Interrogating Trauma
INTERROGATING TRAUMA
Arts & Media Responses to Collective Suffering
in association with Murdoch University and Curtin University
International Conference
http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/trauma
Perth, Western Australia
2-4 December 2008
Keynote Speakers
Felicity Collins
Susannah Radstone
Suvendrini Perera
PAPER ABSTRACTS AND PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES
wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/trauma
Gary Baines (Rhodes University)
Trauma in Transition: Soldiers’ Stresses in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Mental health professionals insist that victims and perpetrators alike have been traumatised by their
involvement in South Africa’s low-intensity war of the 1970s and 1980s. Some invoked PTSD in mitigation of the
reprehensible deeds of apartheid’s security forces, while others justified gross human rights violations committed in the
name of the liberation struggle. In both cases, trauma discourse was employed to minimise individual agency and
abdicate political responsibility for acts committed in the name of the ‘greater good’. This seems to imply a moral
equivalence between the acts condoned by the apartheid state and the liberation movements and to make for an
undifferentiated ‘victim culture’. But how do SADF veterans and ex-combatants from the ranks of the liberation
movements view their actions and see themselves retrospectively? More than a decade after South Africa’s relatively
peaceful political transition and notwithstanding the work of the TRC, former combatants of the non-statutory forces are
seeking to understand why they find themselves stigmatised and marginalised in the new dispensation. Similarly,
veterans of the statutory forces are attempting to come to terms with the part they played in a needless war and their
sense of being betrayed by the apartheid regime. Some are doing so in relation to a contested process of
memorialisation. Others are doing so by telling of their own stories or writing works of fiction. This paper interrogates
some of these ‘memory texts’ which engage with war trauma in post-apartheid South Africa.
Dr GARY BAINES is an Associate Professor in the History Department, Rhodes University, Grahamstown,
South Africa. He holds a MA from Rhodes University and a PhD from the University of Cape Town. His research
interests in South African history and culture include film, photography, literature and music. He has published a
monograph and numerous articles on the history of Port Elizabeth. And has co-edited (with Peter Vale) Beyond the
Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s late-Cold War Conflicts (Unisa Press, 2008).
Riccardo Baldissone (Curtin University)
Keeping the World at a Distance: The Clinging to Scientific Certainty as a Response to
Collective Trauma
In this paper I track the results of collective trauma up to the anodyne effect of order and certainty. Following
Toulmin, I link the twentieth-century trend towards quantification and formalisation to the devastating experiences of
the two world wars. In particular, I argue that the disaster of global conflicts was reflected in what Cocteau defined as
the rappel à l’ordre, i.e. the call to order, which took place not only in the arts but also in the sciences. For this purpose,
I analyse examples from the arts illustrating the stark contrast between the pre-WWI season of vanguard
experimentalism and the post-WWII turn towards neoclassical or formalist structures. Moreover, I consider the parallel
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emergence of formalist trends in linguistics, in literary criticism and in the hard sciences. I recall that after the WWI,
and even more after the WWII, the push for mathematization went far beyond the original Cartesian program and
produced not only in the sciences but also within the humanities a frenzy for quantitative analysis that has not yet
definitively subsided. I also consider examples of analogous tendencies, as serial music and optical art, which
developed previous artistic approaches along the lines of a detached and objective rationality. Finally, I question the
alleged intrinsic reasonableness of these responses to collective trauma by recalling the disturbing mirroring of the
detached instrumental rationality involved in planned human slaughtering and the likewise detached rationality that is
still invoked as a supposed alternative to violence.
RICCARDO BALDISSONE was born in Rome, Italy, in 1959. His education covers Classical Studies,
Science, Philosophy and Education. He is a PhD candidate and sessional lecturer with the Centre for Human Rights
Education at Curtin University. In his thesis he is exploring modern fundamentalisms in order to expand human rights
discourse beyond its original western, liberal, and individualistic perspective.
Mark Balnaves (Edith Cowan University) and
Tom O'Regan (The University of Queensland)
Cultural Trauma and Audience Ratings: The Role of Ratings as a Form of Knowledge
in Constructing National Identity and Re-Presenting Trauma
Pyszczynski (2001) says the trauma that Americans experienced in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack was
similar to the cultural trauma that many indigenous peoples experienced in response to colonization by European and
American countries over the last few centuries. Massumi, however, took the fear and trauma generated by 9/11 as
something governments and others took advantage of to control citizens and used the phrase “affective modulation” to
describe this control. Virilio and Lotringer in The Accident of Art conclude that there is a complex relationship between
war trauma, the visual arts and the national media that re-presents trauma. Media is war by other means. What gets
presented in national media as “trauma” is itself mediated by forms of knowledge like audience ratings. In this paper,
the authors will provide an account of audience ratings as a form of knowledge and their role in mediating what counts
as trauma for national audiences.
PROFESSOR MARK BALNAVES is Professor of New Media at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia.
His current Australian Research Council research project with Tom O'Regan is on the history of the audience ratings
convention, nationally and internationally.
PROFESSOR TOM O'REGAN is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Head of School, English,
Media Studies and Art History, at the University of Queensland. He is author of Australian Television Culture and
Australian National Cinema, now seminal in the field. His current research is in the areas of contemporary film studies,
Hollywood film and television production ecologies with a particular emphasis on their Australian instantiation, new
"service" models for audiovisual media, independents and cultural policy, audience development in the arts and media
industries, and contemporary reframings of cultural policy in the light of creative industries and creative city policy
paradigms.
Valerie H. Barske (University of Wisconsin Stevens Point)
Dancing Historical Trauma in Okinawa: Kodama Kiyoko’s Performative Act of Healing
After 27 years, the U.S. occupation of Okinawa officially ended on May 15, 1972. Shortly thereafter,
Okinawan female performance artist, head of the Tokyo Okinawa Performing Arts Preservation Society, staged a
dance-theatre entitled “Okinawa in Flux: A Story of Okinawa over 1300 Years.” Grappling with the historical
consequences of returning to Japanese sovereignty, Kodama traces collective memories of trauma in Okinawan history
including the Satsuma Invasion of 1609, colonization by Meiji Japan beginning 1872, and WWII Battle of Okinawa
1945. Following portrayals of each violent and tragic event, she appears as the incarnation of the “shima no seishin,”
the spirit of the island, embodying “Okinawa’s peace-loving heart.” In this paper, I will examine how Kodama’s
dancing serves as a performative act to cleanse, purify, and heal the traumatized souls of the Okinawan people. More
specifically, I analyze the ways in which she reenacts gendered traditions of Okinawan folk practices and shamanic
rituals such as “mabui-gumi” (translated spirit stuffing) to provide spiritual restoration for the collective Okinawan
body. Highlighting the importance of socio-cultural processes for understanding trauma, my work builds on
semasiological theories that emphasize the “signifying body” (Williams 2004), dancing as a “mode of becoming”
(Uriciuoli 1995), and performers as “dynamically embodied meaning-making agents” (Farnell 1995). My presentation
will include original video footage from the 1992 restaging of “Okinawa in Flux,” and a discussion of the intersections
between Kodama’s historical works and present-day activist dancers who address ongoing struggles of war memory,
militarism, and cultural loss in contemporary Okinawa.
VALERIE H. BARSKE is an Associate Lecturer in History, Peace Studies, and Women’s Studies at the
University of Wisconsin Stevens Point (www.uwsp.edu). While teaching courses on topics such as ‘Gendering Peace:
Women’s Activism in East Asia,’ Barske is completing a doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Performing Embodied Histories:
Colonialism, Gender, and Okinawa in Modern Japan’ through the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2005-
2006, she received a Fulbright Hays-Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to conduct ethnographic research with local
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activist performance groups and archival work on dance traditions at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan.
Barske began studying Okinawan identity politics through the site of the performing arts through an IIE Fulbright
Research Fellowship to Okinawa in 1998-1999. As a Blakemore Foundation Fellow at the Stanford Inter-University
Center for Intensive Japanese Studies in Yokohama 2001-2002, she continued her training in Okinawan dance and
research on embodied archives with the Tokyo Okinawa Performing Arts Preservation Society. In particular, she was
privileged to meet and work with Kodama Kiyoko (1914-2005), the only female founding member of the Preservation
Society. Barske has published her work with the Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement and has
presented at numerous conferences including the American Anthropological Association, Association of Asian Studies,
American Historical Association, and Wisconsin Women’s Studies Conference. Barske hopes to continue her research
on the performing arts, theories of the body, embodied archives, colonial studies, gender and women’s history, and
Okinawan cultural history.
Martina-Gabriele Barsuhn (Northumbria University)
Notions of Cultural Trauma in Media Representations of Sasha Waltz’ Post-
Tanztheater
The public perception of and reflection on contemporary dance practice in Germany is shaped by
“fragmentation; confrontation, constant recurrent struggle” and a lack of a materialized national identity. This paper
challenges the common cultural interpretations of the public awareness of Post-Tanztheater in Germany through
Alexander et al’s sociological model of cultural trauma. The “advanced stage of trauma processing” in a collective
identity that is not shaped predominantly by personal memories and collective guilt anymore is exemplified in the
linguistic analysis of media representations of Post-Tanztheater choreographer Sasha Waltz’ performances. The
traditional focus on the syntactic and semantic level of bodily language in dance analysis is taken into consideration, yet
the primary focus is on the ‘sociolinguistic context’, as defined by dance anthropologist Williams, i.e. the discourse of
national identity in relation to dance. In particular, this paper clarifies the significance and contribution of Sasha Waltz’
Post-Tanztheater, defined as individual and collective identity performance and ethnographic narrative, for the ‘socially
constructed attribution’ of cultural trauma in contemporary German society.
MARTINA-GABRIELE BARSUHN is a research student at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. She
obtained a first class degree in English Language and Education Studies from Sunderland University, UK. Her primary
interests and training are in the investigation of language in its socio-cultural and artistic context, contemporary dance
practice. She has been a dance teacher in multilingual settings for young children in Berlin and is a dance and musical
practitioner in performance groups and community orchestras in Newcastle, Sunderland and London.
Linda Briskman (Curtin University)
Restoring Humanity: Memorialising Refugee Experiences
Through a racialised discourse of border protection Australia’s immigration detention camps and the ‘invading
other’ have been shielded from public view. The erection of razor wire denies the public’s right to know of the systemic
brutality and capriciousness occurring within the desert and offshore sites. Shrouding the popular representations is a
politics of fear akin to the ‘ticking bomb theory’ where the impending bomb is reincarnated into notions of boatloads of
unworthy people, reinforced by a parable of displacement of Australian values. Unrelenting government propaganda
mobilised advocates and activists to replace the depiction of wicked impostors to portrayals based on responsibility and
humanity. This was combined with an infiltration of the seemingly impenetrable barriers in order to expose the
malevolence. A citizen’s endeavour, the self-appointed People’s Inquiry into Detention, was among the revelations that
trumped the government’s public relations machinery by engaging in a collective advocacy process to overcome the
psychic and national trauma arising from the policy of mandatory detention. The paper analyses testimony to Inquiry
through textual narratives and visual imagery. The voices of former immigration detainees, staff, professionals,
advocates and activists build a picture of a torturing regime that maliciously engaged in the demonisation and
subjugation of people who were exercising their right to seek asylum. The paper outlines how the Inquiry re-storied
Australia’s policy distortion, to mitigate against the prospect of a new ‘history war’ and to contribute to the healing of
personal and national scars.
Professor LINDA BRISKMAN holds the Dr Haruhisa Handa Chair in Human Rights Education at Curtin
University. Positioning herself as an academic activist, her areas of practice, policy and research endeavour focus on
Indigenous rights and asylum seeker rights. She publishes widely in both spheres and recent books include Social Work
with Indigenous Peoples (2007), Asylum Seekers: International perspectives on interdiction and deterrence (co-edited
with Alperhan Babacan 2008) and Human Rights Overboard (co-authored with Susie Latham and Chris Goddard 2008).
Adam Brown (Deakin University)
Confronting ‘Choiceless Choices’ in Holocaust Video Testimonies: Judgement,
‘Privileged’ Jews, and the Role of the Interviewer
Explorations of the traumatic experiences of so-called ‘privileged’ Jews during the Holocaust, particularly
Primo Levi’s paradigmatic essay on the ‘grey zone,’ often situate them at the threshold of representation, understanding
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and judgement. ‘Privileged’ Jews include those prisoners in the camps and ghettos who held positions that gave them
access to material and other benefits, whilst compelling them to act in ways that have been judged detrimental to fellow
inmates. The unprecedented ethical dilemmas – what Lawrence Langer has termed ‘choiceless choices’ – that
confronted ‘privileged’ Jews may be viewed as exemplifying the ‘limit’ events or experiences that were characteristic
of the Holocaust, and pose vast problems for representation, especially when it comes to the question of passing moral
judgement. The paper will analyse several video testimonies recorded at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research
Centre in Melbourne, which address the highly complex and sensitive issue of ‘privileged’ Jews. It will be shown that
while Levi suggests that judgement should be withheld when confronted with the experiences of Jews in extremis,
moral evaluations of ‘privileged’ Jews are often imposed on Holocaust testimonies and have a strong impact on their
content. The role of the interviewer is a crucial factor in the representation of ‘privileged’ Jews, and this is particularly
the case when interviewees are former ‘privileged’ Jews, and interviewers are themselves Holocaust survivors. The
paper will argue that when confronted with such emotionally and morally freighted issues, judgment may itself be seen
as a ‘limit of representation.’
ADAM BROWN teaches history and literary studies at Deakin University. He is currently completing a PhD
on Holocaust representation, focusing on how moral judgments of ‘privileged’ Jews are communicated in Holocaust
memoir, history and film. He publishes both academic and creative texts, and works in the testimonies department at the
Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre in Melbourne. His most recent publication in the area of Holocaust
Studies is the chapter ‘The Trauma of “Choiceless Choices”: The Paradox of Judgment in Primo Levi’s “Grey Zone,”’
in Trauma, Historicity, Philosophy (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007).
Angi Buettner (Victoria University of Wellington)
The Gaze at Catastrophe
The images of horror are ambivalent. It is not clear whether these images represent a practice that transforms
the horror they depict into a form—the picture or photograph—that enables a well-defined cultural relation with it, or
whether the images, rather, take over the haunting presence of the bodies and make well-defined cultural relations
difficult. Whatever the cultural outcome, photographs of dead bodies and of extreme suffering, as they are taken and
reproduced relentlessly in western culture, return that which we attempt to put to rest by explanations into a remaining
presence again—into a remnant and into an object for the gaze at catastrophe. This paper will draw on images of trauma
circulated within our contemporary, global media landscape in order to discuss methodological possibilities in analysing
the ‘trauma’ work performed by the production, dissemination, and consumption of such images. Images of catastrophe
not merely represent catastrophe and trauma, but also thematize the gaze at catastrophe and trauma. I will argue that this
gaze at catastrophe is at the core of our attempts to take in the effects of catastrophe and to gain an understanding of
catastrophe with a view to see and move towards the ‘beyond’ of trauma.
ANGI BUETTNER is a Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She
researches in the areas of cultural studies and environmental studies, with a focus on media and the public sphere.
Buettner’s PhD thesis examined the contemporary uses of the idea of the Holocaust as it has been generalised as a
metaphor in media representations of catastrophe. Buettner is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press on
media studies (with Thierry Jutel, Tony Schirato, and Geoff Stahl).
Shannon Burns (The University of Adelaide)
The Status of Dreams in Cormac McCarthy’s Post-Apocalyptic Novel The Road
In this paper I explore the status of dreams in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road, with
reference to the ancient Sumerian text The Epic of Gilgamesh, and consider the connection between narration in both
texts – and, by extension, written narrative in general – and trauma. Broadly following the trajectory of Cathy Caruth’s
work on P.T.S.D. in relation to literature, and with a sympathetic ear toward Theodor Adorno’s ‘after Auschwitz’
philosophical turn – which in effect amounts to an ethics and aesthetics of trauma – as well as Freud’s analysis of
dreams and Laplanche’s writings on trauma as an originary ego (and therefore narrative) producing force, I will
examine what it can mean to ‘survive’ when what is being survived is something incommensurable with living. I will
also consider how written narrative itself, as a sort of dream-like wish-fulfilment, might be seen to be a work of survival
that has as its origin an ethically dubious and ego-driven animosity toward potentially traumatic stimuli. In this sense
the response to trauma that I will examine in this paper will be one which Derrida, in his modification of the Freudian
notion of mourning, would refer to as a failure of mourning, which is at the same time a smothering of memory and a
memorial for its absence.
SHANNON BURNS is a PhD candidate in the English Discipline at the University of Adelaide, Australia. His
research interests focus on ‘trauma’ and ‘survival’ in the context of literature and continental philosophy.
Victoria Burrows (University of Tasmania)
Interrogating Trauma, Interrogating Whiteness: Gail Jones’s Sorry
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Gail Jones's novel Sorry is a political allegory in Shakespearean mode. It addresses the themes of trauma and
separation, memory and forgetting, language and silence and the psychic damage of traumatic amnesia in contemporary
Australian history: it is embedded in the cultural politics that surrounded white Australia's refusal to offer an apology to
its indigenous population. In what can now perhaps be viewed as a proleptic vision of how to move towards an ethical
apology, Jones's narrative about a young white girl's inability to say sorry for a grave injustice that she does to her
Aboriginal 'sister' encompasses a double interrogation. Focalised through her central character, the white child, Perdita,
the novel complicates and questions the paradoxical structure of dissociation in psychic trauma and explores what can
occur when such a displacement converges with an unconscious will to forget, a forgetting that in this novel is bound up
with the comforting seduction of whiteness. Sorry is about language in deficit, language in excess and it offers a way of
understanding how a traumatic stutter and its abreaction can radically alter our understandings of silence, time and the
workings of traumatic memory. This paper will explore psychic and physical violence and its interrelation with racial
trauma; trauma's inward flight as a special type of forgetting; the notion of vicarious white victimhood; the construction
of a shamed self; and, finally, the gift of weeping as an ethical response to white silence.
Dr VICTORIA BURROWS is a Lecturer in the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the
University of Tasmania (www.utas.edu.au), Hobart, Australia, having previously completed a post-doctoral fellowship
at the University of Western Australia. Her interest in trauma theory and whiteness studies has resulted in a monograph
entitled Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni
Morrison (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and more recently "The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael
Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" in Studies in the Novel 40: 1 & 2 (Spring & Summer 2008). Her current project, near
completion, is a monograph on whiteness and shame in contemporary fiction.
David Carlin (RMIT University)
Poetic Witnessing in the Archive: The Database Narrative of Life After Wartime
Ross Gibson and Kate Richards describe their interactive database narrative project Life After Wartime (2004)
as a ‘story engine’. They have taken as their inspiration and raw material an archive of crime scene photographs from
Sydney police files of the 1940’s and ’50’s, which have been cut loose from their referential anchoring as specific
historical documents and set in motion, literally, with allusive ‘haiku-like’ scraps of text, to produce what I am calling a
‘haunting machine’. In this paper I analyse the textual strategies employed in Life After Wartime to generate a form of
narrative that embodies a ‘poetics of haunting’. I situate my analysis within recent debates within the humanities
around memory and trauma, and explore whether Life After Wartime may be productively viewed as a distinctive model
of a ‘trauma text’, one eschewing notions of narrative or therapeutic closure, in which complex interconnections
between memory, history and fantasy are played out. Its shifting juxtapositions of image and text, archive and fiction
serve to foreground the ambiguities within testimony and problematize the connections we make with the past. There
is, certainly, a haunting pathos attached to the photographic images in the police archive, but it is a pathos engendered
in the fragility of their fullness of reference: they tell us something but never enough, and we become complicit in
making up the difference.
