1st Edition
Reading Violence and Trauma in Asia and the World
This collection casts the spotlight on Asia and its place in global studies on trauma to explore the ways in which violence and trauma are (re)enacted, (re)presented, (re)imagined, reconciled, and consumed through various mediums in the region. The discussions revolve around the ethics of representing and discussing trauma as we negotiate the tensions between trauma and political, historical, literary, and cultural representations in written, visual, digital, and hybrid forms. It examines how perspectives about trauma are framed, perpetuated, and/or critiqued via theories and research methods, and how a constructive tension between theory, method, and experience is essential for critical discourse on the subject. It will discuss varied ways of understanding violence through multidisciplinary perspectives and comparative literature, explore the "violent psyches" of narratives and writings across different mediums and platforms, and engage with how violence and trauma continue to influence the telling and form of such narratives.
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading Trauma and Violence: Expanding Horizons
Yiru Lim and Kit Ying Lye
Part 1
Imagining and Reimagining
1.
The Human Inclination Toward Violence and Where We Stand in the Age of Mass Consumption
Michael Kearney
2.
Fictional Testimonies: Narrative Structures of Resistance in White Chrysanthemum and How We Disappeared
W. Michelle Wang
3.
Fictive Realities: Witnessing and the Imagination in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Yiru Lim
4.
Representing Anthropocene Trauma: Disaster Narratives of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in Indian Cinema
Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh
5.
The Unbearable Lightness of the Future-Shock-Myth-Traumatized Swallowers: A Reading of the Assassination of Shinzo Abe
Setsuko Adachi
Part 2
Remembering and Forgetting
6.
National Identities, Hybrid Postmemory, and Cultural Remediation in Akira Mizubayashi's Novel Reine de Coeur
Priscilla Charrat-Nelson
7.
Giving a Voice Back to the Families of Soviet ‘Public Enemies’ Through Postmemory Graphic Narratives
Iana Nikitenko
8.
The Telling of Violence, and the Violence of the Telling: Narrative and the Choice to Forget in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists
Claudia J. M. Cornelissen
9.
Mass Graves and Topography: Narrating Violence through the Visible Reminders of the Nellie Massacre, 1983
Jabeen Yasmeen
10.
Refugee Poetics: Reassembling the Syrian Identity on Digital Media
Waed Hasan
Part 3
Reclaiming and Telling
11.
Beyond the Impossibility of Representation: Aesthetic Politics in Yun Ch’oe’s There a Petal Silently Falls
Heejung Kang
12.
Words Stuck in the Throat: The Paradox of Deep Silence and Narrative Plenty in Postwar Lebanese Fiction
Renée Ragin Randall
13.
Speaking the Unspeakable in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman
Judy Joo-Ae Bae
14.
Listening to Lost Voices: Reading Wartime Rape in Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue
Nicole Ong
15.
“We Must Find a Way to Do More Than Endure”, Silence as Resistance in Charmaine Craig’s Miss Burma
Kit Ying Lye
16.
Tasting Loss
Joy Xin Yuan Wang and Hairuo Jin
Index
Biography
Yiru Lim is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Interdisciplinary and Experiential Learning at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her main research interests include ekphrasis, narrative and the imagination, and stories of illness and pain, and those of vulnerable groups. She has published in the Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE) and was co-author of Coal Mining and Gentrification in Japan published in 2019.
Kit Ying Lye is currently Senior Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her dissertation focuses on the use of magical realism in the representation of Cold War violence in Southeast Asian literature. Her research interests are, mainly, the Cold War in Southeast Asia, history and its remembrance, death in Southeast Asian literature and culture, and Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage. She has published works that discuss the use of literature to represent civil wars in Southeast Asia. She is also the principal investigator of the research project on Singapore Chinese Funerary Practices. She is the co-editor of Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City (Routledge).
