[csaa-forum] UNSW Seminar June 8 Debating Trauma Theory

[Melissa Gregg]

UNSW Media, Film and Theatre Seminars
5 p.m. Wednesday 8 June 2005
Webster Building 327



Debating Trauma Theory 

Susannah Radstone


Why the current academic interest in trauma studies?   On the one hand,
trauma theory responds to the need to overcome, or at least address,
perceived impasses within humanities theory. On the other, trauma theory is
linked with wider cultural preoccupations, fascinations and obsessions -
with survivor movements, with discourses of victimhood and with generalised
incitements to give testimony or offer witness statements.

This paper argues that the evaluation of academic engagements with trauma
theory ought not to be separated out from an analysis of the wider cultural
movements and discourses that constitute its constitutive contexts. After
contextualising trauma theory within contemporary academic debates
concerning history, referentiality and subjectivity, the paper addresses, in
broad brush-strokes, the dominant  cultural context within which it might be
placed.  Trauma theory, it is argued, reproduces certain contemporary
cultural blind-spots or denials.  It therefore needs to take on board some
of the insights provided by the psychoanalytic theories with which it claims
close relationship.

Susannah Radstone teaches in the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies
at the University of East London. She writes on cultural theory,
particularly psychoanalysis and memory studies, and on contemporary film and
literature. Her publications include Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory
and Regimes of Memory (both ed. with Katharine Hodgkin, 2003); Memory and
Methodology (ed, 2000); and The Women's Companion to International Film (ed.
with Annette Kuhn, 1994).  Her current projects include an edited book on
Culture and the Unconscious, a special issue of Economy and Society on 'The
Emotions in Public Life', and a monograph titled On Memory and Confession:
The Sexual Politics of Time, to be published by Routledge. 

_________________________________________________
Dr James Donald
Associate Dean (Education), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Professor of Film Studies, School of Media, Film and Theatre
University of New South Wales
Sydney
NSW 2052
Australia

Telephone:      (02) 9385 4858
Mobile:         0433 126445
Facsimile:      (02) 9662 2335

International
Telephone:      +612 9385 4858
Mobile:         +61 433 126445
Facsimile:      +612 9662 2335 

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