DAVID CARLIN is a writer, film-maker and lecturer in Media Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne,
Australia. He has been recently published in Overland and Senses of Cinema, and his documentaries, short films, and
plays have been screened/performed in Australia and overseas. He is currently completing his PhD, an interdisciplinary
project on traumatic memory and narrative involving a creative non-fiction (memoir) work and a dissertation.
Paul Carpenter (Curtin University)
An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger) and its Photographic Silences
Following the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Great Irish Famine (1845-1852), it was claimed by many
commentators that the outpourings of grief that marked its commemoration, together with the symposia and
publications that examined previously unexplored dimensions of An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger), had finally put its
elusive ghosts to rest. Notwithstanding the mixed receptions these acts of public memorial and scholarly analysis had
received, particularly several state orchestrated projects and the controversy over ‘revisionist’ readings of the Famine,
the sesquicentennial, despite its shortcomings, was heralded as a response to the deafening silence that had always
enveloped this trauma: a trauma that was pivotal in the making of the modern Irish State. This paper seeks to examine
two unrecognised silences that neither these commemorations nor scholarly investigations have given a voice to: first,
the peculiar absence that exists between the Famine and photography (for even though the medium was practiced in
Ireland from the early 1840s, no Famine-related photographs are known to exist). And secondly, through my own
photographs of Famine sites (its mass-graves, ruins and abandoned places) this paper will contend that local silences
surrounding this trauma have not abated but, nearly 160 years after what James Clarence Mangan had poignantly
described as ‘The Event and its Terrors’, continue to haunt Irish society.
PAUL CARPENTER is a PhD candidate in the School of Design and Art and coordinator of Photography
programs within the Department of Design at Curtin University (http://www.curtin.edu.au/). His research interest,
which stems from being an Irish Photographer living here amongst the diaspora, has been into examining the silences
that surround the Great Famine. These silences, he argues, have a photographic resonance; one that commenced shortly
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following the emergence of photography in Ireland and is still revealed today in the photographic study of the Famines
mass-graves, ruins and abandoned places.
Jeanne E. Clark (Willamette University)
Breaking the Silence: The Double Edge of Victimage and Trauma
Four years ago, at the opening of a controversial exhibit, Yonotan Boemfeld stated, “After two days in Hebron
I understood that in order to survive there I must lock up all that I am, all my values and ideologies, all my feelings and
thoughts, in a little box. And shut up….Tonight…the time has come to talk about what we endured there and how we
are returning to you” (http://www.shovrimshtika.org/article_e.asp?id=19&page=1). Breaking the Silence began as an
exhibit and became an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers collecting testimonies of soldiers in the territories. The
organization contends: “In order to become a civilian again, soldiers are forced to ignore their past experiences;” this
group works to break that silence, first by encouraging the soldiers to remember and recount their experiences, then by
cleansing the interviews of identifiers in order to protect the tellers, and finally publishing the testimonies on the web
and in diverse other media “in order to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created.” The organization’s
website collection of testimonies and media responses provides the basis for a case study of the double edge of military
related trauma. The soldiers portray themselves as victimizers of the people they occupy and, simultaneously, victims
both of the people they are sent to protect and the society that requires their service and expects their silence. This paper
will examine in that collection both the trauma implicit in the double edge and the potential release in the construction
of a corrective collective memory. (http://www.shovrimshtika.org/about_e.asp)
Dr JEANNE E. CLARK is an Associate Professor of rhetoric and media studies at Willamette University in
Salem, Oregon, USA. She has a PhD in speech communication and a second MA in Syro-Palestinian archaeology from
the University of Arizona. Since living in East Jerusalem for two years during her graduate study she has had a strong
interest in the events and discourse of the Israel-Palestine conflict. She has been writing about coverage of that conflict
for twenty years.
Katrina Clifford (University of Canberra)
Mental Health Trauma Narratives and Misplaced Assumptions: Towards an Ethics of
Self-Care among Humanities-Based Trauma Researchers
Taking as its context my own research of discursive representations of fatal mental health crisis interventions,
this paper questions the limits of traditional ‘trauma theory’, which has conventionally insisted on a model of
spectatorship that remains passive. Drawing on a particular case study involving the fatal police shooting of an
individual in psychiatric crisis, and the graphic media coverage that ensued, this paper will demonstrate that there is, in
actual fact, an active negotiation of meaning frameworks, identities and real social and political consequences that takes
place in the expression and representation of and engagement with mental health trauma narratives. This act of
negotiation extends beyond research participants with lived experience of trauma to trauma researchers themselves who,
more often than not, are typically exposed to a ‘vicarious trauma’ as a result of bearing witness to the very personal
stories shared by their research participants, and the often distressing media materials that can shape and complicate
such trauma narratives. Adopting a confessional tone, this paper explores attempts by humanities-based researchers
such as myself to resolve, or at best manage – quite often in isolation – the personal and professional conflicts of
responding to mental health trauma narratives while struggling to maintain the assumed role of the ‘neutral researcher’.
In doing so, it challenges the strongly paternalistic ethical frameworks of a psycho-medico tradition, which has largely
failed to not only acknowledge, but make permissible, the importance of maintaining an obligation to self (and self-
care) among humanities-based trauma researchers, additional to the ethical responsibilities maintained towards their
research participants.
KATRINA CLIFFORD is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Communication and International Studies at the
University of Canberra, Australia. Her research interests include discursive representations of fatal mental health crisis
interventions; media framing; media ethics; collective memory and traumatic recovery; photographic theory; and the
relationship between visual images and relations of power/knowledge. Katrina is a former recipient of a Commonwealth
Scholarship, which she received to complete a Masters of Research (Media and Communications) at Goldsmiths
College, University of London, on the topic ‘[Dis]embodied sight: September 11 and the politics of collective memory,
representation and experience’.
Catherine Collins and Alexandra Opie (Willamette University)
When Places Have Agency: Traumascapes, Temporality, Memory, and Memorializing
This joint project includes a paper presentation by Catherine Collins and a video installation by Alexandra
Opie. We borrow the term “traumascapes” from Maria Tumarkin (2005) to reference sites of trauma that evoke,
“legacies of violence, suffering and loss” (p. 12). Traumascapes are places where time seems to replay itself and the
experiences of loss are continuously re-experienced. Foucault (1998) calls these sites heterochronias—places where the
present and past collapse, where the evocation of the initial trauma leaves the past open in the present, constraining
individual agency while giving agency to place. Sites evoke trauma narratives because “the event is not assimilated or
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experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in the repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Caruth,
1995, 4-5). Memory controls us; yet these sites of pain are often memorialized in an effort to find release from the
trauma they evoke. The paper and the video installation are the culmination of joint research in the intersection of
trauma, temporality, memory and place. We analyze and interpret jointly gathered audiovisual, news stories and
interview material using the lenses and methods of our disciplines.
Catherine Collins’s paper focuses on vernacular memorials such as roadside shrines to the victims of auto
accidents, spontaneous memorials to victims of violence at the site of their death, and the search for symbolic spaces for
making concrete the trauma for victims whose death sites are inaccessible. Each case reveals a need to mark death, to
discover a place that allows space for working through trauma. We extend the research of Kennerly (2002) on the
performative dimension of memorial sites to include the physical site and the testimony of those directly involved in the
tragedy. Additionally, the paper reviews the media’s reporting of this form of traumascape.
Alexandra Opie’s artwork consists of a multi-channel video installation that meditates on the theme of
vernacular memorials. Image and sound collected are mined for elements to create atmosphere. Responding to the work
of experimental sound artist Bob Ostertag, who re-edited sound recorded at the site of a burial in his 1991 work Sooner
or Later, this installation also explores the connections between image and sound, allowing viewers to confront tragedy
and healing in the presence and removal of private memorials in public spaces.
Dr CATHERINE COLLINS received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1977. She is a Professor
and Chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Willamette University, Oregon, USA, and writes and
teaches in the areas of visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of war, memory and memorials, and media framing. Her most recent
work on trauma theory is: “U.S. Television Commemorates 9/11: 5th Anniversary Coverage” in Y. Pasadeos, ed.
(2007) International Dimensions of Mass Media Research, Athens: Athens Institute for Education and Research, pp.
459-468.
ALEXANDRA OPIE is Assistant Professor of Art at Willamette University. She teaches video art, installation
and photography. She received her Masters in Fine Arts in video art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston in 2000. Opie’s artwork has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the US: Boston, Chicago, New York,
Portland, Salem, and San Francisco. She is interested in creating for the viewer an experience of artwork as direct
presence rather than as representation. Themes explored in her artwork include tragedy, memory, sense of place, and
surveillance. For examples of her earlier work, please visit www.alexandraopie.com
Malathi de Alwis (International Centre for Ethnic Studies)
Terror, Trauma and Tracing Traces in Sri Lanka
Forced disappearance is one of the most insidious forms of violence as it seeks to obliterate the body and
indefinitely extends and exacerbates the grief of those left behind. In this paper, I consider how such chronic mourners
'reinhabit the world' in the face of terror and continuously deferring loss, and seek to theorize what might be its political
outcome(s). Arguing that this re-inhabiting is a constant tracing of traces given the ambiguous nature of the
disappeared's status of absence, and thus presence, I explore particular 'identifications' with suffering that is embraced
and embodied by Sinhala women whose children were disappeared during the second Peoples' Liberation Front (JVP)
uprising (1988-1993). In such a context, visual and tactile objects such as photographs and clothing, I suggest, become
especially meaningful by reasserting the presence of the disappeared. In conclusion, I engage Judith Butler's contention
that grief is a tie that binds and thus enables the imagining of alternative political communities, to reflect on how such a
conceptualization might be helpful to re-invigorate political communities in Sri Lanka.
MALATHI DE ALWIS is a socio-cultural anthropologist and a feminist who lives and works in Sri Lanka.
She has researched and written extensively on issues of nationalism, militarism, humanitarianism, displacement and
suffering. She is the co-editor of Feminists Under Fire: Conversations Across War Zones (Toronto: Between the Lines)
and Embodied Violence: Communalizing Women's Sexuality in South Asia (London: Zed/Delhi: Kali for Women). She
is a co-founder of the Women's Coalition for Peace and the Cat's Eye Collective, in Sri Lanka.
Dirk de Bruyn (Deakin University)
Dancing Out of Trauma
Kaplan has argued that Maya Deren's film Meshes of the Afternoon (USA 1943) "produces a visual correlative
to the subjective, emotional and visual experience of trauma" (2005: 125). This paper places Meshes in the centre of an
"inverted odyssey" undertaken by Deren through her professional career as film-maker and anthropologist. It is a
trajectory that delivers the hysteric female body out of the clutches of the originating diagnostic moments of Charcot's
photographs and the weekly hysterical public demonstration-performances at Paris's Salpêtrière's Hospital that Charcot
(1825- 1893) conducted, to dance all the way into the midst of Haitian and African cultural and political life. It is
outlined how Deren's theorising about 'disciplined' Haitian Voudoun dances of possession and western Hysteria as
'parallel phenomena' brought her to the assertion that it was the cultural context in which hysteria occurred that made it
aberrant or dysfunctional in western culture. In Haiti such phenomena were 'conflicts of a community' that were
'organised entirely in terms of their cultural tradition' (Clark Hodson and Neiman, 1984: 490). This insight offers a
further re-reading of Meshes that moves Deren's performance in Meshes beyond trauma and back into 'community'.
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DIRK DE BRUYN has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation films and new media
interactive work over the last 30 years and has continued to maintain a no-budget, independent, self-funded focus for
much of this work. He has curated various programs of film and video art internationally and written extensively about
this area of artistic practice. In the early 1990s de Bruyn lived in Canada and taught Animation at Emily Carr College of
Art and Design, Vancouver. Currently, he teaches Animation and Digital Culture at Deakin University, Burwood,
Australia.
Rebecca Grinblat Delohery (Dublin Women’s Aid)
Moving Beyond Trauma when Identity is Based on Intergenerational Grief
How do grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, or 3Gs, move beyond their inherited trauma and grief to form
an identity? As a 3G myself, I know that we have not moved beyond our grandparents’ experiences yet and that the
trauma is at the core of our identities. Many 3Gs have studied the Holocaust, as if learning the historical facts will help
us make sense of ourselves. Many of us go into the caring professions, as if in ‘fixing’ others we will have earned the
worthiness to be alive, the justification for our existence. Some of us embrace the source of our grief and learn to tell
our grandparents’ stories, as well as our own. Is this the way to move beyond trauma? My journey to identify and
express myself has taken me from Australia to the US, Israel, and now to Ireland, where there is no Jewish community
to speak about. I have had to move away from the tradition and the binding of family and community ties to discover
my own voice, which only began to emerge after encountering my husband’s art. My husband, Thomas Delohery, an
Irish Artist of Catholic descent with no family connection to the Holocaust, has helped me to break away from the
expectations of how I should narrate my own story and find an utterly new voice. Becoming connected to his art, which
depicts various aspects of the Holocaust, has also given me some of this freedom to stop merely relating the stories of
those who have come before me and to talk about my own journey. In 2007 my husband asked me to open one of his
shows in Ireland. This gave me a platform to bring my thoughts on his work and on my history to artists, journalists,
critics, students, and others who attend his show. When he exhibited in Canada, later in the year, he spoke to students
about the process of creating art about the Holocaust, and I was able to bring the historical and personal context in
talking about my family’s experiences and what it was like for me as a young Jewish woman whose family had
undergone such trauma. My paper examines the experiences of various 3Gs and asks if moving beyond trauma through
connections to art and other experiences outside the traditional Jewish narrative is possible.
REBECCA GRINBLAT DELOHERY was born in Melbourne, Australia. Her maternal grandparents,
originally from Czechoslovakia, survived the Holocaust. She has an M.A. in Public History and her research focus is
memory and oral testimony. She has worked at the Sydney Jewish Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C. She was an interviewer for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and
was the curator for Courage to Care, a travelling Holocaust exhibition. She met her husband Thomas Delohery while
completing the “Teaching the Holocaust for Educators” course at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, as well as their course for
graduates, which comprised an extended field trip through Poland and Lithuania. She has continued her studies with
Yad Vashem through online courses. She currently works for Women’s Aid in Dublin, Ireland, where she runs the
research library.
Giorgia Doná (University of East London)
Social Suffering in Cyberspace: Virtual Narratives, Transnationalism and
Reconciliation
The paper discusses representations of social suffering in virtual memorial sites in the context of post-genocide
Rwanda, and asks how these constructions relate to and inform reconciliation initiatives. In doing so, the paper calls for
an interrogation of the politicisation of trauma and social suffering in contexts of post-conflict, where specific
representations of suffering become central to a country’s official narrative of its recent history and national identity.
Transnationally managed through the use of technology and targeted to virtual audiences like diasporic groups and the
international community, narratives of social suffering then function as psycho-political tool for legitimacy and
diplomatic relations.
Dr GIORGIA DONÁ is Reader and Co-Director of the Refugee Research Centre at the University of East
London, UK, where she teaches refugee studies and social anthropology. Her research interests are in the areas of
culture and wellbeing, representations of violence and reconciliation, displaced children, and participatory research
methodologies. She has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to research ‘Bystanders to the Rwandan
genocide: revisiting genocide narratives and reconciliation initiatives’. The fieldwork for this research and conference
presentation is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Glen Donnar (RMIT University)
Levinas & the Face: Helping Media Users Witness, Recognise & Recover Trauma
Victims
8
As media users we often ignore the mediated suffering and trauma of (distant) others. But to do so, to not look,
is to refuse recognition of this suffering and to accept their effacement in death and in representation. Witnessing is
essential if we are to 'recover' victims as individuals. Through a consideration of televison news images of terror and
trauma, the photos of Tuol Sleng and coverage of the Madrid train bombings, I adopt a 'Levinasian' approach to discern
a way for us to bear witness and establish a social connection with (often anonymous) victims, thus facilitating a
meaningful engagement both with the images and those they represent. For Levinas, ethics involves our relations with
others and originates when 'the face' (le visage) of the Other–unique and irreducible–discloses itself to me. The Other’s
regard of me provokes recognition, commands my respect and elicits my responsibility. In this encounter with the Other
the potential presence of innumerable others, the 'third party' (le tiers), is also revealed. Levinasian ethics cannot tell us
how to witness the suffering of Others, but it does challenge us. It is not agency but responsiveness that matters; an
openness to the Other and a readiness to go 'beyond’ the image(s) and respond to the Other's call upon us. The
effacement of victims in death or representation cannot be reversed, but in our response and recognition it can be
exceeded, transcended and they, ultimately, recovered.
GLEN DONNAR teaches in the School of Applied Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
(http://www.rmit.edu.au/appliedcommunication/). He teaches cinema studies and international communication and
culture in the Master of Communication and cinema studies, literary studies and communication theory in the Bachelor
of Communication (Media). His MA (Communications) thesis examined Australian news coverage (and the framing
and re-framing) of the Madrid train bombings. He is also part of the Post-Industrial Media (PIM) project, a
collaborative teaching and learning research project undertaken by staff within the RMIT Media program
(http://media.rmit.edu.au/projects/pim/index.php/Main_Page).
Erika Doss (University of Notre Dame)
Interrogating Lynching Photography: Critiquing the Representation of Trauma
There is the perception that the representation of trauma helps to evacuate it: that visualizing atrocities exposes
their causes and consequences, and compels viewers to consider ways to prevent their repetition. Yet as Saidiya
Hartman remarks in a discussion of slavery narratives: "Are we witnesses who confirm the truth . . . Or are we voyeurs
fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and suffering?" This paper considers the voyeuristic dimensions of
atrocity photographs, focusing on the exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000-present).
However revelatory, the images in this critically acclaimed exhibition repeatedly dehumanize their (black) victims as
they simultaneously reanimate the power of their (white) murderers. Their evidentiary terms—how they are seen, and
by whom—are equally problematic. As Grace Hale observes, white viewers may look at lynching photographs to
"experience the trauma of race" without acknowledging the role that whiteness has played in performing the trauma of
racial terrorism. In the ideal ethical scenario, lynching photographs might be considered agents of mourning, images
that permit insights into the terms of human degradation, and urge empathy with the dead. But critically vacuous
fascination with "wound culture"—with the trauma and pain of others, without the necessary interrogation of our own
desires to look at that trauma and pain—discounts these possibilities. Arguing for more nuanced interpretations of
trauma's visualization, and especially of photography's privileged role as an "authenticating" agent, this paper concludes
with a discussion of alternative representational strategies employed in contemporary lynching and slavery memorials
in the United States.
Professor ERIKA DOSS is the Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame,
Indiana, USA. She is the author of several books, including Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From
Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991), Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in
American Communities (1995), Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (1999), Looking at Life Magazine (editor, 2001),
and Twentieth-Century American Art (2002). She is currently completing Memorial Mania: Self, Nation, and the
Culture of Commemoration in Contemporary America, which considers the affective dynamics of contemporary
American memorials to terrorism, lynching, slavery, 9/11, and war. Professor Doss is also the editor of the ‘Culture
America’ series at the University Press of Kansas and is on the editorial board of the academic journal Memory Studies.
Kate Douglas (Flinders University)
Trauma, Silence and the Witness
Over the past century, the global community has witnessed countless traumas: civil wars, terrorist attacks,
cultural genocide, famine, natural disasters and mass murders. This witnessing has resulted in a plethora of traumatic
commemorative sites being constructed and opened to the public—for example, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe (in Berlin), the Burma-Thailand Railway memorial site (in Kanchanaburi, Thailand), and the U.S.S. Arizona
Memorial at Pearl Harbor (Hawaii), to name just a few examples. These are memorials for the dead, and for the
survivors. They are sites of remembrance, mourning and of second-person witnessing. These sites provide a legacy and
a warning—that history should not be repeated. Trauma sites provide interventions into historical events—and ask
visitors to respond to traumatic history in particular ways. These sites solicit performances of witnessing—through what
is asked of visitors who come to these memorials. Drawing on the work of trauma theorists such as Caruth, Felman and
Laub, Gilmore, and La Capra, I focus on one aspect of witnessing demanded from visitors to these sites:
commemorative silence. Using the example of the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, I explore how
9
visitors to this trauma site are asked to read the traumatic experiences it harnesses. In this instance, what is the
relationship between trauma, silence and witnessing?
