M. (1994). The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy (N. Rand, Trans.). Foreword: Jacques Derrida. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Alexander, J. C. (2004). Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser, & P. Sztompka (Eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (pp. 1–30). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Andermahr, S. (2015). Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism – Introduction. Humanities, 4(4), 500–505.
Apprey, M. (2014). A Pluperfect Errand: A Turbulent Return to Beginnings in the Transgenerational Transmission of Destructive Aggression. Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 66, 15–28.
Apprey, M. (2019). “Scripting” Inhabitations of Unwelcome Guests, Hosts, and Ghosts: Unpacking Elements That Constitute Transgenerational Haunting. Transactional Analysis Journal, 49(4), 339–351.
Argenti, N. (2019). Remembering Absence: The Sense of Life in Island Greece. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Argenti, N., & Schramm, K. (2010). Introduction. In N. Argenti & K. Schramm (Eds.), Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission (pp. 1–40). New York: Berghahn Books.
Assmann, A. (2011). Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Function, Media, Archive. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Assmann, A. (2009). From Collective Violence to a Common Future: Four Models for Dealing with a Traumatic Past. In R. Wodak & G. Auer-Borea (Eds.), Justice and Memory – Confronting Traumatic Pasts: An International Comparison (pp. 31–48). Vienna: Passagen Verlag.
Assmann, A., & Shortt, L. (2012). Introduction. In A. Assmann & L. Shortt (Eds.), Memory and Political Change (pp. 1–14). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bar-Tal, D. (2007). Sociopsychological Foundations of Intractable Conflicts. American Behavioral Scientist, 50, 1430–1453.
Bell, D. (2006). Introduction. In D. Bell (Ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present (pp. 1–32). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bennet, J., & Kennedy, R. (2003). Introduction. In J. Bennet & R. Kennedy (Eds.), World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time (pp. 1–15). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 5.
Cairns, E., & Roe, M. D. (2003). Introduction: Why Memories in Conflict? In E. Cairns & M. D. Roe (Eds.), The Role of Memory in Ethnic Conflict (pp. 3–8). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Caruth, C. (1995a). Introduction: Trauma and Experience. In C. Caruth (Ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (pp. 3–12). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Caruth, C. (1995b). Introduction: Recapturing the Past. In C. Caruth (Ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (pp. 151–157). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Craps, S., & Buelens, G. (2008). Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels. Studies in the Novel, 40, 1–12.
Craps, S. (2013). Post-Colonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Danieli, Y. (1984). Psychotherapists’ Participation in the Conspiracy of Silence About the Holocaust. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1(1), 23–42.
Dawson, G. (2016). Memory, ‘Post-Conflict’ Temporalities and the Afterlife of Emotion in Conflict Transformation After the Irish Troubles. In M. Corporaal, C. Cusack, & R. van den Beuken (Eds.), Irish Studies and the Dynamics of Memory (pp. 257–296). Oxford: Peter Lang. (Reimagining Ireland).
Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York: Routledge.
Erll, A. (2011). Travelling Memory. Parallax, 17(4), 4–18.
Fassin, D., & Rechtman, R. (2009). Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Freud, S. (1939). Moses and Monotheism (K. Jones, Trans.). New York: Vintage
Frosh, S. (2013). Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Frosh, S. (2019). Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2009). Working Through the Past: Some Thoughts on Forgiveness in Cultural Context. In P. Gobodo-Madikizela & C. van der Merwe (Eds.), Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past (pp. 148–169). New Castle: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2008). Transforming Trauma in the Aftermath of Gross Human Rights Abuses: Making Public Spaces Intimate. In A. Nadler, J. Fisher, & T. Malloy (Eds.), Social Psychology of Inter-Group Reconciliation: From Violent Conflict to Peaceful Co-existence (pp. 57–76). London: Oxford University Press.
Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2016a). Introduction. In P. Gobodo-Madikizela (Ed.), Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers.
Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2016b). Interrupting Cycles of Repetition: Creating Spaces for Dialogue, Facing and Mourning the Past. In P. Gobodo-Madikizela (Ed.), Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers.
