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This chapter examines the relation between cultural trauma and collective identity. It explains that cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks on their group consciousness, and that the scientific concept of cultural trauma illuminates an emerging domain of social responsibility and political action. It discusses a middle-range theory of the complex causes propelling the trauma process in developed and less-developed societies. It argues that the theory of cultural trauma applies, without prejudice, to any and all instances when societies have, or have not, constructed and experienced cultural traumatic events, and to their efforts to draw, or not to draw, the moral lessons that can be said to emanate from them.

Sigmund Freud, a neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalysis discipline, had characterized the memory of trauma as “a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.” Freud started to investigate and study more about psychological trauma, and it turned out that in his preliminary formulations, the thought of trauma is not to be conceived so much as a distinct casual event as part of a process-in-system. Going back to cultural trauma, the Protestant Reformation qualifies as a cultural trauma because of the primary risk that it posed to the honor and dominance of the Catholic cultural worldview. Many believe that cultural trauma refers to a persistent and vast event which is believed to undermine or overwhelm one or several elements of a culture or the culture as a whole.

Traumas are purely happening which break a person or collective actor's sense of well-being. Cultural trauma is an experiential, scientific concept, signifying new meaningful and casual relationships linking earlier dissimilar events, structures, perceptions, and actions. In contrast to this, a new scientific concept enlightens an emerging field of social responsibility and political action. Cultural trauma transpires when the components of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to an awful event that leaves ineradicable marks upon their group awareness, marking their memories forever and changing their future individuality in basic and irreversible ways. In connection to the subject, cultural trauma, people have constantly used the language of trauma to explain what happened, not only to themselves, but also to the collectivities to which they belong.

Chapter 2 examines the hagiographic portrait of Tāre Lhamo as a local heroine during the years leading up to and including the Cultural Revolution. The representation of this period in her hagiography, Spiraling Vine of Faith, elides the specter of state and her own personal losses and instead narrates the period through a series of miracle tales that portray Tāre Lhamo as a tantric heroine, addressing the immediate needs of her local community. In this way, I argue that Spiraling Vine of Faith constructs a redemptive narrative amid the devastation of the Maoist period and provides a poignant means for restoring a sense of Tibetan agency in the wake of cultural trauma.

This chapter considers novels including The Guardians by Ana Castillo, Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande, and Highwire Moon by Susan Straight, which represent border crossing deaths and disappearances as a new form of cultural trauma. These novels mark a shift in U.S. border fiction by attending squarely to the traumatic effects of increased border security measures on those crossing north. The chapter follows theorists such as Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelser, who argue that cultural trauma is not inherent in events themselves but rather is constructed through repeated representations of particular events as fundamentalinjuries to a “people.” The chapter also argues that border fiction written in the years after Operation Gatekeeper appropriates from its Latin American context the notion of the “disappeared”—with all its connotations of state violence—to construct migrant disappearances as a cultural trauma that violently separates families and introduces profound instability into notions of individual and group identity. Such texts of border crossing, death, and “disappearance” serve as forms of testimonial fiction against U.S. immigration and border policies at home, which ignore the realities of labor needs and which have steep human costs.

The introduction sets out the main themes to be addressed in the book and discusses the concepts of cultural trauma, collective resilience and resistance. The relevance of these concepts to understanding the position of Gypsies and Travellers in contemporary society is addressed. Specifically the importance of these concepts when explaining the settlement of formerly nomadic communities in conventional housing and the adaptive strategies that community members may adopt to mitigate the more culturally corrosive aspects of large scale and fundamental changes to accustomed modes of living is discussed.

This chapter attempts to redefine the term “closure” as applied in the context of the Oklahoma City bombing. By disturbing, inflaming, and frustrating family members and survivors, the Oklahoma City bombers' toxic presences commenced and compelled a quest for “closure.” The application of the term “closure” in the Oklahoma City context raised a host of other issues, such as the controversial assertion that Timothy McVeigh's execution would provide closure by soothing victims' troubled souls. This chapter examines how victims' family members and survivors define closure and attempt to achieve it, with particular emphasis on the link between the pursuit of closure and “memory work.” It also considers the extent to which closure is identified with capital punishment, the idea that victims' families require a death sentence or execution to heal. Finally, it discusses the interrelationships among closure, cultural trauma, and the journey from victim to survivor, along with the media and the criminal justice system as institutional sites of closure.