Dr KATE DOUGLAS is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Australian
Studies at Flinders University (South Australia). Her primary research interest is the social work of life writing—the
ways in which life narrative texts engage with the politics of the moment and affect social change. Her research
investigates who is authorised to write autobiographically at particular historical moments, and the technologies they
use to record their lives. Kate is the author of Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory
(forthcoming Rutgers, 2009) and Trauma Texts (with Gillian Whitlock) (forthcoming Routledge, 2008). With Gillian
Whitlock, she has recently edited two special issues of the journal Life Writing (5.1 and 5.2, 2008) titled ‘Trauma in the
Twenty-First Century’.
Pauline Diamond (Glasgow Freelance Journalist) and
Sallyanne Duncan (University of Strathclyde)
The Ethical Issues of Reporting the Testimony of Women Asylum Seekers as a
Representation of Collective Suffering
This paper explores the process by which journalists mediate others’ experiences of trauma, torture and
atrocity while reconstructing these intimate stories as representations of a historical catastrophic event. The paper asks
whether it is ethical to use such private and personal accounts of suffering to articulate or represent a global
phenomenon. The reporting process of such stories tends to be a highly emotive and painful experience for both the
interviewee and the journalist. The sense of responsibility carried by the journalist in writing up and publishing these
accounts also tends to be heightened. In particular, the paper examines the ethics of reporting the personal testimony of
women asylum-seekers. Women asylum-seekers often have different reasons for seeking refuge than men, for example,
gender-based persecution, which is not recognised in the UN Convention on Refugees. Through references to
interviews with both women asylum-seekers and journalists in the UK, the paper explores issues of trust, empathy,
exploitation and intrusion.
PAULINE DIAMOND is a freelance journalist specialising in reporting human rights issues. She has recently
completed a Masters degree in Journalism, which focused on journalism ethics, at the University of Strathclyde,
Glasgow, Scotland.
Dr SALLYANNE DUNCAN is Programme Director of the MLitt in Journalism at the Strathclyde School of
Journalism and Communication at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Her research interests focus on the
reporting of stories involving trauma, bereavement or anxiety. Her doctoral thesis examined the pressures placed on,
and the processes undertaken by, journalists who cover large-scale disasters and, more commonly, personal traumatic
experiences.
Farid Farid (University of Western Sydney)
Deathbound Affects: Iraqi Bodies, Memories and Texts in Sydney
With the passing of the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by a global coalition of forces that includes
Australia, this paper investigates the cultural politics of memory amongst Iraqis in Sydney through interviews, visual art
and poetry. These visual and textual narratives of forced dispersal, death and collective memory allude to the affective
heightening of political emotions engendered by the bloodiness of the current occupation of Iraq. The paper puts
forward the notion of ‘memory in the body’ as an overarching theme that attends to the specific materiality of Iraqi
bodies that experience pain and trauma. The Iraqi diasporic body is postulated as a site of multiple political and social
inscriptions of violence and its traumatic reminders. The paper, thus, discusses narratives and poetry provided by
interviewees as well as participant observation data gained from extensive ethnographic work. In mapping out a
corporeal topography, the paper attends both to the racialised character of melancholia and to competing
epistemological and ethical positions of writing Iraqi diasporic narratives of pain. Providing a heterogenous anatomy of
the waves of Iraqi migration and exile and their impact on the body through collective processes of affect, remembering
and longing, the paper goes on to map the geographies of displacement and economies of belonging started in Iraq and
continued in Australia.
FARID FARID is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney,
Australia.
Charon Freebody (La Trobe University)
Questions of Remembering: Cinematic Portrayals of the Trauma of the 'Stolen
Generation'
In the light of the Australian government's official apology to the 'stolen generation' in early 2008 there is an
opportunity to re-examine Australian cinema’s portrayal of the experience of this official policy of separation of
10
Indigenous children from their families, communities and cultural heritage. Four films, in particular, illustrate the shift
in the public perception of this issue over a period of fifty years: Jedda (1955), Night Cries (1987), Radiance (2002),
and Rabbit Proof Fence (2002). The paper includes both textual and production evidence to establish that while
individually these films tell stories that have historical specificities, as a group they also chart the development of
models of visual representation of race and systematic violence inflicted upon Indigenous women since settlement.
CHARON FREEBODY is a PhD candidate at La Trobe University, Bendigo, Australia. She is currently
conducting research on the films of Tracey Moffatt and Rachel Perkins.
Vivien G. Fryd (Vanderbilt University)
The Trauma of Slavery in Kara Walker’s Eight Possible Beginnings
Kara Walker, the controversial African-American artist who won the MacArthur “genius” grant in 1997,
recently had an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Walker’s exhibition included a powerful video,
Eight Possible Beginnings (2005), which re-members and re-interprets the trauma of slavery, contributing to public
memory and forcing the viewer to bear witness to her world filled with obscene, haunting, humorous, and arresting
images, all situated within the politics of race. The video narrates eight chapters of a fictional story: the creation of an
allegorical land, “African-America,” which begins with Africans enslaved on a slave ship on the Middle Passage to the
New World and ends with the lynching of white men. It includes, among other things, the rape and pregnancy of a black
man by a white master and the unrelentless rape of a young slave girl, representing the unspeakable and thereby
signifying an absent presence whose traces are always evident and haunting in American culture.
This paper shows how Walker creates a repetitive traumatic site that surrounds, involves, and challenges the
viewer to witness, acknowledge, and remember the trauma of slavery and contemporary racism in the United States.
The paper considers Walker’s re-imagining of racial politics and relationships from the nineteenth century to the
present. In doing so, it examines her treatment of the dialectics between pleasure and danger, fulfilment and guilt, desire
and fear, and race and class in which sexual trauma remains a primary focus. The paper goes on to suggest that in Eight
Possible Beginnings human pain perpetually exists as individual, collective, generational, and transgenerational trauma,
foreclosing the possibility of healing.
Professor VIVIEN GREEN FRYD, Professor of the History of Art, American Studies, and Gender and
Women Studies at Vanderbilt University, USA, is the author of Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the U.S.
Capitol, 1815-60 (Yale University Press, 1992) and Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward
Hopper (University of Chicago Press, 2003). She is currently completing a book manuscript, Representing Sexual
Trauma in Contemporary American Art, which is being considered for publication by the University of Chicago Press.
She has published a number of articles on nineteenth-century American sculpture, including “The ‘Ghosting’ of Incest
and Female Liasons in Harriet Hosmer’s Beatrice Cenci,” The Art Bulletin (June 2006), select paintings by Benjamin
West, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Thomas Hart Benton, and contemporary artists’ representations of sexual
trauma. She is the co-chair of the 2008-2009 Robert Penn Warren Humanities Center Fellow’s Program at Vanderbilt
University: “New Directions in Trauma Studies.” This year-long seminar will turn a critical lens onto the "fact" of
trauma, lived experiences of trauma, stories and representations about trauma, and intellectual and pedagogical issues
related to scholarly investigations of trauma. This will be an interdisciplinary approach that will greatly enhance this
emerging area of scholarship to further understand the individual and collective experiences of trauma, to intervene in
human suffering resulting from trauma, and to assist in preventing traumatic events.
Kelli Fuery (University of Newcastle)
Suffering as Transitional Object: Investigating Creativity and the Intermediate Area
of Experience in the Process of Healing
We all tell stories of our scars, the texture and appearance of our wounds working as platforms for the detailed
and cared for narratives of our personal, local healing memories. These scars are not just the reminders of surgery or
accident, they form part of our body's memory and help us to emotionally cope with traumatic experience. This paper
explores the potential of photography as a tool in the healing process and outlines current research being conducted in
association with the Centre for ArtsHealth Research and Practice at the University of Newcastle regarding the effect of
visual culture on patients' experience, healing and memory. Strong connections have long existed between visual
culture and memory; more recently seen as forming part of interdisciplinary research initiatives and centres, such as
medical humanities and arts/health programmes. However the association between visual culture and patient experience
has not had the same attention as other intervention from the humanities. This paper positions visual culture
(specifically photography) as an essential component of suffering and healing. Particular emphasis is placed on the
formation of narrative as memory. Physical healing only forms part of the body's regenerative process, its psychical
counterpart forming the remaining element. This paper looks to link the condition of memory and its association with
traumatic experience to a visual narrative of healing for both mind and body.
Dr KELLI FUERY lectures in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at University of Newcastle, Australia
(http://www.newcastle.edu.au/school-old/hss/staffcontact/kellifuery.html), and is a member of the ArtsHealth Research
Centre for Practice and Research (http://www.newcastle.edu.au/research-centre/artshealth/). She has held previous
11
positions at Birkbeck College, University of London, Monash University, and Sussex University. She is the author of 3
books and is currently completing research on photography, memory, and body trauma.
Don Gill (University of Lethbridge)
D’Arcy Island – An Installation
The installation D’Arcy Island focuses on the intercultural panic that occurred upon the discovery of the
disease of leprosy (Hanson’s disease) in the city of Victoria, British Columbia in 1891. The illness was discovered in a
few immigrants from China and the panic that ensued resulted in the immediate internment of the infected individuals
on a small, uninhabited island for the rest of their lives. Through still photography, video projection, and audio D’Arcy
Island looks at landscape as a device of incarceration and the racialization of disease. I constructed an operatic libretto
using text from a nineteenth century medical journal which included such statements as: “The introduction of this
plague to the Pacific Coast of British Columbia was due to the immigration of the Mongolian races to her shores.” This
is then sung to the accompaniment of an improvised piano score. This accompanies a sixteen-minute video composed of
material shot on the island between 1996 and 2006 in addition to archival material. The American photographer Ansel
Adams photographed the Manzanar internment camp where American citizens of Japanese origins were held during
WW ll. This work provided me the germination for the proposition that landscape is used as a device of imprisonment.
While he published a book protesting the internment he also believed that despite the harsh conditions of the camp the
sublime landscape of mountains and desert was beneficial to the internees during their imprisonment. Robert Louis
Stevenson also spoke of landscape when writing about the Lazaretto on Molokai:“Here then is a prison fortified by
nature, a place where thousands may be quartered and a pair of sentinels suffice to watch and hold the only issues. “
D’arcy Island is part of a larger project The Carceral Landscape, which engages with the idea of the landscape itself
being used a device of imprisonment. In this age of mass migrations, refugee camps and internments D’Arcy Island acts
as a prism to look at broader issues of the use of landscape or geography to separate population groups.
DON GILL is a multimedia artist with an extensive production and lecturing history. His research and creative
activities encompass photography, video, film, new media, writing, performance, and documentary studies. Before
accepting a tenure-track appointment at the University of Lethbridge in 2000, he held academic appointments at the
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; Emily Carr Institute of Art and
Design; Malaspina University College; and Simon Fraser University.
Stephen Goddard (Deakin University)
Video Testimony: The Generation and Transmission of Trauma
My mother experienced World War II displaced and separated from her family. In 1997, as part of the Shoah
Foundation Visual History series, she narrated her individualized video testimony, once again, separated from her
family. This presentation seeks to examine the methodology of this video testimony. Members of the family (other than
the narrator) were asked to absent themselves during the recording process. It was assumed that this would empower the
storyteller to narrate without interruption, and without the fear of possible contradiction. However, the removal of
familial participants also meant that the remembering and the narration occurred without the usual dynamism of
interactive storytelling. With a single light and unblinking camera, the interrogatory setting also enacted a therapeutic
structure that foregrounded the mediating influence of the camera, the cinematographer, and the promptings of the
interviewer. Under these circumstances, was the storyteller able to tell her stories in the way she wanted to? Did the
recording methodology produce a series of shifts, by which a witnessed testimony became a guided interview, and then
a form of traumatic interrogation? An eye-witness testimony generates a distinct form of traumatic re-experiencing for
the storyteller. The storyteller also bequeaths their stories to family members, who, as part of their genetic and cultural
inheritance, act as carriers who pass the stories on to others. As the stories are transmitted from one community of souls
to another, these stories and their traumatic aura permeate the everyday and ever-present heritage we seek to
understand.
Dr STEPHEN GODDARD lectures in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University,
Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include historical and contemporary documentary, experimental and
autobiographical screen practices.
Ariel Gratch (Louisiana State University)
Haunting Stories of Abuse: Revealing Ghosts through Critical Performance
Ethnography
In this project I explore what it means to be haunted by a history of abuse. Through critical performance
ethnography I explore how acts of intimate abuse are incommunicable. In an effort to make meaning out of these acts,
we work to label past experiences and place them into a more easily
explainable context. In so doing, many mundane acts of abuse might not be viewed as legitimate by the people who
experienced these acts of abuse. This project employed a performance-centred research method. A staged performance
that juxtaposed ethnographic research, theories of victimization, memory, and haunting, and a traditional ghost story
was created. This opened up conversations of how histories of abuse continue to affect people in intimate abusive
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relationships. This analysis examines the labels attached to discourses of victimization and suggests that focusing on the
relationship aspect of intimate abuse offers methods of praxis that are absent when our focus rests on labels.
ARIEL GRATCH is a PhD student at Louisiana State University, USA, in the department of Communication
Studies. He uses performance as a mode of analysis to examine questions of memory and abuse in private and public
settings. His critically acclaimed performance piece, The Bell Witch: A
Haunting Tale of Love and Abuse won an award for best original script, and was hailed as a “clever concoction of
layered complexity and simplicity in a skilful weaving of Tennessee's Bell Witch legend with real-life stories of family
abuse.”
Helena Grehan (Murdoch University)
The ‘Disconnected’ Spectator: Witnessing and Responding to Acts of Control at a
Public Event
This paper asks whether the current environment of control and surveillance has radically altered the function
and power of the spectator at (and in response to) public events. I take as my subject the ‘Tasering’ by security guards
of student Andrew Meyer at a talk by Senator John Kerry at the University of Florida, to explore the processes by which
spectators at that event witnessed the subduing of Meyer and responded by recording the ‘event’ on their mobile
phones. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, I ask questions about response, responsibility and intervention as
they pertain to spectatorship in the contemporary moment. I consider the following: how is it possible to witness the
‘tasering’ of a screaming and pleading student without responding bodily? What kind of in-between state does the
contemporary spectator occupy that allows her to respond with technology rather than with her body? Are we in an
environment where the body is futile and the phone is not? I also consider what happens to the captured material once it
begins to circulate as a visual snippet in the virtual world? In the process of my paper I think-through the relationships
between technology, the body and trauma in the current fraught globalised landscape and consider where these
relationships leave the contemporary spectator as an embodied and a technologically advanced subject.
Dr HELENA GREHAN is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Arts at Murdoch University, Australia.
Henriette Gunkel (University of Fort Hare)
‘Aftermath’–Visual Interventions into the Trauma of Hate Crime in Post-Apartheid
South Africa
This paper focuses on the work of black lesbian photographer and activist Zanele Muholi and examines the
artist’s response to (post)colonial homophobia in contemporary South Africa. In her work Muholi documents some of
the key issues within the black lesbian community in Johannesburg and by doing so dismantles both the cause and the
effect of postcolonial homophobia. I develop this argument by focussing on Muholi’s images Aftermath (2004) and
Period (2003). Both photographs deal with the issue of hate crime against lesbians and hence reveal the tension between
the post-apartheid constitution and post-apartheid homophobia. The images, however, do not only tell the story of
victimization. They also tell the story of agency and resistance. Muholi creates resistance through visual culture; she
creates a rupture of the disciplined, docile body of the present through what Foucault calls the ‘process of
subjectification’. It is this passage from objectification to subjectification that marks the production of these images as a
political act–as an opposing force working against colonial positions. They represent the postcolonial idea of self-
definition–while at the same time targeting the assumption that homosexuality cannot act as a signifier for a
decolonized subject. The photographs emerge as a political act, as an act of becoming. The subjects of the photography,
and Muholi herself, work in opposition to what the colonial project has determined. They reappear as subjects not
objects or the so called objectified Other. By doing so Muholi challenges the sex/gender regime that underwrote
colonialism and apartheid and open spaces in which people are able to constitute themselves beyond trauma.
Dr HENRIETTE GUNKEL is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Fort Hare Institute for Social and
Economic Research in East London, South Africa. She is currently writing a book on the cultural politics of female
same-sex intimacy in post-apartheid South Africa. Her broader academic interests centre on the politics of race and
racism, postcolonial theory, queer theory and feminist theories of the body.
Lindsay Hallam (Curtin University)
Gore-nography: Post 9/11 Trauma and the Rise of ‘Torture Porn’ in Recent Horror
Films
Cultural fears and traumas have always found manifestation in horror cinema. With the events of September
11th 2001 leading to the War on Terror—and the establishment of facilities such as Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib—
the fear of and fascination with torture has become a central cultural issue. These events are arguably linked to the rise
of increasingly graphic scenes of prolonged torture in recent horror cinema. Films such as the Saw series, Hostel, Wolf
Creek and Captivity rely on scenes of torture and sadism to deliver audience thrills and excitement, which has lead to
these films being termed as ‘torture porn.’ Despite this derogatory term, I will argue that this form of genre cinema can
13
be seen as a response to a traumatic public event. Whilst the majority of trauma cinema theory has focused on
documentaries and films which dramatise past events, for example, Janet Walker’s Trauma Cinema (2005) and Felicity
Collins and Therese Davis’s Australian Cinema After Mabo (2004), the idea that genre cinema can also be a form of
trauma cinema has yet to be fully explored. For one must ask the question: can the experience of trauma really be
expressed within the trappings of the horror genre?
Dr LINDSAY HALLAM completed her doctoral thesis Sinema: Sade and the Transgressive Body Onscreen at
Curtin University in 2008. She is a sessional lecturer and tutor in film studies at this university. Her research interests
include horror films and other forms of transgressive cinema. She has published articles in Senses of Cinema and Metro
Magazine, and has produced and directed short films, a music video and an advertisement for a local horror shop.
Anne Harris (Victoria University)
Performativity, Identity and the “Found Girls” of Africa: Transgressive Integration
into Contemporary Australia (The Sunshine Short Film Project)
Like their famous counterparts, the so-called “Lost Boys of Sudan”, Sudanese refugee girls and young women
have found asylum in the United States, Australia, UK and other countries. They have travelled far, sometimes alone,
suffered unimaginable atrocities, and are working hard to ‘fit in’ to their new cultures. This paper addresses gender-
based socialisation challenges faced by Sudanese refugee secondary school students in Melbourne’s western suburbs,
and an arts praxis by which these challenges may be met. The performativity of their identities in school settings often
relegates African young women to the liminal space of simultaneous race/gender marginalization. This paper and the
project it describes foregrounds the issue of belonging and empowerment which facilitates all other tasks that follow.
Particularly for African young women entering the mainstream school system, this sense of belonging is pivotal in
establishing successful or unsuccessful patterns in their integration process. This paper examines the prevailing social
context for that connectedness (or disconnectedness), suggests that arts-based methodologies may be the best
opportunity for establishing democratic educative practices in schools, and examines one in particular: the Sunshine
Short Film Project. This film project invites Sudanese young women in the Melbourne region to make short films
reflecting their educational experiences, situates their lived experience in the context of a hostile contemporary
immigration climate, and through film the participants offer advice to the education system on what can improve
education delivery to refugee young people today.