Gordon, A. F. (1997/2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective Memory. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Hamber, B., & Gallagher, E. (Eds.). (2015). Psycho-Social Perspectives on Peace-Building. New York: Springer.
Hirsch, M. (2008). The Generation of Post-Memory. Poetics Today, 29(1), 103–128.
Hoffman, E. (2004). After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs.
Kalema, E. (2018). Scars, Marked Bodies, and Suffering: The Mulele “Rebellion” in Postcolonial Congo. The Journal of African History, 59(2), 263–282.
Kidron, C. A. (2009). Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in Everyday the Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel. Current Anthropology, 50(1), 5–27.
LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing History: Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Langer, L. (1991). Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Leys, R. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lorey, D. E., & Beezley, W. H. (2002). Introduction. In D. E. Lorey & W. H. Beezley (Eds.), Genocide, Collective Violence and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (pp. xi–xxxiii). Wilmington: SR Books.
Margalit, A. (2002). The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848/1992). The Communist Manifesto. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McGrattan, C. (2012). Memory, Politics and Identity: Haunted by History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Morrison, T. (2005). Beloved. London: Vintage.
Prager, J. (2003). Lost Childhood, Lost Generations: The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma. Journal of Human Rights, 2(2), 173–181.
Prager, J. (2011). Danger & Deformation: A Social Theory of Trauma. American Imago, 68, 425–448.
Prager, J. (2014). Melancholia and the Racial Order: A Psychosocial Analysis of America’s Enduring Racism. In L. Chancer & J. Andrews (Eds.), The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis (pp. 284–316). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Richter, J. (2017). Intergenerational Layers of Silence: How the Concealed or the Outspoken Remain Undiscussable or Indescribable. In L. Auestad & A. Treacher Kabesh (Eds.), Traces of Violence and Freedom of Thought. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ricouer, P. (1999). Memory and Forgetting. In K. Richard & M. Dooley (Eds.), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (pp. 5–11). London: Routledge.
Root, M. P. P. (1992). Reconstructing the Impact of Trauma on Personality. In L. S. Brown & M. Ballou (Eds.), Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals. New York: Guilford.
Rothberg, M. (2008). Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response. Studies in the Novel, 40, 224–234.
Rushohora, N. A. (2017). Theorising the Majimaji – Landscape, Memory and Agency. Journal of African Cultural Heritage Studies, 1(1), 19–31.
Schwab, G. (2004). Haunting Legacies: Trauma in Children of Perpetrators. Postcolonial Studies, 7(2), 177–195.
Silberman, M., & Vatan, F. (2013). Introduction. In M. Silberman & F. Vatan (Eds.), Memory and Postwar Memorials: Confronting the Violence of the Past. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sodaro, A. (2018). Exhibiting Atrocities. Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Sturken, M. (1997). Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Swart, M. (2017). Introduction. In M. Swart & K. van Marle (Eds.), The limits of transition: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission twenty years on (pp. 1–8). Leiden: Brill-Nijhoff.
Tint, B. (2010). History, Memory and Intractable Conflict. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 27(3), 239–256.
van der Kolk, B. A., & van der Hart, O. (1995). The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma. In Trauma: Explorations in memory (pp. 158–182). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Volkan, V. D. (2001). Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity. Group Analysis, 34(1), 79–97.
Wale, K. (2016). South Africa’s Struggle to Remember: Contested Memories of Squatter Resistance in the Western Cape. London: Routledge.
Wale, K. (2017). Performing and Resisting the Post-TRC ‘Trauma-Drama’: Survivors Narratives of Past and Present Violence in South Africa. In M. Swart & K. van Marle (Eds.), The Limits of Transition: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Twenty Years On (pp. 121–146). Leiden: Brill-Nijhoff.
Ward, A. (Ed.). (2015). Postcolonial Traumas: Memory, Narrative, Resistance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Young, A. (1997). The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wale, K., Gobodo-Madikizela, P., Prager, J. (2020). Introduction: Post-Conflict Hauntings. In: Wale, K., Gobodo-Madikizela, P., Prager, J. (eds) Post-Conflict Hauntings. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39077-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39077-8_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39076-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-39077-8
eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)