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?
if … studying ghosts allows us to rethink a society’s relationship to its dead, particularly to those who are subject to some kind of injustice, the ghost and its haunting effects act as a mode of memory and avenue for ethical engagement with the present.
Cho (2008, p. 29)
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© 2007 Nathan To
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To, N. (2007). Diasporic Montage and Critical Autoethnography: Mediated Visions of Intergenerational Memory and the Affective Transmission of Trauma. In: Knudsen, B.T., Stage, C. (eds) Affective Methodologies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483195_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483195_4
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