ANNE HARRIS is currently a sessional lecturer and PhD researcher in the School of Education at Victoria
University, Australia, focusing in the areas of transnationalism, performativity of identity, and refugee studies. As a
playwright, dramaturg and teacher, her play Heat was shortlisted for the Patrick White Playwriting Award in 2006. Her
play Surviving Jonah Salt was co-written and produced by members of Jute Theatre Co in Cairns and Knock Em Down
Theatre, Darwin in 2004, and is published by Playlabs Press. Her one-woman show Dust was produced by Red Dust
Theatre for Alice Springs Festival 2003 and excerpted by Darwin Theatre Company. She composed and musical
directed the score to Train Dancing by Michael Watts, which was produced by Red Dust Theatre for Adelaide Festival
2002. Ms Harris has worked as dramaturg, script assessor, and workshop leader for New York Theatre Workshop, New
Dramatists, Soho Rep, Young Playwrights’ Festival Inc., Playworks, NT Writers Centre and the Australian National
Playwrights’ Centre. She was co-founder and artistic director of Lend Theatre in New York, and teaching artist for the
American and Central Australian Young Playwrights Festivals. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York
University, where she studied with Wendy Wasserstein, Tony Kushner, Arthur Miller and Eve Ensler, among others.
Jennifer Harris (Curtin University)
Memorials and Trauma: Pinjarra, 1834
Many memorials reflect traumatic experiences insisting on the historic, lived quality of the events while in
most cases attempting to reflect the events in such a way that they seem to transcend politics. Memorials are, therefore,
rich sites of semiotic contradiction. There is a performative quality of memorials implicit in their narratives, but it is
suppressed because of the contradictory insistence that the events are beyond debate. The characteristic numb quality of
trauma, in its repetition of the shocking event, can be approached by taking control of the narrative. It is time for
memorials to be reconceptualised as cultural resources which could open up the act of narrativising trauma; they could
be highly effective spaces for confronting traumatic history. This paper examines aspects of the memorial experience at
Pinjarra in Western Australia which is the site of an event in October 1834 between British colonisers and the Binjareb
people. For the British it was the place at which south-western Aboriginal resistance to colonisation was overcome in
what has been referred to most often as a “battle”, a word which many still insist is the correct description. For the
descendants of the 1834 Binjareb, and their supporters, it is a place known through oral history as a “massacre” site in
which 15-80 people, mostly women, children and the old, died in an ambush which all but destroyed their society and
has carried intergenerational trauma. The paper proposes a reconceptualisation of the role of memorials away from
places of assumed harmonious memory that are fixed in the landscape. It proposes that memorials be seen as process
sites that could activate debate with the intention of easing trauma. This process could be applied to existing and new
memorials and would encompass dialogue and public programmes in which the contesting parties could listen to each
14
other. Memorials used actively, therefore, could result in apologies for historic events, re-narrativisation and some
social control of trauma.
Dr JENNIFER HARRIS is the Acting Head of Cultural Heritage at Curtin University and a member of the
executive board of the International Council of Museums, Australia. Her research interests include popular culture,
heritage and museology.
Nicola Henry (La Trobe University)
The Impossibility of Bearing Witness: Wartime Rape and the Language of Testimony
Testimonies of wartime sexual violence contribute to the preservation of post-conflict collective memory and
the recognition of rape as a serious human rights violation. While acknowledgement and justice are no doubt imperative
to countering the silence that has for so long shrouded women’s experiences of wartime violence, this paper critiques
some of the commonly-held therapeutic assumptions about disclosure and silence through examining the way memories
of so-called “unspeakable” events are communicated through language. It is Giorgio Agamben’s contention that
“testimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of language.” This attests to the impossibility of language for
expressing physical and psychological pain, and to the impossibility of “non-language” or silence as an alternative
mechanism for what Elaine Scarry has termed the “unsharable”. The paper will thus explore the inherent limitations of
language for bearing witness to wartime rape through the lens of agency and subjectivity, specifically focusing on
international war crimes tribunals. The paper will also consider alternative memory sites or instruments, such as truth
commissions, memorials, inquiries, non-governmental campaigns, films, documentaries, literature and other cultural
texts in order to explore different modes of witnessing and their meaning.
NICOLA HENRY is a lecturer in Legal Studies in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University,
Melbourne, Australia. She teaches in the areas of: legal practice, discrimination, human rights and social justice. She
consistently adopts an interdisciplinary, socio-legal approach to her teaching and research with a particular focus on
critiquing the ideological phenomena reflected in legal and other “scientific” discourses. She has written on a wide
range of issues, with specific interests in violence against women, human rights, political democracy, and the natural
environment. Her central research interests relate to collective memory and wartime sexual violence.
Aileen Hoath (Curtin University)
Tracing Life Lines through an Ecological Disaster: Porong, Sidoarjo, East Java
In Traumascape, author Maria Tumarkin recalls Italio Calvino's observation that 'places do not tell their past,
they contain it like the lines of a hand'. What then when the lines of containment are erased? When whole villages are
buried beneath a seemingly ceaseless flow of mud erupting from deep in the earth? This paper explores the relationship
between the displaced and their (dis)place, now an accidental mudlake in Porong, Sidoarjo, Indonesia, site of one of the
most recent and catastrophic disasters associated with gas exploration. As Turmakin writes, such scapes inevitably
contain histories that ‘have never been fully articulated or remembered'. Our collective fascination relates to “the hope
that place will retain our pasts in ways that nothing else... not even our memory can.” This suggests that lost or damaged
places give rise to potent generative spaces. The processes by which individuals and collectivities retrieve and articulate
personal and shared histories are deeply implicated in the imagining of present and future possibilities. These processes
are examined here through discussions with victims based around several medium that include: representations of the
disaster painted by victims on the canvas walls of the Porong refugee centre; more overtly political art that has marked
sites of protest against the injustice of the event; and the narratives of those who are now generating a new income by
guiding the curious around their strangely compelling, recently drowned worlds.
Dr AILEEN HOATH is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University.
Robert Jacobs (Hiroshima Peace Institute)
Reconstructing the Perpetrator’s Soul by Reconstructing the Victim’s Body: The
Hiroshima Maidens in the American Mind
This paper examines mass culture stories and depictions of the Hiroshima Maidens and their sojourn to the
United States to undergo plastic surgery in the mid-1950s. Childhood victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the
reconstruction of these twenty-five women was not limited to their physical appearance. The media narration of their
experiences expressed pride in American technology in much the same way that it had expressed pride in American
technology after the atomic bombing which had caused the “maidens” original victimization. It emphasized their
gratitude to the American people, which recast the Americans as philanthropic healers rather than as the perpetrators of
their trauma. Those who sponsored the trip of the Hiroshima Maidens had only admirable intentions, but the presence of
these victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima became a means for the American public to seek to reconstruct the
role they had played in the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and recast themselves as charitable
healers and modern wonder workers.
ROBERT JACOBS is Assistant Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute. He is a historian of science and
technology who works on issues of nuclear history and culture and has written on the cultural construction of narratives
15
of the survival of nuclear war, and psychological discussions of the roots of human violence in the aftermath of
Hiroshima. He is currently completing his first book, The Bomb As Talisman.
Joanne Jones (Curtin University)
The Ambivalence of White Settler Trauma in Australian Historical Novels
One quick glance at the list of Miles Franklin Prize winners over the past twenty years reveals the centrality of
the realist historical novel to Australia’s literary canon and publishing institutions. The continual reappearance and
reworking of settler frontier narratives is clearly linked to a national cultural preoccupation with the nature of events
and material conditions of early colonisation. This may be attributed to a number of interconnecting and seemingly
irreconcilable factors, including the persistence of white guilt at individual and systemic violence against indigenous
peoples and the need to explain and ethically justify the invasion and appropriation of land. Interestingly, the
experiences of the group most clearly and visibly traumatized by the initial events and ongoing processes of
colonisation–Indigenous Australians–remain largely unrepresented within this genre. A much greater emphasis is
placed on the representation of white settler trauma caused by the shock of cultural and geographical displacement, the
abuses of nineteenth-century industrialised Britain, the deprivation and difficulty of early settler life and the guilt caused
by recurring memories of frontier inspired violence. This paper examines the representation of a specifically “white”
trauma in three historical novels produced around the time of Australia’s bicentenary year (1988) and the early 1990s.
These are Rodney’s Hall’s Captivity Captive (1988), Liam Davison’s The White Woman (1993) and David Malouf’s
Remembering Babylon (1993). These narratives often attempt to illuminate the realities of race-driven frontier atrocities
in a profoundly ambivalent way; through the troubled and fractured identities of white settlers. Do these novels in their
open portrayal of settler trauma also leave room for a particular type of political avoidance?
JOANNE JONES is a PhD candidate at Curtin University. She is working on the Australian historical novels
written during the History Wars (since 1988) and is investigating the representation of trauma on the frontier.
Sue Joseph (University of Technology Sydney)
Narrating the Silence of Trauma
Conception by racist pack rape kept secret for more than 30 years; rape as war crime kept secret for more than
50 years; a doctor sexually abusing a five year old; child abuse within a family. Silence is a ubiquitous by-product of
traumatic crime. And when the subjects of such crime finally decide to speak, the interview process itself can be a
traumatising experience. And then, the handling of information by the journalist, particularly in long form narrative, is
integral to that experience. Contextualising these narratives within the genre of literary journalism, this paper is an
exploration of professional practice when dealing with traumatic memory in subjects. The paper will draw on interviews
which form part of a manuscript of creative non-fiction entitled Speaking Secrets. This paper argues for a greater
discussion within the academy of empathy as a tool of journalism, rather than a notion regarded by most as anathema to
the industry. It further argues that empathy must and should be taught and embraced within journalism education in
Australia, particularly within the long form literary journalism.
Dr SUE JOSEPH has been a journalist for thirty years, working both in Australia and the UK. She began
working as an academic, teaching print journalism at UTS in 1997. In that year, she also published her first book of
journalism, She's My Wife; He's Just Sex. She has completed her second book manuscript as part of a non-traditional
PhD project, focussing on literary journalism and ethics. Dr Joseph is a Lecturer in Journalism in the Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) (http://www.communication.uts.edu.au/journalism).
There she teaches across both the undergraduate and postgraduate Communication programmes in the print journalism
subjects. Her research interests have been around sexuality, secrets and confession, framed by the media; HIV and
women; literary journalism; and creative writing, including poetry and short stories.
Rosanne Kennedy (Australian National University)
Interrogating Abu Ghraib: the Photograph, the Witness, and the Question of Evidence
in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure
This paper offers an analysis of director Errol Morris’s recently released documentary film, Standard
Operating Procedure (2008), which interrogates the meaning of the notorious images that sparked the Abu Ghraib
scandal. When these images circulated through the international media, they shocked and horrified viewers, especially
Americans, and raised grave moral and political questions about the American war in Iraq, American use of torture, and
abuse of prisoners’ rights. At the same time, the US military and political establishment went into damage control,
pinning the abuse on a ‘few bad apples’. It insisted that prisoner abuse and disregard for the most basic human rights
was ‘un-American’, and was not ‘a standard operating procedure’. In prosecuting low-ranking individuals, the military
has treated the photographs as evidence of complicity in abuse. Morris, through painstaking research and interviews,
gives an alternative reading of some of the most iconic images, and reminds viewers that we cannot take the meaning of
the image at face value. In bringing to light relevant testimony that lies outside the frame of these photographs, he
exemplifies Judith Butler’s challenge to intellectuals and critics to be attentive to the ways in which the discourse on
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terror is framed in a post 9/11 world, and to what lies outside the frame. The paper examines Morris’ reframing of
images of trauma, and his framing of witnesses and their testimony. The analysis considers Morris’ film in relation to
some of the criticism on the Abu Ghraib images, including the special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture, and the
writings of Judith Butler, Susan Sontag and Ulrich Baer. What does his film teach us about the way images of trauma
and torture are mediated and framed? About the unstable evidence of both the photograph and witness testimony?
About our own complicity as viewers of such images?
Dr ROSANNE KENNEDY is a Senior Lecturer and Head of Gender, Sexuality and Culture in the School of
Humanities at the Australian National University. She has published widely on trauma, testimony and witnessing, and
the cultural forms through which these are mediated, in special issues of Biography, Studies in the Novel, Women’s
Studies Quarterly, Life Writing (forthcoming) and Aboriginal History. She has edited (with Jill Bennett) a volume on
cross-cultural approaches to traumatic memory, World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time (London:
Palgrave, 2003). She is currently editing a special issue of Humanities Research on ‘Post-Colonial Testimony’,
convening with Gillian Whitlock a conference on ‘Testimony and the Limits of the Human’ (the Australian National
University, 2009), and working on a project on trauma and the figure of the child.
Jane Kilby (University of Salford)
Turning a Crisis into a Drama: Incest, Trauma and Love
In an attempt to move beyond the terms established by trauma studies, Judith Butler (2004) argues that to
understand incest we must accept that it involves the exploitation of the child’s love and because the child ‘may no
longer be able to recover or avow that love as love’, they will suffer melancholy. The aim of this paper is to ask:
whether incest is necessarily about love and its exploitation; and whether it -- and trauma more generally -- might not be
better understood in less affectively charged terms? Might not the child experience indifference, for example? And,
why, if Butler’s reasoning stands, is the impossibility of avowal a question, then, of melancholy and not mourning? In
response, I will suggest that Butler’s insistence on love is symptomatic of a desire to redeem the trauma which in
explicit terms she does not deny, but which theoretically she does, a denial only then compounded by the inference that
the child is subject to further violence when his or her (prior and perhaps continuing) love of the abuser is socially
censored. Indeed, I will argue that Butler’s argument is deeply conservative, if not a romantic idealisation, and as such
she fails to meet the challenge set by trauma studies which is not to redeem suffering. Ultimately, I will argue that the
radicalism of trauma studies is to due to its willingness to continually provoke the crisis instituted by incest and
violence more broadly, and not turn it into an emotional drama.
Dr JANE KILBY is a Lecturer in the School of English, Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History,
University of Salford, UK. She specialises in the study of sexual violence, trauma and testimony and has published
widely in this area with articles appearing in New Formations, Feminist Theory and the Journal for Cultural Research.
Her recent and forthcoming publications include her monograph Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma
(Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and a chapter on the role of body in our understanding of trauma (in the
forthcoming Gender and Interpersonal Violence, edited by K. Throsby and F. Alexander, Palgrave, 2008) as well as
dictionary entries for Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman (in the forthcoming Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary
Theory). She is also co-editor of The Future of Memory (Berghahn Press, 2009), a collection of essays exploring the
future direction of Trauma and Holocaust Studies. And she is currently working on a new book provisionally entitled
Redeeming Violence: Feminism and the Question of Trauma.
Lee-Von Kim (University of Western Australia)
Revisiting Historical Trauma in the Work of Kara Walker
This paper investigates the representation of historical trauma in relation to the work of visual artist Kara
Walker. Walker’s large-scale silhouettes have generated controversy due to their reappropriation of black racial
stereotypes in their reconstruction of antebellum historical narratives. While much of the existing critical scholarship
has focused on her reappropriation of racial stereotypes, in this paper I wish to shift the focus to how representations of
historical trauma are complicated in Walker’s work. Taking Joan Copjec’s claim that “History flows through these
figures but it does not contain them” as a starting point, I will consider how Walker compels us to look again at the
traumatic legacies of slavery that are represented in her work. Walker’s black paper silhouettes can be read as a series of
incisions, which bring to mind the notion of physical wounding. I propose that Walker’s work is a particularly
productive space for the discussion of visual representations of trauma as trauma is doubly encoded in her work: both in
their form and their subject matter. Her silhouettes not only engage with the historical traumas wrought by slavery, but
their very production enacts a kind of physical trauma too. I will conclude by offering some thoughts on the broader
implications of Walker’s work for trauma studies.
LEE-VON KIM is a doctoral candidate in English and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia.
Her doctoral thesis examines postcolonial haunting in a range of cultural productions from Australia and South Africa.
Her research interests include postcolonial studies, film studies and critical theory.
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Claire Sisco King (Vanderbilt University)
Legendary Troubles: Historical Trauma and Masculinity in I Am Legend
This essay argues that Francis Lawrence’s film I Am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith, demonstrates a
symptomatic response to the historical traumas of a post-9/11 America. The most recent installment in a series of
adaptations of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same name, I Am Legend follows Last Man on Earth (1964),
starring Vincent Price, and Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston. Accordingly, I read I Am Legend as an act of
repetition precipitated by the traumas of history; and, in particular, I understand this film as compulsively replaying its
most immediate predecessor, Omega Man. Although Francis’ film shares a title with Matheson’s source novel, its
narrative more closely resembles that of Omega Man, a textual similarity resulting from overlapping cultural anxieties
about American identity in the wakes of Vietnam and 9/11. Specifically, I Am Legend’s response to its own historical
context is informed by American cultural memory about the traumas of the Vietnam era, during which Omega Man was
produced. However, despite their likenesses, there are significant differences between these films, not the least of which
is the racial transfiguration of the lead from Heston to Smith. Thus, in adapting its cinematic predecessor, I Am Legend
also reveals important information about the changed historical context that demanded its repetition (again). Accounting
for disturbances to commingled fantasies about America and hegemonic masculinity, I Am Legend displaces, repeats,
and rewrites history in search of mastery over traumatic loss. And, by relying on a narrative of male self-sacrifice, I Am
Legend registers the trauma of masculinity under attack and responds by suggesting new life for old legends about what
the “masculine” can be.
CLAIRE SISCO KING is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University, USA, where she teaches in the
Communication Studies Department and Film Studies Program. Her research interests include cinema, gender,
performance studies, and trauma studies. She has published on such topics as childbirth rituals, Nazi propaganda, and
horror films. She has forthcoming essays in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies,
and Western Journal of Communication, as well as a forthcoming book chapter that addresses music and historical
trauma in The Exorcist. She is currently completing a book project entitled Washed in Blood: Cinema, Sacrifice, and
Masculinity, which explores ritualized sacrifice as a trope for performing and recuperating masculinity in post-traumatic
American cinema.
Flavia Laviosa (Wellesley College)
‘Death is the Fairest Cover for Her Shame’: The Practice of Honor Killings
Honor killing is a crime committed against a woman by a close male family member. The crime is justified as
a means to bring back the honor of the family that was ruined by the woman. Whether called honor killings, dowry
deaths, or crimes of passion, women are brutally victimized. Maria’s Grotto (2007), by independent director and
producer Buthina Canaan Khoury from Ramallah, is a painfully true film about the practice of honor killings in
Palestine. Vendetta Song (2005), by independent Turkish-Canadian director Eylem Kaftan, describes the filmmaker’s
own journey from Montreal to Turkey to solve the thirty-year-old mystery of her aunt’s murder. The short In the
Morning (2004), by Turkish director Danielle Lurie, is a daring drama based on a true story which confronts the social,
cultural, ethnic, and ideological dimensions of the multilayered issue of honor killing. Crimes of Honor (1998), by
Shelley Saywell, documents the terrible reality of ‘femicide’ – the killing of daughters or sisters suspected of losing
their virginity, for having refused an arranged marriage or having left a husband. These directors are mobilized by
diverse cinematic forms of intervention, take on the responsibility of leading advocates for women’s lives, and
denounce unambiguous truths about women’s cultural gender struggles. The purpose of this essay is, firstly, to examine
the dramatic confluence of social, cultural, and political events that have made honor killings a worldwide crisis that
crosses cultures and religions. Secondly, the paper aims to discuss this practice through poignant and compelling films
which highlight the increasingly common, frequently unreported, and rarely punished phenomenon. The paper’s title is
adapted from a passage in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
FLAVIA LAVIOSA is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies at Wellesley College,
Massachusetts, USA. Her research interests are in Women’s Studies, Italian cinema, and Southern Italy. Her articles
have appeared in Studies of European Cinema; Italica; Rivista di Studi Italiani; Kinema; American Journal of Italian
Studies, and Italian Politics and Society. She has also contributed essays and chapters on Italian directors and
representations of the South to the following edited anthologies Italian Cinema-New Directions; Film Representations
of Popular Culture; Italy and the Mediterranean: Transcultural Spaces; From Paper to Screen: Cinema and the Italian
Novel Tradition; Teaching Italian Culture: Case Studies for an International Perspective; Incontri con il Cinema
Italiano; and La Scuola Italiana di Middlebury (1996-2005) Passione Didattica Pratica.
