Diasporic Montage and Critical Autoethnography: Mediated Visions of Intergenerational Memory and the Affective Transmission of Trauma

  • Nathan To
Chapter

Abstract

Looking for paths that have been disavowed, left behind, forgotten, silenced, covered over, and left unseen begins by performing juxtapositions of fragmented memory. In this chapter, I employ a performative, critical, and (un)locatable autoethnographic writing approach to explore the affective transmission of trauma. In my research, I am particularly interested in exploring how traumatic memory can affectively pass from one generation to the next across chronological time and geographical space — a concept referred to as intergenerational ‘hauntings’ (see Cho, 2008; Gordon, 2008; Abraham and Torok, 1994). My unique interest in ‘ghosts’, however, requires an equivalently unique methodology and epistemology that can adequately deal with such issues. In response, I ‘stage’ in this chapter different (un)locatable autoethnographic approaches that employ what I call a ‘diasporic montage’.1 Throughout this paper, I unpack this discussion and demonstrate how the existence and composition of this very chapter, in fact, embodies my autoethnographic act of creating a ‘diasporic montage’. One key question I ask is: Can such methodologies ‘see’ ghosts, the forgotten, and the unseen?

Keywords

Cultural Revolution Traumatic Memory Mutual Complicity Chronological Time Conversational Interview 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© Nathan To 2007

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  • Nathan To

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