Interrogating Trauma ― Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media

Throughout the past century, traumatic experiences have been re-enacted frequently by evolving media and art forms. Now there is a significant body of theory across academic disciplines focused on the representation of cataclysmic European and US historical events. However, less critical attention has been devoted to the representation of havoc outside the West, even though depictions of Third-World disasters saturate contemporary media and art around the globe.

This book considers traumatic histories internationally in a broad range of creative arts and visual media representations. Deploying diverse applications of the conventional theories of trauma, it examines the theoretical limitations at the same time as considering alternative methodologies. Interrogating Trauma is concerned with the examination of the concept of trauma, and how it is (often unproblematically) used to theorise the cultural representation of disaster and atrocity. It offers a theorisation of trauma, in order to reappraise the relationship between cultural representation and the socio-historical processes which are marked by violence, conflict and suffering.

This book was published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

Mick Broderick is Associate Professor and Research Coordinator in the School of Media, Communications & Culture at Murdoch University, where he is Deputy Director of the National Academy of Screen & Sound (NASS). He has published editions of the reference work Nuclear Movies and, as editor, Hibakusha Cinema.

Antonio Traverso is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television studies in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. He co-edited a special issue of Social Identities: "Living Through Terror: (Post)Conflict, (Post)Trauma and the South", and has produced several short films, including the award-winning Tales from the South.