Jennifer Lawn (Massey University)
Trauma Theory, Settler Gothic, and the Sexual Abuse of Children in Contemporary
New Zealand Fiction
This paper traces some of the points of intersection and divergence between gothic studies and trauma studies as
they apply to literary texts. The two discourses share a common genealogical node through Freudian psychoanalysis,
and, among other conceptual overlaps, both posit self-division resulting from a traumatic encounter, inquire into the
18
extent and impact of fantasy in psychic life, and turn around some unspeakable knowledge. Trauma theory's productive
tension between absence and loss, or structural versus historical trauma, parallels a similar debate in gothic studies
between those theorists who emphasise spectrality and the uncanny as "incurable" modes of indeterminacy, and others
who elaborate a more recovery-based model through which ghostly presences are acknowledged and exorcised. To
focus this discussion, the paper analyses the representation of sexual violence against children and adolescents in
contemporary New Zealand fiction. In these texts, the gothic mode implies a sense of being haunted by some aspect of
the past that ought to be dead, while the trauma paradigm tends more towards the complexity of memory and the
problematic of how to represent and understand the violent events that drive the emotional structure of the narratives.
Both angles of analysis coalesce in their intense interest in the nuclear family as a vector for the intergenerational
transmission of forbidden forms of knowledge. The prevalence of sexual abuse as a fictional theme, its treatment within
bicultural, Maori, and settler Pakeha domains of experience, and the fact that several of these novels have been worked
into feature films achieving international distribution (In My Father's Den, Once Were Warriors, and Rain), lead to the
suggestion that child abuse occupies a foundational status within New Zealand's national imaginaries.
Dr JENNIFER LAWN is a Senior Lecturer at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand, and co-editor of Gothic
NZ (Otago University Press, 2006). Her research and teaching interests include settler and postcolonial gothic fiction,
cultural studies in contemporary New Zealand, and the representation of traumatic experience in literature and film.
School of Social and Cultural, Massey University Studies (http://sscs.massey.ac.nz).
(http://sscs.massey.ac.nz/lawn.htm)
Sarah Leggott (Victoria University of Wellington)
Representing Spain’s 20th-Century Trauma in Fiction: Memories of War and
Dictatorship in Contemporary Novels by Women
In recent years, remembering Spain’s twentieth-century past has emerged as a public, collective movement that
has generated intense media attention and sparked vociferous debate in the public sphere about problematic elements of
the national past. The events in question, namely the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the ensuing repressive Franco
dictatorship (1939-1975), are omnipresent in the cultural memory of Spain, despite attempts by various governments to
gloss over and even silence aspects of the nation’s history. The current interest in Spain’s recent past is reflected in
contemporary cultural production, with many cinematic and fictional works produced since the 1990s focusing on the
years of the Civil War and its aftermath. This paper explores responses in contemporary fiction to the collective
suffering of the trauma of the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship. The paper examines recent novels by Spanish
women writers that open up important questions about the on-going process of remembrance in contemporary Spanish
society and the impact of past wounds on the present. Drawing on works by Dulce Chacón and Rosa Regàs, I will
explore the novels’ presentation of the complex relationship between remembering and forgetting in a society in which
the articulation of the past has been forbidden, and will consider the extent to which traces of traumatic experience
might be meaningfully represented in fiction.
SARAH LEGGOTT is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Spanish Programme at Victoria University of
Wellington (www.victoria.ac.nz). New Zealand. Her research interests focus on twentieth-century Spanish literature
and culture, with a particular interest in women writers and autobiographical narratives. She is the author of History and
Autobiography in Contemporary Spanish Women’s Testimonial Writings (Edwin Mellen Press, 2001) and The Workings
of Memory: Life-Writing by Women in Early Twentieth-Century Spain (Bucknell University Press, 2008), as well as
numerous articles on twentieth-century Spanish women writers. (http://www.victoria.ac.nz/saelc/staff/sarah-
leggott.aspx).
Pablo Leighton (Universidad de Santiago)
The Deaths of Augusto Pinochet
On Sunday December 10, 2006, the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died. His death prompted street
demonstrations in Santiago, including heated public displays of both celebration and grief at various locations across the
city. Thousands flocked to his wake and funeral to observe his corpse, made available for public viewing at the Military
School, a torture centre during the dictatorial regime (1973-1990). Framed by a transdisciplinary approach, this paper
analyses the broadcasting of the circumstances of and reactions to the death of Pinochet as screened on the Chilean
national television from December 10 to the day of his funeral on December 12, 2006. The paper discusses how
television in Chile today works as a cultural power, discursively constructing hegemonic and restricted versions of
national history and collective memory and trauma. The paper argues that an audio-visual language has been extended
from the authoritarian to the democratic regime through which political power and exclusionary accounts of a Chilean
self are exercised.
PABLO LEIGHTON was born in Santiago, Chile, 1972. He has a BA degree in Journalism from the
Universidad Católica, Chile, and a MFA in Filmmaking from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, USA. He is
currently a PhD candidate at the Universidad de Santiago, Chile, with a dissertation entitled "A Culture of Audio-Visual
Propaganda under Dictatorship and Democracy in Chile", which discusses how the audio-visual media articulated the
dictatorships' discourses and contributed to the upholding and exceptional survival of the Chilean dictatorship within
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the South American subcontinent since 1973. Pablo received an Endeavour Research Fellowship from the Australian
government and a Chilean research grant to spend a semester at various Australian universities. He has directed, written
and edited several documentary and short fiction films.
Mia Lindgren (Murdoch University)
The Reporting of Trauma: A Traumatic Experience
Journalists are traditionally the objective observers, who go where others might fear to go in order to bring
back stories that are beyond the reach of most people. A lot of these stories involve human tragedy, and very little
attention has been given to the impact this sort of reporting has on the journalist. This paper looks at the reporting
challenges posed by a current project gathering the stories from people affected by asbestos. While they have been the
focus of medical attention for many years, the sufferers of asbestos-related diseases are more than a statistic in the
medical journals: each person has a story to tell. These are stories of sickness and death, of corporate greed, of families
and social circles gradually depleted by a destructive illness. Even when the subjects are keen to tell these long
suppressed stories, the experience can be confronting for the journalist. How can journalists be objective recorders
when hearing these tragic tales? As the listener you share the trauma. What role should journalists play? How close
should they get to their subjects? How enduring must the relationship be? How do journalists manage their own
feelings? Questions such as these will be examined in this paper using interview examples from the Asbestos Stories
project.
MIA LINDGREN is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Murdoch University, where she teaches broadcast
journalism. Before moving to Australia in 1998 she was a radio and television reporter with the Swedish Broadcasting
Corporation. During 2008 she has been working as producer for ABC Radio National’s Social History and Features
Unit in Perth, Western Australia. She is co-author of Australian Broadcast Journalism (with Gail Phillips, Oxford
University Press 2006, 2002) and Den Självkörda Radioboken (with Mia Ohlsson, Liber 2005).
Florencia Marchetti (University of California in Santa Cruz)
Ghosts, Victims, and All the Rest: Notes on the Post-Memories of Argentine Terror
The organized system of repression known as disappearance that vanished 30,000 people in Argentina during
the 1970s has become quite notorious around the world, thanks to the work of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and other
human rights organizations. Activism, academic research, as well as artistic and documentary work have helped
crystallize the narratives of the disappeared and their relatives as the legitimate memories of the Dirty War. In this
process, a particular framework for the social labours of memory has been shaped, that strives to establish
disappearances as a collective tragedy and recognizes personal suffering as the main determinant of legitimacy and
truth. This paper will argue that the historically shaped distinction between “victims” and “rest of the population”
secludes the participation of many citizens in the making of history (thought of as both, the writing of the past but also
the shaping of the future). Focusing on a specific site, a former clandestine detention center now turned into a public
high school, the paper will analyse how different media and arts-based efforts (photography, performance, mural
painting, and documentary video) have addressed the contradictory relationship between the horrors of the past and the
joyful mission of educating youth in the present.
FLORENCIA MARCHETTI has a degree in Social Communications, and graduate training as an
anthropologist from the University of Córdoba, Argentina. In 2007, she finished an MA in Social Documentation at the
University of California in Santa Cruz, USA. She is currently teaching and working as Field Study Coordinator for the
Community Studies Department at UCSC. Florencia's work as a photographer and ethnographer is based in Córdoba,
Argentina. This paper is part of the “Haunting Presences” documentary project that works to represent diverse and
marginalized memories of the dictatorship period that are not part of the legitimate historical records, but circulate
instead as silenced tales, rumors or ghost stories. A video produced as part of this project will also be showing at the
conference.
María Teresa Martínez-Ortiz (Kansas State University)
Transnational Terror on Poor Women: Analyzing the Feminicide in the Border
Mexican City of Juárez
The focus of this paper is the ongoing feminicide in the fractured community of Juárez, within the dynamics of
neoliberalism and globalization. Since the establishment of NAFTA in 1994, massive migration begun to shake and
reconfigure Mexico’s traditional social order as peasants (mostly Indigenous people) from the south of the country and
Central America have systematically abandoned the agricultural sector and migrated to the north; many of these people
are poor young women. The arrival of hundreds of “maquiladoras” (or sweatshops) in search of cheap labor, provided
mostly by female workers, has fostered a dramatic change in the landscape of the city of Juárez in the state of
Chihuahua. Today over five hundred sweatshops are located just in this city, generating annual revenues that exceed the
sixty billion dollar figure. Yet the most disturbing phenomenon that these booming cheap labor opportunities have
created is the unprecedented social pathology in which a misogynistic chain of rapes, homicides and impunity have
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terrorized the female population of this city for over a decade. In order to illustrate this discussion, the paper analyzes
the sharp contrast between the denunciatory modes of expression in Lourdes Portillo’s documentary film Missing Young
Woman (2001) and other filmic and literary texts have failed to render these atrocities visibile. In fact, many of these
cultural productions actually reincorpore the Juarez feminicide just as another commodity into the capital system, as
evidenced in hard-boil novels, such as Patrick Bard’s La frontera (2004), and mainstream Hollywood films, such as
Bordertown (2007). Relying on female networks of resistance that have been successful at overcoming unjust social
practices, the paper shows examples of women working together to stop the hegemonic socio-economic patterns that are
destroying young poor females in the border city of Juárez.
Dr MARÍA TERESA MARTÍNEZ-ORTIZ is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Kansas State University,
USA. She received her PhD from Purdue University in 2001. Her research centers on Latin American cultural studies
with an emphasis on Mexican literature and culture as well as Latino/a literature and culture produced in the US.
Martinez-Ortiz has interviewed Mexican writers such as Ángeles Mastretta and José Agustín and published an article
about the latter in Cuadernos de Aldeeu. She has another article in press that deals with maternal archetypes and myths
in contemporary Mexican literature and film. She is also preparing a monograph that explores testimonial literature and
culture produced by contemporary Indigenous and “campesino” Mexican women.
Sarah McGann (Curtin University)
The Hidden Death, The Hidden Text
The “hidden death,” death in the hospital, continues to be commonplace. Yet it is not openly talked about. The dilemma
for hospitals is that their mandate to “save lives and repair broken bodies” (K. Worpole, 2006, Honoured Guests,
Honoured Places, p 9, www.hospicefriendlyhospitals.net; accessed, 26/04/08) remains the principal function; helping
people to die was never a part of their core activity. Death was considered primarily from the point of view of the
living, rather than from the dying. Hospital planning texts of the past state that dying in hospital “depresses, discourages
and disturbs” other patients” (C. Butler & A. Erdman, 1946, Hospital Planning, Dodge Corp. NY). As far as the
hospital was concerned the dying are people who have ceased to become valid or are “in-valid” users of the facility
(Verderber, S. & B. Refuerzo, B., 2006, Innovations in Hospice Architecture, Taylor & Francis: Oxon). This paper asks
how we can design for “dying with dignity” if it is viewed only from the perspective of the living, that is, of those on
the outside, looking in. The hidden texts that prescribed the design of past hospitals influenced their occupation and
continue to inhabit the buildings not only through the visible, albeit confusing, signage but also through the invisible
attitudes expressed through these outdated institutions. By dissecting the terminology of architectural guidelines of the
past we start to identify the underlying questions asked within the texts and analyse how the building attempted to
answer these questions. Attitudes to both health and death were expressed through these texts and these attitudes are
evident in the resultant buildings, many of which are still in use today.
SARAH MCGANN is an Irish architect who teaches in the Department of Architecture and Interior
Architecture at Curtin University. She has specialized in healthcare design, combining the disciplines of Architecture,
Interior Design and Landscape to design holistic health facilities. This has resulted in winning international architecture
awards and recognition for her projects. She is currently completing a PhD in healthcare design and ideology.
Tony McHugh (Psychological Trauma Treatment Service)
From Trauma to Recovery: Challenges in Mediating Post-Trauma Representation
Trauma is a fundamental part of human experience and most people will be directly exposed to it (often more
than once) across the life cycle (Creamer et al. 2001). Not surprisingly, people inevitably respond to depictions of
trauma, be it in entertainment - for example, via the horror genre - or in reality-based depictions of trauma. A reflection
of the latter, mass-media, film and television provide daily coverage of real-life trauma. Regrettably, such information
is too-often focussed on trauma's front-end and there is a relative imbalance of horror to recovery content. When the
latter is described, it is often conveyed in a piecemeal and sensationalist fashion. For example, there is a clear
"disconnect" between the typically prolonged and prosaic toil of exposure treatment for PTSD—the first line treatment
recommended by expert consensus (NICE, 2005; ACPMH, 2007)—and the "light bulb moment" understanding of the
mind in recovery so often promoted in film and television. Meaningfully depicting recovery processes, natural (for there
are many who recover independently) and assisted, is crucial: there is an interesting and important human story to be
told. This paper compares typical post-trauma paths to recovery and typical mass media, film and television depictions
of trauma and recovery and raise possibilities for representations of higher veracity and greater utility. It seeks to
challenge existing notions, while calling for input from a film, television and media perspective as to what is truly
possible and how this might be achieved.
TONY MCHUGH is Manager of the Veterans Psychiatry Unit at Austin Health, USA. Before that he was the
Manager, and principal psychologist, of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Program at Austin Health since 1995
and the Victorian Psychological Trauma Treatment Service (VPTTS) since its inception in 2003.
Cait McMahon (Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma)
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Trauma ‘Literacy’ for News Gatherers: Covering Tragedy and Violence
There is recent evidence that news gatherers such as journalists, photographers, sound and production crew
exposed to potentially traumatic events can experience significant emotional effects. What is also known is that media
professionals are very resilient. The Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, Australasia, has produced a training DVD
to facilitate discussion about issues pertaining to work-related trauma exposure for media workers. The DVD is
intended to be part of a training program to enhance the resilience of journalists by helping them become ‘trauma
literate’. Trauma ‘literacy’ contributes to understanding the importance of self care, but also enables more ethically
sensitive interviews, thus ultimately creating better news stories. The paper presentation includes the screening of 7
minutes of the training DVD, which consists of a series of interviews with working news professionals who share
candidly their personal reactions when covering traumatic incidents. The DVD is followed by current research
undertaken on media personnel covering tragedy and violence. This research focuses on both the negative outcomes of
trauma, such as depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder, and the positive outcomes of trauma such as post
traumatic growth. Post traumatic growth proposes that people can have parallel experiences of negative trauma
responses as well as transforming experiences that contribute to enhanced states of being in areas such as interpersonal
relationships, perception of ones self in the world and philosophy on life.
CAIT MCMAHON is a PhD candidate and a counselling psychologist specialising in trauma and journalism.
Cait worked at The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, as a staff counsellor in the mid 1980s and early 1990s
whilst undertaking groundbreaking postgraduate research into trauma exposed print media journalists. In 2004 Cait was
invited to start the Australasian arm of the International Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma (www.dartcentre.org)
of which she is now the Australasian Managing Director. The Dart Centre is a non profit group of journalists,
journalism educators and health professionals dedicated to the ethical and thorough reporting of trauma; sensitive,
professional treatment of victims and survivors by journalists, and greater awareness by media organizations of the
impact of trauma coverage on both news professionals and news consumers. McMahon has conducted training sessions
for news organisations on enhancing resilience through trauma awareness both nationally and internationally. Last year
she collaborated with Deutsche Welle Training Academy in Cambodia preparing journalists for reporting on the
impending Khmer Rouge Trials intended for 2008.
Nesam McMillan (La Trobe University)
Bearing Witness: The Rwandan Genocide on the Global Stage
During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, national and international communities were not interested in the
suffering of the Rwandan Tutsis. As the Tutsis were systematically persecuted and murdered, both states and the United
Nations turned away. Paradoxically, however, since 1994, the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis, and the international
failure to prevent them, have received much societal attention. These events have become the focus of numerous feature
films, memoirs and first-person accounts, which seek to ‘bear witness’ to these events, testifying to both their traumatic
nature and their societal significance. These popular cultural texts not only represent the subjective experience of the
genocide and the international response, but they also shape (and constrain) how these events are experienced by the
broader public that consumes them. That is, even though they are framed as individual testimonies, such ‘trauma texts’
nevertheless have a social role–enabling their consumers to vicariously ‘experience’ the genocide and the international
failure to stop it. This paper reflects on a selection of these popular cultural texts, in order to explore the way/s in which
they make it possible to think and feel about the Rwandan genocide and the international response to it. The paper
discusses how these texts enable, and foreclose, certain connections between non-Rwandans and the Rwandan
genocide. In considering the limits and possibilities of these popular cultural representations, the paper considers both
their content (how they represent the genocide and the international failure) and their textuality (the way in which they
signify as texts).
NESAM MCMILLAN is an Associate Lecturer in Legal Studies in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe
University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research and teaching interests include genocide and state crime, the Rwandan
genocide, international responsibility, bystanderism and the spectatorship of suffering. Her current research focuses on
the post-hoc cultural representations of the international failure to prevent, or stop, the Rwandan genocide.
Allen Meek (Massey University)
Family Violence: Media, Trauma and Sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand
This paper considers the ways that representations of family violence have become a site where different
understandings of nation and history are articulated in New Zealand media. In particular, the violent deaths of several
children in Maori families have attracted high levels of media interest as well as responses by Maori political leaders. A
wide range of issues of public concern have come into focus around the deaths of these children: the role of state
welfare services; media representations of Maori; ongoing forms of colonial power; and processes of mourning in the
wider community and in the national ‘family’. Three strong discursive positions emerged in response to these traumatic
events; firstly, a neo-liberal emphasis on individual responsibility; secondly, a call for greater state intervention in
family violence; and, thirdly, an anti-colonial claim that violence among Maori (along with its representation in the
media) arises from historical conditions of racist oppression. All of these public discourses claim to speak in the
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interest of the child as victim, but behind them are very different conceptions of trauma, childhood and citizenship. The
dominant settler culture tends to understand violent behavior as requiring either punitive or therapeutic “correction”. In
this respect the Indigenous population continues to be subject to the pedagogy of the colonial master. Maori voices,
however, have argued that violence has become a trans-generational legacy that must be seen in the context of the
ongoing struggle for political sovereignty and social justice.
ALLEN MEEK is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University, New Zealand. He is currently
researching trauma theory and postcolonial cultural politics. He has essays forthcoming in Lord of the Rings: Studying
the Event Film (Manchester UP) and Place: Indigenous Media Practice (Cambridge Scholars Press).