This chapter examines the genesis and development of a trend that interprets (post-)postmodern paradigms as vehicles for coping with cultural trauma, and how that trend plays out in contemporary sincerity rhetoric. It first considers the simultaneous emergence of North American and Russian new-sincerity discourses in the 1980s before discussing the trauma thread that permeates its Russian pendant from the very beginning. Central to the chapter's argument is poet-cum-performer and undisputed classic of recent Russian literature Dmitrii Prigov, and his personal creative story is interwoven into a wider narrative of sincerity and collective remembering. The story of Prigov and his contemporaries challenges the view, proposed by Mieke Bal and others, that sincerity rhetoric flourishes specifically in times of intercultural conflict. The chapter also explores existing notions of post-Soviet memory and post-Soviet Russia's insistence not on remembering but on a collective forgetting of the gloomier pages of Soviet history.

This chapter attempts to redefine the term “closure” as applied in the context of the Oklahoma City bombing. By disturbing, inflaming, and frustrating family members and survivors, the Oklahoma City bombers' toxic presences commenced and compelled a quest for “closure.” The application of the term “closure” in the Oklahoma City context raised a host of other issues, such as the controversial assertion that Timothy McVeigh's execution would provide closure by soothing victims' troubled souls. This chapter examines how victims' family members and survivors define closure and attempt to achieve it, with particular emphasis on the link between the pursuit of closure and “memory work.” It also considers the extent to which closure is identified with capital punishment, the idea that victims' families require a death sentence or execution to heal. Finally, it discusses the interrelationships among closure, cultural trauma, and the journey from victim to survivor, along with the media and the criminal justice system as institutional sites of closure.

This chapter addresses the superheroes' experience of the “death”/resurrection cycle in serial narratives. This cycle shows that the Silver Age superhero is not only a disability disavower and overcompensator, but is also a death denier. Through their deaths, superheroes ritualize, render meaningful, and exorcise cultural trauma. Their resurrections likewise help generate a sense of hope and new beginnings into storylines, at the same time implicitly reassuring readers of the durability and continuity of the values they embody. Superheroes also seem to communicate an underlying fear and motivation amounting to the genre's structuring disavowal. For writer Ernest Becker, fictional death may remind people of the mortality that their culture represses, but it deprives the reader/viewer of a real, direct appreciation of death—the only thing that would make life “meaningful.”

Chapter 7 examines public debates over the future of the World Trade Center site, commonly known as ground zero. Focusing on three controversial matters—the debate over the International Freedom Center originally slated for the rebuilt site; the debate over Park51, the Islamic community center located two blocks from the World Trade Center; and the debate over the cross-shaped steel beam known as the “World Trade Center Cross” and included in the permanent collection at the National September 11 Memorial Museum—this chapter identifies deep disagreements concerning the meaning of September 11. Beneath this dissensus are more fundamental disagreements concerning the meaning of archetypal American ideals—freedom and liberty, tolerance and pluralism, equality and justice. These debates reveal that—despite official efforts to place September 11 within familiar national narratives—the event remains an unresolved cultural trauma.

This chapter discusses the cultural production of memory in the digital era through Facebook memorial pages and virtual memorial websites dedicated to deceased sporting heroes. Increasingly, fans, family, friends, and journalists are turning to the Internet to express their condolences, communicate with other mourners, and memorialize the deceased in “highly creative, interactive, and dynamic ways.” Constituting a “record of the multiple, contested, and changing emotional responses,” these websites become “valuable archives of the public affective responses to cultural trauma.” The chapter then focuses on surfer Andy Irons and skier Sarah Burke, who died in 2010 and 2012, respectively, and who have been memorialized extensively online.

In Chapter Three "Acts of Redemption and ‘The Falling Man’ Photograph in Post-9/11 US Cinema", Guy Westwell, who has written his own monograph on the impact of the 'War on Terror' on American film, Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 Cinema (2014), takes as a starting point one of the quintessential images of the 'War on Terror' era, the photograph of the unidentified 'falling man' taken on 11 September 2001 by Richard Drew. Such has been the impact of the picture, which Mark D. Thompson described as 'perhaps the most powerful image of despair at the beginning of the twenty-first century' (63), it has been returned to in a variety of forms over the years: in art, literature, television and film. Westwell considers how the image (and the World Trade Center itself) has been co-opted by a variety of authors to function as a prism through which prevailing attitudes towards 9/11 have been projected. In a detailed analysis of two such examples, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011) and The Walk (2015), Westwell engages with questions of representation and identity, memory and trauma (both on a personal and cultural level) and argues that, as Mark Lacey suggested, American cinema in the first decades of the new millennium became "a space where 'commonsense' ideas about global politics and history are (re)-produced and where stories about what is acceptable behaviour from states and individuals are naturalised and legitimated" (614).