Adrian Parr
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748627547
- eISBN:
- 9780748652433
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748627547.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This book presents a detailed study of contemporary forms of public remembrance. It considers the different character traumatic memory takes throughout the sphere of cultural production and argues ...
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This book presents a detailed study of contemporary forms of public remembrance. It considers the different character traumatic memory takes throughout the sphere of cultural production and argues that contemporary memorial culture has the power to put traumatic memory to work in a positive way. Drawing on the conceptual apparatus of Gilles Deleuze, the book outlines the relevance of his thought to cultural studies and the wider phenomenon of traumatic theory and public remembrance. This approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on media criticism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, urbanism, continental philosophy and political economy. A number of case studies are examined including the holocaust, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, 9/11, the Amish shootings in Pennsylvania USA, the documentation and dissemination of US military abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, as well as the consumption and reification of trauma. The book offers a revision of trauma theory that presents trauma not simply as a definitive experience and implicitly negative, but an experience that can foster a sense of hope and optimism for the future.Less
This book presents a detailed study of contemporary forms of public remembrance. It considers the different character traumatic memory takes throughout the sphere of cultural production and argues that contemporary memorial culture has the power to put traumatic memory to work in a positive way. Drawing on the conceptual apparatus of Gilles Deleuze, the book outlines the relevance of his thought to cultural studies and the wider phenomenon of traumatic theory and public remembrance. This approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on media criticism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, urbanism, continental philosophy and political economy. A number of case studies are examined including the holocaust, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, 9/11, the Amish shootings in Pennsylvania USA, the documentation and dissemination of US military abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, as well as the consumption and reification of trauma. The book offers a revision of trauma theory that presents trauma not simply as a definitive experience and implicitly negative, but an experience that can foster a sense of hope and optimism for the future.
Mariane C. Ferme
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520294370
- eISBN:
- 9780520967526
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520294370.003.0009
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
This chapter examines the emergence of the figure of the child soldier in African conflicts and of the criminalization of forced conscription of children in combat in international war crimes ...
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This chapter examines the emergence of the figure of the child soldier in African conflicts and of the criminalization of forced conscription of children in combat in international war crimes jurisprudence, particularly at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL)—one of the first war crimes tribunals to secure convictions on this count. The chapter examines the context of a civil war that often split small-scale communities and of a society that offers individuals multiple communities of belonging, thus complicating choices about the reintegration of demobilized, war-affected youth. Through two cases of war-affected youth, the chapter questions the humanitarian application of “normative post-traumatic” practices of psychological narrativization of trauma, leading to ambiguous and ambivalent returns in communities of origin, where forms of collective forgetting were preferred as strategies for addressing harms and war reparations.Less
This chapter examines the emergence of the figure of the child soldier in African conflicts and of the criminalization of forced conscription of children in combat in international war crimes jurisprudence, particularly at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL)—one of the first war crimes tribunals to secure convictions on this count. The chapter examines the context of a civil war that often split small-scale communities and of a society that offers individuals multiple communities of belonging, thus complicating choices about the reintegration of demobilized, war-affected youth. Through two cases of war-affected youth, the chapter questions the humanitarian application of “normative post-traumatic” practices of psychological narrativization of trauma, leading to ambiguous and ambivalent returns in communities of origin, where forms of collective forgetting were preferred as strategies for addressing harms and war reparations.