Nick Mercer (Hwa Chong Institution)
Personal and Historical Trauma in Michael Haneke’s Hidden/Caché
Michael Haneke’s critically acclaimed film Hidden/Caché (2005) explores both the personal and historical
trauma surrounding the brutal suppression and murder of peaceful Algerian pro-NLF demonstrators during the Paris
massacre of 1961, and the subsequent attempt to repress and deny this event in the French national memory. Although
the film only ever makes the most cursory of references to the events of 1961, the anxiety and guilt that haunts the
French collective imagination is affected through the personal story of Georges; whose privileged white middle-class
existence becomes threatened when his childhood actions towards the Algerian boy, Mahid, return to plague his
conscience. Hidden interrogates the post-colonial conscience of the Western bourgeoisie by refracting it through the
panoptic lens of Haneke’s disturbing film consciousness. This paper examines how Haneke constructs a film
consciousness that refuses to be anchored in a stable vision or gaze, and in doing so problematises our investment in the
legitimacy of the camera’s gaze as locus of power and in the ontology of the cinematic image. This complex film
addresses the experience of trauma by undermining the spectator’s own reliance on the conventions of filmic images;
the spatio-temporal discontinuities and disjunctive perspectives that confound the diegesis corresponds with the collapse
of Georges’ world as the terrible actions of his past resurface in his memory. By deterritorialising our filmic
imagination Haneke is revealing the deep anxieties, fears and traumas that are ‘hidden’ beneath the seductive consumer
images of the mass media and contained within the banal and ubiquitous networks of surveillance.
Dr NICK MERCER completed his doctorate, entitled ‘Thinking the Commodity through the Moving Image: A
Philosophical Investigation into Cinematic Consciousness and the Commodity as a Mode of Communication’, in the
School of English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia, in 2008. The thesis explores the historical,
theoretical and philosophical development of cinematic media as a collective form of technological perception and
consciousness. Nick currently works in Singapore at Hwa Chong Institution, where he teaches Literature and Media
Studies. His research interests include, film and media philosophy, film studies, Marxian theory and digital culture.
Diane Molloy (Monash University)
Guilt and Trauma: Using Fiction to Respond to the Complex Crimes of a Violent Past
“For once in my life I had not been constrained by the severe discipline of history, but had been at liberty to
invoke the dilemmas inscribed in my own heart, inscribed there during my childhood, and which had haunted me ever
since.” (Alex Miller, 2007, Landscape of Farewell, Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, p.216). Alex Miller’s Landscape of
Farewell is a story about the difficulties associated with remembering and recording a painful past. Max Otto, the
German narrator, was unable to face up to the possibility that his father may not have been an honourable and
courageous soldier fighting for his country during the Second World War, but most likely was involved in the atrocities
perpetrated by his country. Through the writing of the massacre of a group of white settlers by Aborigines (based on the
Cullin-la Ringo massacre of 1861) from the point of view of a perpetrator he came to understand that “[g]uilt ... was not
the experience only of the heartless perpetrator of a crime, but was a complex and pervasive condition of the human
soul” (Miller 2007: 77) and as a result he was now ready to write his father’s story. But how to write that story
remained a dilemma for him. As an historian Max must decide whether he writes it as fiction or history. He is
concerned that the story is too emotionally charged for him to write it as history, that he cannot possibly be objective
enough, but he also “loathe[s] books that are made up”. This paper examines the way using fiction to tell the violent
past “may provide a more expansive space ... for exploring modalities of responding to trauma” (Dominik LaCapra,
2001, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, p. 185.); a space that allows for an examination
of the complexities inherent within these crimes.
DIANE MOLLOY is a PhD Candidate with the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies
at Monash University (http://www.arts.monash.edu.au). Her research interests include the representation of violent
history in contemporary German and Australian literature; the blurring of the boundaries between history, memory and
imagination and the works of W G Sebald.
Nayanika Mookherjee (Lancaster University)
Imaging Trauma and the Raped Woman of the Bangladesh War of 1971
This paper seeks to explore how the ‘trauma’ of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war of 1971 has been
imaged in the 1970s and 1990s. The formation of Bangladesh in 1971 coincided with the death of 3 million people and
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the rape of 200,000 Bengali women by the Pakistani army personnel and their local collaborators Razakars (local
Bengali collaborators), in a span of nine months. Instead of shrouding the issue of rape in silence the newly formed
Bangladeshi government eulogized the raped women as birangonas (‘war-heroines’), in their attempt to rehabilitate
them. It is important to note that the issue of rape during the war was reported in the press and mentioned in government
speeches till mid 1973 and is thereafter consigned to oblivion in the journalistic and government registers. However, the
history of rape has remained a topic of literary and visual media (films, plays, photographs) through the last thirty-five
years in Bangladesh, thereby ensuring that the raped woman endured as an iconic figure. The paper juxtaposes the
literary and visual representations of the raped woman and her ‘trauma’ in the 1970s with the renarrativisation of the
history of rape by feminist organisations in the 1990s in contemporary Bangladesh. It argues that these images
contributed to a sedimented practice of the viewing of the raped woman and to a certain collective register of the history
of rape. Through this, the concept of ‘trauma’ is interrogated and comprehended within the fractured, historical
trajectories of Bangladesh.
Dr NAYANIKA MOOKHERJEE is a Social Anthropologist and a Lecturer in the Sociology Department at
Lancaster University, UK. Funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, her book Specters
and Utopias: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
She has published chapters in edited collections and in peer reviewed journals: Journal of Royal Anthropological
Institute, Space and Culture, Feminist Review, South Asia and Childhood. Her two ongoing research projects explore
the relationship between affective structures and the nation; genetic citizenship and transnational adoption through the
prism of 'war-babies' in Bangladesh.
Akiko Naono (University of Kyushu)
Transmission of Trauma and Subjectivity of Objects: A Ghost Story of Hiroshima
Inquiring into other’s traumatic experience, whether through direct interviews or documents and visual
representations, necessarily draws the researcher to the force of original trauma. In clinical settings, this “transmission
of trauma” is often understood in terms of “transference/counter-transference,” “secondary traumatic stress” or
“compassion fatigue.” In Holocaust studies, some refer to the transmission of traumatic memory of the first to the
second generation as “postmemory.” With these work in mind, I develop different vocabularies to talk about
contagiousness of trauma by bringing theoretical and methodological insights of psychoanalysis, sociology and cultural
studies. My (auto)ethnographic notes of uncanny experience in the Hiroshima memoryscape, especially on the gaze
turned back by the figures in the Atom-Bomb Drawings by Survivors, are taken as concrete site to interrogate forces of
secondary imprinting of original trauma. Theoretically speaking, I propose to analyze “transmission of trauma” in terms
of inter-subjectivity between the researcher and the researched, which includes place and objects. Here, I refer to Derek
Hook’s provocative work on the “subjectivity of space” that brings together Freud’s theories of “uncanny” and
“identification” and Althusser’s “interpellation.” I further look into a potential in Freud’s underdeveloped notion of
“contagious identification” with Avery Gordon’s work on “ghostly matters” in an attempt to integrate affective
dimensions of experience into the analysis of social structure and historical forces. Overall, I employ sociological
imagination to make parable transmission of trauma as a form of affective recognition of the past violence that is still in
operation in the present in forms of state and colonial violence.
Dr AKIKO NAONO, a second-generation survivor of Hiroshima’s atom-bombing, worked on politics and
affects of memory around Hiroshima and received her PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of California,
Santa Cruz, USA, in 2002. She is now associate professor of Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies at the
University of Kyushu, Japan. Dr Naono established and served as the Project Director of the Nuclear History Institute at
American University in Washington, D.C., a project that won the North American Association of Summer Sessions
Award for Creative and Innovative Programs. Her recent publications include Sensotaiken no Sedaikan Keisho
[Transmission of War Experience to the Next Generation], 2008, Keio University Press, co-authored; “Hibaku wo
Kataru Kotoba to Itami no Kyoshin” [Words that Speak of Hiroshima and Echoes of Pain], Nihongaku [Journal of Japan
Studies], Spring 2008; Genbakunoe to Deau [Encountering the Drawings by Hibakusha], 2004, Iwanami Shoten;
“Producing Disposable Subjects for the Nation” in Traces in the Social World (forthcoming, University of Minnesota
Press) .
Sophie Oliver (Birkbeck College)
Performance/Body Art and Ethical Spectatorship of the Traumatised Body
Historical, cultural, political, legal and ethical narratives of human rights all draw heavily upon testimony of
atrocity, in which the traumatised body features prominently. At the same time, however, the suffering body of trauma
testimony disturbs - in its very abject embodiment - the narrative of disembodied, rational and autonomous human
subjectivity upon which modern moral thinking is based. This paper argues in favour of this disturbance, seeing it as a
power to be harnessed against the very structures of subjugation and dehumanisation that human rights contest.
Foucault claimed that in every relation of power; in every marked, trained, tortured, and oppressed body, there is always
also the presence of resistance. The encounter between the spectator and the testimonial text (whether it be literary,
visual, or monument) occurs within a triad of power relations: that of the perpetrator over victim; that of the viewer over
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the text; and that of the text over the viewer. At the same time it proposes a space in which the dehumanising and
unmaking logic of pain (Scarry 1998) may be resisted. Drawing from the work of feminist theorists and body artists
who have in various ways sought to re-locate the abject ‘feminine’ body within a politics of emancipation rather than
oppression, as well as upon an analysis of – in particular Kleinian – psychoanalytic theory, this paper examines the role
of the spectator in relation to the political performance and/or body art that is currently emerging as a form of
witnessing human rights violations, asking whether such art has the potential to open up a space of (embodied)
resistance or solidarity in the face of collective memories of traumatic experience.
SOPHIE OLIVER is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law and the School of Psychosocial Studies at
Birkbeck College, London, England (www.bbk.ac.uk). Her interdisciplinary research examines questions of ethical
witnessing and the cultural memory of atrocity in relation to notions of the (in)human and the body, exploring the
theoretical possibility of an ethical human community based upon shared memory or witnessing of suffering; as well as
upon a fully inclusive conception of the human as embodied and precarious.
Iliana Pagán-Teitelbaum (University of Pennsylvania)
War on the Poor: Violence and Insanity in Three Peruvian Films
Most of the 70,000 people that died or disappeared during the recent civil war in Peru (1980-2000) were
indigenous Quechua speakers. It is yet proscribed to talk about the violent conflict in this Latin American country on
the Pacific, where the high levels of poverty that may have triggered the war still affect 50% of the population. In this
paper, I discuss the effort of three Peruvian films to respond to the trauma of misery, racism, forced migration, and dirty
war in both civilians and soldiers. I argue that Gregorio (Grupo Chaski, 1984), filmed during the deadliest year of the
war, strives to denaturalize poverty from the perspective of a Quechua-speaking migrant boy, Gregorio. I propose that
Gregorio’s small acts of direct violence are diminished in the film next to society’s greater crime of discarding migrant
families, who are denied access to citizen rights. In La boca del lobo (Francisco Lombardi, 1988), I examine the
strategic representation of military war crimes in an indigenous Andean village as an insane individual’s responsibility.
I also put forth that the film mystifies the state’s political opponents by associating Shining Path’s actions with
irrational and supernatural forces. Finally, I explore how cultural and structural violence affect a veteran with PTSD in
Días de Santiago (Josué Méndez, 2004). I consider the effects of the fictionalization of a real soldier’s testimony and
how the casting of a white middle-class actor to perform the role of a marginalized soldier of migrant Andean descent is
inadequate and problematic.
Dr ILIANA PAGÁN-TEITELBAUM, from Puerto Rico, is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow
in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Her PhD dissertation The
Disposable City: the Hidden Side of Urban Violence in Narrative and Film of Two Latin American Cities (Harvard
University, 2006) analyzes how literary and cinematic texts from Brazil and Peru use the narratological strategy of
internal focalization to symbolize or represent—from within—the violent reality of the exclusion and loss of the
essential rights of citizenship. She is currently conducting research on how recent fiction written by female Caribbean
authors represents the violent and complex realities of the contemporary Caribbean city.
David Palmer (Flinders University)
The A Bomb and the Earthquake: The Search for Missing Hiroshima Atomic Bomb
Photos and the Ongoing Kanto 1923 Earthquake Hoax
For decades, photos alleged to be missing Hiroshima atomic bomb photos have been surfacing, mainly in
Japan. Analysis by Japanese scholars, museum curators, and hibakusha themselves have regularly identified these as
1923 Kanto earthquake photos, not Hiroshima in August 1945. In 2008, a major publisher reproduced photos from the
Hoover Archives in the United States, with the author again claiming these were the missing Hiroshima photos. The
book’s author and editors failed to consult Japanese experts and were taken in by the hoax. They were proven to be,
once again, Kanto earthquake photos. Why has this A bomb photo hoax continued for so long – and why are Western
scholars taken in by it? Perhaps more important, however, is the underlying reason why the earthquake photos stir such
interest, even though they are a false link to the atomic bombing. The probability of missing atomic photos is actually
quite substantial. In the 72 hours after the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, only one photographer—Matsushige—
captured the full terror of the atomic holocaust, in terms of groups wandering out of the destroyed landscape and the
fires that began to rage in the hours after the explosion. There is a high probability of cameras and photographers in the
area at that time, but severe censorship during the last days of military rule and later censorship restrictions under the
U.S.-dominated Occupation may have led some who took photos to hide them. There also is the possibility that
military personnel present just after the bombing took photos that remain hidden. More recent hibakusha responses to
the “earthquake” photos are particularly significant. Some see “shadows” of the 1945 images they retain but often bury
in their personal memory. Their responses reveal the extent to which existing known photos fail to convey the true
character of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, in contrast to drawings and paintings done by survivors. This paper is
based on an examination of all known Hiroshima atomic bomb photos, archival background research, interviews with
Hiroshima hibakusha, and consultation with Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum staff.
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DAVID PALMER is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies, Flinders University, Australia. His research
focuses on comparative labor history (US, Japan, Australia) and issues of war and political economy. His publications
include Organizing the Shipyards: Union Strategy in Three Northeast Ports, 1933-1945 (Cornell, 1998). His work on
Japan includes, “The Straits of Dead Souls: One Man’s Investigation into the Disappearance of Mitsubishi Hiroshima’s
Korean Forced Labourers,” Japanese Studies (2006) and Korean Hibakusha, Japan’s Supreme Court and the
International Community: Can the U.S. and Japan Confront Forced Labor and Atomic Bombing?,” Japan Focus (2008).
He currently is writing a book with the working title “War Comes to the Shipyards: American and Japanese Workers in
the Era of Total Destruction” based on oral histories of World War II era shipyard workers from Hiroshima, Kure,
Nagasaki, Boston, New York harbor region, and Philadelphia harbor region.
Josko Petkovic (Murdoch University)
Supervising O: Aceh Mon Amour
Drama is conflict! This is what we often tell our screen production students. It is thus not surprising to find that
many student productions involve real-life conflict and real-life trauma. Supervising student productions very often
ends up supervising and managing trauma. From a creative point of view trauma can be many things. On the one hand,
trauma can make one mute and catatonic - it can block anything and everything that is creative. On the other hand,
trauma can also be liberating and compulsively creative. This paper reflects on some of the techniques of managing
trauma encountered in screen production classes. Specifically it looks at the way that a tangible external trauma, in this
case the 2004 tsunami in Aceh, was used to represent the unspoke internal trauma with cathartic consequences.
Dr JOSKO PETKOVIC is Director of the National Academy of Screen and Sound and a former President of
the Australia Screen Production Education and Research Association(ASPERA). He has been an active filmmaker for
over twenty five years. During this time he has written, directed and produced a series of innovative films including
Subjective/ Objective, A Look at Trails, Journey of Anticipation, Frame on Dreaming, Animal Locomotion: Muybridge,
Letter to Eros, The Resurrection of the Barque Stefano. These films have been exhibited at numerous national and
international festivals and conferences. Letter to Eros was a finalist for the 1995 Grand Prize at the prestigious
Yamagata International Documentary Festival. In 1995 Letter to Eros was also nominated for an AFI Award and an
ATOM Award. In addition to his personal academic work, Dr Petkovic takes an active role in teaching and curriculum
initiatives and supervises many of the Academy’s postgraduate and Honours students.
Lenise Prater (Monash University)
“These Are not my Words” (Begg, 2006): Negotiating the Differend and Articulating
Torture in the ‘War On Terror’
Moazzam Begg and Murat Kurnaz have written the only memoirs by ‘enemy combatants’ and victims of
torture in the ‘war on terror’. This paper analyses how they negotiate the differend, a term Lyotard coined to describe
the problems minority groups encounter when articulating their suffering, between their trauma and the official
American stories of Islam, torture and terrorism. They attempt to generate a different language of their experience and
to form new connotations and metaphors that insist on the seriousness of the torture they suffered. Begg, for example,
renames Bagram a ‘concentration camp’ which has a litany of negative connotations in the Western imagination. This is
in direct contrast to the official American narratives that deny that their treatment of ‘enemy combatants’, including
their use of ‘stress positions’, ‘sleep deprivation’ and indefinite detention, is torture. Part of uncovering how each
author articulates his trauma will involve examining the framing devices used to legitimate each text, mainly focusing
on the forwards that begin both memoirs. Both are written by famous Americans; the journalist David Ignatius penned
the forward for Begg while singer and poet Patty Smith did the same for Kurnaz. I will investigate the politics of this
kind of narrative framing and argue that it illuminates the problems of personhood, to which ‘the other’ has only limited
access, and genre in these autobiographies.
LENISE PRATER is a PhD student with the Department of English at Monash University, Australia. Her
current research is a comparative study of diverse narratives of torture in the ‘war on terror’. Her project uses feminist
and post-colonial theory to investigate both the linguistic and grammatical structures that have made torture permissible
as well as those structures that resist the hegemonic torture narrative. In 2007 Prater won the Arthur Brown Memorial
prize for the best Honours thesis and the Henry Handel Richardson prize for the best overall Honours student.
Steve Rabson (Brown University)
Trauma During the Battle of Okinawa: Compulsory Suicides
This paper examines, firstly, those social and cultural forces that contributed to what Norma Field has termed
"compulsory suicides" and other acts of self-sacrifice during the Battle of Okinawa, and, secondly, those that affected
the later responses of people who witnessed and wrote about these excruciatingly traumatic events. During the battle,
Imperial Army officers told civilians that, if they were captured, the Americans would torture them for information,
rape the women, then massacre everyone. As U.S. forces closed in, Japanese soldiers rounded up local residents at
"assembly points," called "places of shattering jewels" in war propaganda, and distributed hand grenades, ordering these
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civilians to kill themselves rather than become prisoners-of-war. Published in 1996, the program guide for the Okinawa
Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum explains, "These deaths must also be viewed in the context of years of militaristic
education which exhorted people to serve the nation by 'dying for the emperor.'" The paper draws on spoken and
written accounts of battle survivors, including letters and diaries, along with portrayals in prose, poetry, and film. The
paper goes on to discuss the reluctance of those who witnessed compulsory group suicides to speak about them publicly
for decades, and what motivated them to come forward recently. Some witnesses told of their wartime experiences as
participants in last September’s demonstrations of some 110,000 people in Okinawa protesting the Japan Education
Ministry's announced policy of deleting references to Imperial Army coercion from high school text books.
Professor STEVE RABSON is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Brown University, USA. He
completed a B.A. in English literature at the University of Michigan in 1965. Drafted into the US Army the following
year, he spent eight months on overseas duty in Okinawa and one month in mainland Japan. Two years after his
discharge in 1968, he entered an intensive Japanese language course at Sophia University in Tokyo, completing a
Masters there in 1973, and a Ph.D. in Japanese literature at Harvard in 1979. He has published Okinawa: Two Postwar
Novellas, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley (1989, reprinted 1996), Righteous Cause or
Tragic Folly: Changing Views of War in Modern Japanese Poetry, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan
(1998), and co-edited Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa, University of Hawaii Press
(2000), an anthology in translation. He has also published articles and chapters on modern Okinawan literature, history,
and society.
Jo Rick and Jackie Cameron (University of Sheffield)
Hacking It: The Impact of Traumatic Reporting on Journalists
This paper argues that in order for journalists to realise the impact of their work on others, they must also
acknowledge the impact to themselves. Despite the commonality of journalists being exposed to traumatic situations,
little is known about the psychological consequences of this type of work, although research gathered from other
occupational domains suggests a significant occupational health risk. An underpinning issue for journalism is the
unsympathetic, or “macho”, culture which predominates and can deter individuals from admitting to emotional
vulnerability. This research attempted to address gaps in existing knowledge via rigorous exploration of the emotional
challenges for contemporary journalism, as well as examining the largely neglected area of organisational support.
Twenty journalists were interviewed to gain insight into how they cope with emotionally challenging situations,
whether this is complicated by cultural pressures, and whether perceived organisational support impacts on
psychological outcomes. The results reveal that journalists who attempt to detach from the emotional content of their
work, for example by suppressing their feelings, suffer more negative psychological consequences than those displaying
more authentic behaviour. However, cultural pressure to maintain a tough or professional exterior means that
detachment, although maladaptive and unlikely to have a positive impact on vulnerable interviewees, continues to be an
accepted strategy, propagated further by a perceived lack of organisational support and pressure to get the story. The
implications are explored and it is argued that in order to fully address journalistic responsibility, media organisations
must include their own employees within the realm of consideration.
Dr JO RICK is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist based at the Institute of Work Psychology, University
of Sheffield, UK, where she runs a programme of research into the workplace factors that affect performance with
particular emphasis on psychological health, trauma, organisational culture and change management. Prior to this, Jo
led the Work, Health and Well-being programme at the Institute for Employment Studies (UK), where she published
and consulted on many aspects of work related health and well-being including psychological trauma and rehabilitation.
Jo has pioneered the use of systematic review methodology in support of evidence based policy and led the review of
evidence which underpins the UK HSE’s Management Standards for Work-related Stress. Jo provides research and
consultancy support to both organisations and policy makers on workplace mental health issues and is regularly invited
to speak at conferences and in the media on work, health and well-being.
JACKIE CAMERON is a former journalist with 12 years of experience in production and writing roles. She
began working on a freelance basis in 2002 while studying for a degree in philosophy and psychology at the University
of Stirling, which fuelled her interest in the psychological impact of journalism. She then retrained as an occupational
psychologist at the Institute of Work Psychology (IWP) in Sheffield in 2007, gaining a distinction for her dissertation
on the impact of traumatic reporting on journalists, which was presented at a British Psychological Society annual
conference in January 2008. Jackie currently works as a research assistant at the IWP, UK.
Carolyn Rickett (Sydney University)
Singing of Bodies Changed Into Shapes of a Different Kind
“Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing
can save you… Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome” (Duras,
Writing, p.7). I am not so much interested in ‘fictionalised’ accounts of pain, but the ‘factual’ trauma experienced by
literary writers in their material/lived circumstance. So the specific aim of this paper is to explore the therapeutic
dimension of autobiographical acts where an author responds to real-life illness and psychic rupture through the
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discursive mode of story telling, what Suzette A Henke calls “scriptotherapy.” My immediate concern is not how
autobiography functions and defines itself as a genre, but what the performance of life-writing might enable an author
to enact in terms of ‘controlling’, ‘recuperating’ and ‘making meaning’ for both themselves and potentially their
readers. This paper will closely examine how Doris Brett’s memoir Eating the Underworld can be read as a narrative
site where aspects of personal trauma are contested, (re) figured and (re) constituted; a place where writing interrogates
the ‘unspeakable’ whilst seeking utterance (the title of this paper was adapted from Ovid's Metamorphoses).
CAROLYN RICKETT is a lecturer in Communication at Avondale College and is completing doctoral
research in the area of trauma, writing and healing at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is co-ordinator for the
New Leaves creative writing project, an Australasian Research Institute funded initiative for people, or carers, who
have experienced or are experiencing the trauma of a life threatening illness.
Leonardas Rinkevicius (Kaunas University of Technology)
Cultural Trauma and Symbolic Meanings of Chernobyl: the Case of Lithuania
Cultural trauma (see Alexander et al, 2004) that are discussed in this paper are inter-twined with the symbolic
meanings of Chernobyl disaster as signifying the major dimensions of what has come to be called the risk-society
(Beck, 1992). Cultural trauma of nuclear power is also regarded in this paper as one of the key aspects of reflexive
modernity (see Giddens, 1996). The all-encompassing disaster of Chernobyl stretching social and geographic
boundaries is reflected in numerous artistic, publicist and scholarly attempts to capture the social and cultural trauma
that is perhaps the most significant trauma of technogenic nature in the human history (Rinkevicius, 2007). The paper
traces yet another side of the symbolic meaning of Chernobyl, namely the new up-surge of nuclear power in Eastern
Europe as a way to combat the post-colonial social trauma of transitional societies and pursuit for energy-independence.
This new up-surge of nuclear power also epitomizes the controversy between nuclear scares of the Chernobyl era vis-à-
vis the new emerging social concerns, for instance the societal concern about the global warming. Based on the
sociological research into public attitudes and public discourse in Eastern European countries such as Lithuania, the
paper argues that humanity is shifting towards a new era of „competing framings” of different types of social and
cultural trauma – the troublesome experiences of catastrophes like Chernobyl and the sensing of new trauma like global
warming. This paper concentrates on symbolic dilemma of nuclear power in the light of Chernobyl’ trauma in societies
like those in the Baltic States. This paper studies the ways in which such dilemma and cultural trauma are reflected by
different media and forms of art, contrasting both the contents of different representations and framings as well as
societal perceptions of risks and symbolic meanings.
Dr LEONARDAS RINKEVICIUS works in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Kaunas
University of Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania.
Sarah Rossetti (Murdoch University)
Enigmatic Pearl: Trauma and the Sublime in the Short Film Pilbara Pearl
This paper explores the Burkian notion of the sublime in the postmodern sense, linking big ideas such as
romantic love, as it is felt, which is grand in scope and transcendentally traumatic in origin, rendering it and its
representation almost incomprehensible to humans, such as Eddie (the protagonist). In doing so, I will seek to answer
one of Lyotard’s questions, regarding whether art is possible under the category of the sublime by applying some of his
tenets to my film. I will draw upon my creative practices to explore how I sought to represent trauma and sublime
notions of love through the aesthetics of cinema. Kant will be discussed in terms of the immensity of love and Eddie’s
initial failure of imagination to comprehend objects which appear terrifyingly boundless and formless, such as Pearl’s
immersion in the otherworld of her fish tank. In agreement with postmodern concepts, I will argue that the gap between
being human, and the thing (antagonist Pearl’s immersion in her fish tank, which we, the audience, witness) is a sublime
moment in the film for Eddie. Consequently, his powers of reason and imagination challenge him into a reversal,
ultimately enabling him to surrender to love to experience the unthinkable, as he immerses with Pearl in her fish tank. I
thus will argue that Eddie’s terror of love transforms into a positive epiphany, which is, nonetheless, sublime and moves
beyond trauma.
SARAH ROSSETTI is a Perth scriptwriter with credits in a wide variety of genres. She has won four AWGIES
(Australian Writers’ Guild national awards), a WA Lotteries Commission Award for Film Excellence, and a WA
Premier’s Award. In November 2000, Sarah won an If Award for Best Emerging Australian Talent. She is currently
finalising her PhD at Murdoch University.
Paul Sendziuk (The University of Adelaide)
Drawing the Line Against AIDS: Trauma and Survival in Australian and American Gay
Communities
The inner-city gay communities of Australia and the United States have been devastated by HIV/AIDS. In the
early-to-mid 1990s, in particular, when the annual death rates peaked, gay men were collectively diagnosed as suffering
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from acute trauma and melancholia. In an effort to stem the rate of new HIV infections, health authorities turned to the
principles of the ‘New Public Health’, which seeks disease prevention through education, community participation in
decision-making and the provision of health education, community empowerment, community building, and public
policy intervention. In the context of HIV/AIDS, community empowerment means fostering a sense of hope that AIDS
can be beaten; community building entails creating a space for survivors to grieve, celebrate, affirm and renew their
energies; and public policy interventions involve modifying existing laws in order to create healthy social
environments. The call for community empowerment and community building was predicated on the understanding that
one’s motivation to maintain a regime of safe sex and/or safe drug use was dependent upon the belief that one’s
sacrifice would be worthwhile: that AIDS could be stopped, and the community to which one belonged was worth
preserving. Research indicated that those who believed infection and death to be inevitable, or who were traumatised by
the loss of loved ones, were less likely to heed messages regarding safe sex and drug use. A number of papers presented
at the Eighth International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam in July 1992, for example, dealt with the growing
experience of ‘multiple loss syndrome’ among gay men, an experience defined to include feelings of anger, resentment,
isolation, guilt, abandonment, depression, and fatalism. Suicide, perceived to be a result of multiple loss syndrome, was
cited as the leading cause of non-AIDS mortality in a cohort of San Francisco homosexuals. Public health authorities
and AIDS service organisations thus became keen to foster the belief that it was possible to avoid infection and that it
was worthwhile continuing to live in the midst of the epidemic. Australian and American artists and cultural workers
also took a leadership role in this regard. Organisers of ‘AIDS art’ exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia,
Artists’ Space and the New Museum of Modern Art in New York, and cultural events such as the Gay and Lesbian
Mardi Gras, the Candlelight Vigil and the AIDS Quilt Project, sought to provide an outlet for communal grief and an
opportunity to celebrate the vitality of the community that remained. Artists such as Felix Gonzales-Torres, Frank
Moore, Duane Michals, Andrew Foster, Maree Azzopardi and William Yang, whose elegiac photographs, paintings and
installations focused on the themes of remembrance and transcendence, were also important in this respect. Drawing
upon evidence recorded in oral histories and Visitors’ Comments Books concerning the impact of AIDS-related art and
cultural events, the paper examines the success of these cultural interventions in dealing with the trauma of AIDS.
Dr PAUL SENDZIUK is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide,
Australia. He specialises in twentieth-century Australian History, with particular interests in post-war immigration,
public health and the history of disease. Paul’s most recent book is Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS,
which was short-listed for the 2004 Human Rights Award (bestowed by Australia’s Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission). He is currently working on a project titled ‘The Art of AIDS Prevention: Cultural Responses
to HIV/AIDS in Australia, South Africa and the United States’ (http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/australia/).
Bruna Seu (University of London)
The Mediation of Torture: A Psychosocial Analysis of Audience Responses
This paper focuses on the mediation of suffering and the reception of such mediation. It presents the findings
from a series of focus groups on the topic of unresponsiveness to Human Rights appeals, where participants were asked
to discuss their reactions to information about torture and Human Rights abuses (2 appeals from Amnesty International
and one newspaper article). In this sense it explores the space between representation and mediation of suffering and
audiences’ reactions to such representations. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how: a) audiences engage much more
passionately with the mediators than with the message itself; and b) audiences display a considerable and sophisticated
ability to deconstruct the message, thus successfully resisting its intended impact. The paper illustrates the ways in
which audiences dismantle the message as a moral plea and reconstruct it as a manipulative, unreliable, marketing ploy
by campaigners, activists and ideologically biased media. Thus, the paper follows the chain of arguments that go from:
a) ignoring the moral plea of the message and turning it instead into ‘text’ to be analysed and critiqued ; b) to
questioning the intentions of the mediators and campaigners; c) to the doubting of the efficacy of the action. It
illustrates how, through this chain of arguments, the moral appeal of message is successfully neutralised. The paper will
argue that, for a morally successful communication of suffering, those involved in the mediation of information need to
be more aware of the psycho-social dimensions of audiences’ responses. More attention should be paid to, on the one
hand, the ideological justifications available to people to resist the involvement in collective suffering and, on the other,
the emotional component of the response that provokes resistance rather than responsiveness to the information about
such suffering.
BRUNA SEU lectures in Social Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and is a psychoanalytic
psychotherapist in private practice. She has been researching moral apathy to Human Rights abuses and is currently
involved in a project exploring the relationship between the processes of mediation of distant suffering and the
reception of such messages.
Timothy Shary (University of Oklahoma)
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Facing the Inevitable End: Elderly Death in Cinema
Perhaps the greatest trauma anyone can endure beyond the torments of life is the prospect of death. All of the
arts and many of the sciences have dedicated time to dealing with death, under the assumption that just about everyone
would rather live longer, even in pain, than die younger before pain sets in. American cinema, however, offers a greater
variety of perspectives on the inevitable end of life, especially in dealing with characters who have already achieved
their elderly years. Such stories about the end of life are understandably assumed to be rather depressing, yet in true
Hollywood fashion, the elderly facing death in many films either avoid the dreaded end before the credits roll, or they
find a way to go into that good night with dignity and grace. One of the first Hollywood features to fully consider this
moment on screen is the forgotten gem Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), in which an aging husband and wife stoically
succumb to encroaching senility. Where's Poppa? (1970) finds unexpected humour about senility with a man who can’t
place his mother in a nursing home, and Going in Style (1979) also mines humour as a trio of old men enjoy their last
days by robbing a bank. Films of a more solemn nature in this realm, include Being There (1979), The Whales of
August (1987), Rocket Gibraltar (1988), and Requiem for a Dream (2000). Thus, this paper addresses the ways in
which American cinema has faced the ultimate trauma—death—through its promotion of and resistance to death for
elderly characters.
TIMOTHY SHARY is Associate Professor and Director of the Film and Video Studies Program at the
University of Oklahoma, USA. He has published three books on the study of youth in cinema: Generation Multiplex:
The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2002), Teen Movies: American
Youth on Screen (Wallflower, 2005), and Youth Culture in Global Cinema (Texas, 2007), edited with Alexandra Siebel.
He has also written many other articles and encyclopedia entries and is currently editing an anthology on American
movie masculinity (to be published with Wayne State University Press). His paper for this conference grows out of his
current book project, The Silver Screen: Elderly Characters in American Cinema, due to appear in 2010.
Erin Stark (Curtin University)
Visualising Trauma, Encouraging Recovery: Using the Internet as a Tool for
Negotiating Traumatic Experience
Whilst suffering is often collective and affects a great number of people–entire communities or even
countries—the experience of dealing with trauma can be an isolating, solitary ordeal. The individual way of firstly
encountering and then negotiating trauma is so diverse that people find themselves to be alone, unable to connect with
others, and therefore unable to heal. It seems, however, that the Internet offers significant potential for healing, by
engaging in community and/or using blogs as a means of self expression. Often users will engage with people they
don’t know offline, giving the sufferer the opportunity to be open and frank about their emotional and mental state. In
other instances, the sufferer may talk online to a friend or family member, but the distance enforced by the screen and
the equal position in which the medium places both parties in a less stressful position, and encourages interaction and
discussion. This paper explores the ways in which individuals are connecting with others through the Internet as part of
the recovery from a traumatic, with a particular focus on photoblogging and online art journaling as a means of
overcoming the ordeal. Photoblogging and art journaling are significant in this instance as they allow a double-edged
ability to express oneself and thus interrogating trauma. Firstly, it provides the opportunity to engage artistically and
visually with the situation as a means of acknowledging trauma, and secondly, the opportunity (if desired) to display the
product of that exercise in an online forum, and receive not only feedback but also support and advice from members of
the community.
ERIN STARK is a PhD student in Internet Studies at Curtin University, and has a first-class Honours degree in
English from the University of Western Australia. She is currently thinking about blogging, positioning and belonging,
and the online translation of offline spaces to online locations.
Mark Straw (University of Birmingham)
The Circle is Never Complete: Trauma, Masochism, and Spectatorship in
Contemporary War Films
The main question of this paper is the fraught psychological realm of the combat veteran or soldier in
depictions of 1990s conflicts in Hollywood and narrative cinema. This will explore how a traumatic male subjectivity is
constructed and is rendered explicitly in the staging and dramatization of the film. It will also explore how this trauma
impacts on the communities inscribed in the films and the implied community of the films’ spectators. This will include
looking at films such as Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick, 1996, USA), Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005, USA), The
Jacket (John Maybury, 2005, USA), and Before The Rain (Milcho Manchevski, 1994, Macedonia & UK). This paper
will therefore deal with the issue of how war is memorialised, processed and critiqued through deploying traumatised
male subjectivity in cinema. The paper deals with this question by referring to a now well established critical discourse
of ‘trauma cinema’, influenced especially by E. Ann Kaplan, Janet Walker, Ban Wang, and Thomas Elsaesser, and also
to a Deleuzian model of masochism. In particular, the paper deploys Steven Shaviro’s reading of masochistic aesthetics
and the body in cinema in his The Cinematic Body (1993). These methodologies are pertinent since they demonstrate
that traumatised masculinity is essentially represented as a masochistic subjectivity, and elements of masochism and its
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representational regimes echo and compliment those of the attempted depiction of trauma. Thus, the paper argues that
masochistic male subjectivity is deployed in films in which the central male protagonist is ostensibly, traumatised.
These films attempt to impose causation on experience and process trauma, and as such, we witness the desire for fixity
and closure. This is a reactive, defensive position, and one which confirms Marita Sturken’s assertion that certain war
films, offer healing only in order to “make way for the next war” (Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS
Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, London: University of California Press, 1997, 121). The paper also argues
that it is seemingly only in cinemas beyond Hollywood that we see ‘trauma cinema’ being used to adequately critique
and appraise memory, suffering and its affects on communities. The value of this is to show how Hollywood’s version
of ‘trauma cinema’ may offer short term radical pleasures, but long term conservative and reactive ones. This has
implications for the manner in which global military power, and in particular US power, is critiqued and raises the
question of whether the victimised and traumatised nature of the male protagonists in Hollywood is foregrounded in
order to mask the cultural machinery which reinforces and duplicates normative, hegemonic, phallocentric power.
MARK STRAW is a PhD student in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of
Birmingham, UK. His current area of research examines masochistic male subjectivity and spectatorship in
contemporary war films, media representation of war, and Hollywood film as a form of neo-imperial public diplomacy.
He teaches courses on film aesthetics and theory, and North American Cinema.
Miyume Tanji (Curtin University)
Distant Relatives? Trauma and Resistance in Okinawa
This paper consults how such media as fiction and film make links between the past collective suffering and
the present resistance in ways that differ from connections made by the non-fiction prose of political
activists. Memories of the massacres, starvations, betrayals and so-called ‘group suicides’ during the Battle of Okinawa
late in World War II have been central to Okinawan anti-militarism/pacifism. However, as explained in my earlier
work, Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa, the connection between Okinawans’ past war experiences and their
struggle against the US military presence in Okinawa is not straightforward. The connection is mostly implicit and only
tenuous in the political realm. How is Okinawans' past war experience and legacy of collective suffering resurrected in
the discourses of opposition against the US military presence? What are the tensions in establishing this juncture? This
paper pays particular attention to the reluctance of ‘group suicide’ survivors, discussed by Steve Rabson, to speak of
this ultimate of traumas. They have broken their silence recently in response to government deletions of accounts from
history textbooks of compulsory suicides and other atrocities committed or coerced by Japanese imperial forces. This
paper inquires as to whether this reluctance is related to the difficulty of connecting past war experiences to present
anti-military and anti-base struggle.
Dr MIYUME TANJI is a CASAAP Research Fellow in the School of Media, Culture, and Creative Arts at
Curtin University. She is a researcher in social aspects of US overseas military bases in Okinawa and the Asia-Pacific
region, and their implications for the studies of international relations. Her work, based on a long-term field research in
Okinawa, has been published and recognized internationally. In Perth, Miyume has taught Politics and International
Relations at Curtin University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia. She has also taught
Japanese language at Edith Cowan University. Miyume has a doctorate degree in Politics from Murdoch University
(2004) and a master's degree in International Relations from the Australian National University (1996), as well as a
Diploma in Education from Curtin University of Technology (2004). Her publications include Myth, Protest and
Struggle in Okinawa (RoutledgeCurzon, 2006), “The Dynamic Trajectory of the Post-Reversion ‘Okinawa Struggle’:
Constitution, Environment and Gender” in Richard Siddle and Glenn Hook, eds. (2003) Japan and Okinawa: Structure
and Subjectivity, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 167-187, and articles in academic journals such as Japan
Focus and Intersections.
Sonia Tascón (Curtin University)
Considering Love, Trauma, and Cross-Cultural Film: Towards an Embodied Ethics
Love, as Patrick Fuery mentions in his book New Developments in Film Theory (2000), is the most oft-used
thematic and representational device in films. In recent Australian films the cross-cultural love story has been used in
large part to represent a place of new hope and reconstruction of lost opportunities. Films such as Fish Sauce Breath,
2003; Molly and Mobarak, 2003; Amanda and Ali, 2003; and Pioneers of Love, 2005, use romantic love across different
cultures to display the most intimate but also political dimensions within which difference can be reproductive of shared
[if not harmonious] futures. Within the context of Australia’s racialised genocide of its Indigenous populations and mis-
treatment of other groups such as refugees and migrants, these films suggest love as one site where severed connections
of responsibility may be remade, and the suffering of groups of people may begin to be healed. If we can consider love
as a dimension that can fulfil aspects of what Levinas calls futurity – the ability to imagine oneself into possible futures
– then it also forms part of a cultural order that determines who may reproduce with whom, and part of ethics, or to
whom we may respond and provide opportunities. If trauma, on the other hand, is in part the result of an attempt to
disable the futurity of certain groups of people then ethical responsibility to these people has already been destroyed (or
was never present). Through the explorations of the aforementioned films this paper will engage with the possible role
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love has in the reconstruction of shattered/ non-existent responsibilities and thereby to a futurity for traumatised/
disaffected peoples. Through the representations of cross-border connections at the deepest level of engagement and
risk these ‘love’ films pose a challenge from within intimate and personal spaces to dominant notions of ethics, and
hence add a level of embodiedness usually lacking.
Dr SONIA M. TASCÓN is a member of the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University
Amanda Third (Murdoch University)
Reconciling Difference: On Growing Up ‘White’ in Australia’s North West and
Speaking the Trauma of Whiteness
Beginning with an interrogation of the ‘in-between’ experience of growing up ‘white’ in the Pilbara mining
region in the 1970s, this paper examines how the disavowed history of genocide against indigenous people in Western
Australia has shaped, and continues to shape, dominant ‘white’ cultural identity. Drawing on postcolonial theory (eg:
Bhabha, McClintock) and accounts of Australian race relations (eg: Muecke, Stratton, Hage), I argue that
‘reconciliation’ in Australia cannot advance far without the recognition that the unspeakability of Australia’s
subterranean history of genocide enacts a trauma that impacts on coloniser and colonised – indigenous and ‘white’
Australians – alike. Acknowledging that the effects of this trauma are experienced differently by Aboriginals and white
Australians, this paper seeks a space and a language through which to begin unpacking the ways the spectre of
colonialism haunts white Australian identity. In doing so, this paper suggests how white Australians might find a deeper
political engagement with the goals of reconciliation.
Dr AMANDA THIRD teaches Media and Cultural Studies at Murdoch University.
Steve Thomas (University of Melbourne)
Exploiters of Suffering? The Art of Documentary Making
“No one can recreate what happened here. No one can understand it” (Simon Srebnik, a participant in Claude
Lanzmann’s 1985 holocaust film Shoah). Many of my documentary films deal with the stories of individuals or groups
caught up in catastrophe and trauma but exhibiting great resilience. I have aimed to ‘provide a voice’ for people by
giving ‘air time’ to their stories and to use filmmaking as a catalyst for the benefit of my participants as well as the
audience. This approach has produced severe moral and ethical dilemmas for me as well as for my ‘subjects’. In this
presentation I will explore the potential and the limitations of documentary film in ‘interrogating trauma’ by focusing
on two of my films: Least Said, Soonest Mended (2000, 52 mins). The story of my twin sister Val, who in the 1960s
became an ‘unmarried mother’ and was coerced to give up her baby for adoption. Val has suffered ever since although,
at the time of filming, resolution appeared possible as her adopted daughter had contacted her after 33 years. Hope
(2007, 115 mins). This film began as a survivor’s account of ‘the SIEV X disaster’ in 2001, when a people smuggling
boat sank on its way from Indonesia to Australia and 353 people perished. Amal Basry clung to a floating corpse as she
watched women and children drown all around her. The film became a collaboration with Amal, who by this time was
fighting for her life once again. Both Least Said, Soonest Mended and Hope will be screened in full during the
Conference.
STEVE THOMAS has been making independent documentaries for nearly 20 years. He teaches documentary
making at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia (http://www.vca.unimelb.edu.au). He
has won film festival awards, an AFI Award and a United Nations Association Media Peace award. His films include
Black Man’s Houses, Harold, Errands of Mercy, Least Said Soonest Mended, Welcome to Woomera and most recently
Hope. The website for Hope at www.hopedocumentary.com.au includes a CV with more details.
Kim Toffoletti (Deakin University)
What’s So Violent About War Anyway? Iraq War Films in an Age of Integral Reality
Speaking about the state of the Hollywood film industry at the 2008 Academy Awards, the Oscars’ host -
comedian Jon Stewart - made the following wry assessment: ‘Not all films did as well as Juno obviously. The films that
were made about the Iraq war, let’s face it, did not do as well. But I’m telling you, if we stay the course and keep these
movies in the theatres we can turn this around. I don’t care if it takes 100 years. Withdrawing the Iraq movies would
only embolden the audience. We cannot let the audience win.’ The films he is referring to include Redacted (2007), In
the Valley of Elah (2007) and Stop-Loss (2008) - all of which focus on the personal cost to American soldiers on their
return to civilian life, as well as exposing the failure of the US invasion of Iraq at home and abroad. Despite their
topical subject matter, these movies were, for the most part, critical and commercial failures. This paper seeks to
investigate the waning interest in mainstream cinematic responses to the traumatic after-effects of the Iraq war in the
context of what Jean Baudrillard calls ‘integral reality’. His idea that there is a violence done to the image itself when it
is imbued with too much meaning provides a lens through which to consider the limitations and possibilities of film to
imagine trauma and suffering.
Dr KIM TOFFOLETTI co-ordinates the Gender Studies program at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.
She is the author of Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body (I.B.Tauris:
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London & NY, 2007). Her current research includes the funded project ‘The Commodification of Sexuality in
Postfeminist Young Adult Fiction’ and the monograph Baudrillard Reframed, which examines contemporary visual
culture through Baudrillard’s writings. Her research focus on media, sport and gender has resulted in the recent
publication ‘How is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football
League Sex Scandal’, Women’s Studies International Forum 2007, 30(5): 427-38.
Bryoni Trezise (University of New South Wales)
Reappearance and Erasure: Tragedy as After-Effect in Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s
BR#04 (Brussels)
Theatre-maker Romeo Castellucci explains that tragedy is ‘a mechanism to expose the dead body’ (Valentini
2004: 17). In the episodic structure of Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia, the exposure of the dead body
gains in weight as each installation of the performance cycle remakes connections between theatre, place and
disappearance. In this paper, I read one of these episodes, BR.#04 (Brussels), to examine the vicissitudes between
tragedy, trauma and postdramatic form. In particular, I am interested in how the specifics of postdramatic theatre
develop a politics of engagement that enable us to apprehend the dead body in profoundly disturbing yet important
ways. The paper takes as its starting point the provocation that the postdramatic offers an ‘anamnesis’ of drama’
(Lehmann 2007: 2). This definition of a formal code that begins with recollection positions Castellucci’s dramaturgy as
built around ends: tragedy here is a dramatic remnant, a fragmentary formal order. Claudia Castellucci argues that
contemporarily, theatre must enable a politicised apprehension of the dead body that goes beyond the consensus-making
performativities of the media spectacle. This arises in how an ‘exposure of the realities of representation’ can force a
‘fall into representation’ which destabilises conventional capacities for spectatorship and enables other modes of
perceptivity to emerge (Castellucci 2007: 3). The paper examines how the discursive and performative after-effects of
tragedy in Castellucci’s work speak to the historical traumas of place. Tragedia Endogonidia BR.#04 (Brussels)
remakes the city in a sequence of pulse, breath, accident, body, light, decay, myth, image, marble, death. To this extent,
the paper argues that we inhabit the dramaturgical unconscious of the city itself.
Dr BRYONI TREZISE was awarded her doctorate with a thesis entitled ‘Performing Postmemories:
Recollection in Crisis’ in 2007 and now lectures in Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of English, Media
and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia. She is a regular contributor to Realtime Magazine and
works as a dramaturg in contemporary performance practice.
Valerie Walkerdine (Cardiff University)
Social Trauma and Collective Suffering in South Wales: Art and Media Responses
This paper engages with the history of collective suffering in South Wales. Long the heartland of Welsh coal
and steel production, it saw its share of pain and tragedy, which took a further twist with the virtual ceasing of coal and
steel production in the last 10 years or so. I want to agree with Davoine and Gaudilliere in their move to speak of
‘history beyond trauma’. However, I also want to recognise a complex relation between ongoing suffering and a
historical event which ruptures the social fabric and the flow of time. In attempting to understand this relation, I will
turn to my own social scientific and artistic work in this area as background to work specifically on art and filmic
responses to the 2006 40th anniversary of the tragedy in the small pit village of Aberfan, in which a slag heap engulfed a
primary school, killing most of one generation. The tragedy is best known through a series of iconic and much
televisualised images of the disaster, yet the inhabitants felt that they could not move, were almost suffocated by these
images from which Aberfan could never escape. Into this scene, local filmmaker Chris Morris brought American
installation artist, Shimon Attie, whose work had hitherto been known in relation to the re-placing of images of Jewish
people in parts of towns from which they had been exterminated. Morris’ film explores the way in which Attie works
with the inhabitants to present the town as living, ongoing and not a mausoleum to the dead. The paper explores the way
in which the negotiation between inhabitants and artist attempt to restart the flow of time and to work through the
tragedy.
VALERIE WALKERDINE is a Research Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University,
UK.
Joan Wardrop (Curtin University)
In/vulnerable Bodies, Traumatised Bodies: Understandings of the Other in South
Africa's Transition to Democracy
In the culture of violence which has accompanied South Africa's transition to democracy, police have operated
as the critical interface between State and people, their bodies a permeable membrane, performing the State to the
people. Police commonly construct the world outside their service as Other. In order to understand that critical
interface, and drawing on extensive fieldwork from before the first democratic election in 1994 to mid-1998, this paper
interrogates the modes and registers through which major-crime emergency-response police in Soweto, the largest and
one of the most culturally diverse Black townships in South Africa, constructed and read the Other during the initial
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years of transition. Deciphering the relationships between ongoing low levels of trauma punctuated by sudden very high
intrusive spikes, the construction of a climate of collective apprehension and hyper-alertness, and its projection on to
racialised/ethnicised categories, the paper reads the physical and psychological inscriptions of trauma on their bodies
and minds to reread the masculinist State and its performances of power.
Dr JOAN WARDROP is Associate Professor of History in the Social Sciences program, Faculty of
Humanities, Curtin University. Trained as a medieval historian, she has researched and written on violence, trauma,
place and dislocation in Southern Africa and elsewhere, focusing on issues of embodiment, memory and masculinities.
Deb Waterhouse-Watson (Monash University)
Silencing Traumatic Testimony: Footballers’ Narrative Immunity Against Allegations
of Sexual Assault
2004 in Australia saw several sets of sexual assault allegations made against footballers from Australian Rules
and rugby league, sparking an intense media debate around the culture of the leagues and the nature of relations
between elite footballers and women. None of the cases was tried in court. This paper explores the role of narrative
and grammar in representations of the cases in the media and different commentators’ engagements with complainants’
traumatic testimony. The paper demonstrates that narrative and grammatical techniques were repetitively employed to
deflect blame away from footballers and onto the women involved, providing footballers with a “narrative immunity”
against allegations of sexual assault. Through comparison of different narrative constructions of the same events, the
paper demonstrates that even when commentators engage with a complainant’s account, the techniques used to narrate
it can evoke “cultural stories” which blame the complainant and discount her testimony. Individual narratives do not
function independently, but intersect with culturally embedded narrative patterns and stories which give meaning to
narrative events and descriptions. Characters in media rape narratives, as in defence lawyers’ cross-examination
techniques include the Gold Digger, the Woman Scorned and the Party Girl: sexually available women who are always
consenting to sex and lie about being raped. For trauma survivors’ recovery, the importance of having a receptive
audience to whom they can recount their story is well-documented; thus media narratives which validate a victim’s
perspective can in fact aid her recovery, and their significance thus cannot be underestimated.
DEB WATERHOUSE-WATSON BA (Hons), BMus, A.Mus.A. (violin) is in the final year of a PhD in
English at Monash University, Australia, in the area of football culture and sexual assault. She is a fan of Australian
Rules football and has been a member of the Hawthorn football club and the AFL since 2001. She also has a strong
interest in the function of language in other forms, such as film, television and fiction, and its role in shaping societal
values, norms and attitudes.
Rachel Wilson (RMIT University)
The Screening (or Not) of Memory Cages
In 2002 I completed a short experimental autobiographical film called Memory Cages. Although I’m proud of
the film to date it has only had one public screening. On initial reading the literature examining the role of trauma
testimonials in the process of healing and reconciliation appears contain an assumption that for traumatic memory to be
fully integrated into normative narrative memory (and therefore cease to continually re-inflict its trauma) testimonials
need be witnessed and acknowledged by others. I intend to investigate this assumption through the lens of the
autobiographical filmmaker and in doing so pose the question: can the ‘process’ of producing filmic testimonial in itself
be enough, or does the film need to be seen or witnessed to complete the final process of integration required for
healing? In attempting to identify and unpack the reasons behind my reluctance to publicly screen the film a number of
questions arise such as: can a text be too personal to screen? How is it possible to separate oneself from an
autobiographical text? And most importantly, do I have the right to inflict my traumatic memories on an audience?
RACHEL WILSON currently lectures in media production in the Media program in the School of Applied
Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. As a screen practitioner Rachel has worked on a number of
documentaries, features, shorts and TVCs. She is very involved in screen culture in Melbourne and sits on a number of
boards, is on the selection panel for short documentaries for the Melbourne International Film Festival and, is the
national secretary for the ASPERA (Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association).
Andrea Witcomb (Deakin University)
The Role of Art Objects in the Process of Memorialisation in The Jewish Holocaust
Museum and Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia
In any history museum context, objects have two primary functions. They are a source of material evidence of
past experiences as well as a means to both construct and maintain memories. In the case of Holocaust museums that
are not site museums, both of these roles are made more difficult by the frequent absence of objects directly connected
with the historical experience of the Holocaust itself. Thus at the JHMRC many of the objects on display belong to the
period before the Holocaust and document the existence of a ‘lost world’ or they are aesthetic objects created after the
Holocaust by survivors to document their experiences and often to offer a memorial to those who died. This paper is
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concerned with the latter category of objects in the museum, exploring their role for survivors as well as audiences
unconnected to the Holocaust. While one of the roles of such objects is to embody the memories of survivors in material
form, this paper will also explore how this form of embodiment offers more than either catharsis for its maker or a
memorial to those who died. The paper explores how these objects function within the museum setting, teasing out their
particular pedagogical role by focusing on their affective powers and being alert to the possibilities that this form of
engagement may offer this Museum’s audiences.
Associate Professor ANDREA WITCOMB, a museologist, holds a research position at Deakin University,
Australia. Her recent work, including analysis of the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, explores the ways in which
museums have used multimedia to offer interactive experiences and how the material world can offer embodied,
affective forms of knowledge. Her publications include, ReImagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, (2003) and,
with Chris Healy, South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture (2006).
Shannon Woodcock (La Trobe University)
The (Im)Possibility of Disembodied Genocide Studies in the Australian Classroom
The Australian classroom, including a dynamic range of ethnic, gendered and class identities, is a unique
location for learning through reflection on the very (im)possibility of understanding traumatic events from the safety of
an institutional environment. Courses run from within the discipline of history, however, have not yet come to terms
with the question of how the different lived experiences of genocide survivors and deniers of genocide alike affect the
ways that traumatic events can be taught and understood. I witnessed the difficulties of the Australian genocide studies
classroom as a tutor, where students who were survivors of genocide were not acknowledged, and students without
lived experience of genocide struggled with the imperative to know and speak when the most general human response is
to listen and flounder in the impossibility of 'knowing.' After years of teaching my own genocide studies courses to
Albanian students at the University of Tirana, including former KLA soldiers, my work at La Trobe University now
aims to create a classroom where the exact question of how we can learn from each others' experiences and apply that
reflective skill of listening and 'feeling' is integrated with the historical study of genocide. This paper reflects on
strategies for teaching students how to 'think through their own skins,' permeable and impermeable, and is based on
critical student reflections on the courses we have undertaken together in 2007 and 2008.
Dr SHANNON WOODCOCK is a lecturer in Genocide Studies at the School of European and Historical
Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She has previously taught in Albania and Romania, and
completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. Her
forthcoming book traces the history of Romanian Romani resistance to slavery and genocide in Romania, and she also
researches the history of communism in Albania, the violence of "non-violence" in European Union 'minority policy,'
and joke telling amongst survivors of torture and trauma.
Magdalena Zolkos (Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, University
of Western Sydney)
The Spectrality of Trauma and a “Haunted” Political Community in the Works of Imre
Kertész
This paper takes a departure-point in literature on theorizing political community in situations where that
community (a) has experienced collective trauma due to historical violence and historical injustice, and (b) undertakes
an act of its own re-founding within the trajectories of “transitional justice” and reconciliation. It suggests that
interesting insights into the problematique of political theorizing of traumatized communities comes from the work of
the 2002 Nobel Prize winner, Imre Kertész. The paper, first, offers a reading of Kertész’s texts (drawing on his novels
and essays) that is inspired by recent literary and psychoanalytic influences within trauma studies, as well as by the
conceptualizations of Jacques Derrida on democratic community. Next, on the basis of that reading, it makes an
argument that Kertész theorizes post-genocidal / post-Holocaust community as one that is being “haunted” by trauma
and as such ventures upon the project of ritualizing and “conjuring” the “ghosts” of its own violent past. This for
Kertész links to the question of the communal placement of the vulnerable human subject (or witness), and the
formation of a transitional civic subjectivity that remains under the influence of trauma. He speculates on subversive
and productive articulations of the traumatized subject (labeled as a “specter”) vis-à-vis the community that has, first,
declared on her/him a death verdict (figuratively and literally speaking), and tries to reclaim her/him in the present to
achieve reconciliation, understood as a secular project of redemption. This paper concludes with some reflections on
how Kertész’ ideas are related to the so-called “post-foundational” theorizing of political community, i.e. a community
that has experienced displacement of its own founding act.
Dr MAGDALENA ZOLKOS (PhD, University of Copenhagen) is Researcher in Political Theory at Fellow at
the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, University of Western Sydney. Her research includes radical democratic
theory, transitional justice, theorizing political community in post-conflict contexts and the concept of trauma in
political theory. She has published academic articles in International Journal of Transitional Justice, European Legacy
and Journal of Contemporary European Studies. She is the author of a forthcoming book Transitional Justice and
Subjective Life. Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in Jean Améry and Imre Kertész (Continuum, 2009).
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