Introduction: Mourning and Memory

As multiple communities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East reel from the impact of traumatic events, wrestle with how to remember and mourn those events, and struggle to reconstruct selves and societies, it has become increasingly urgent to theorize and understand processes of mourning and memory. This volume originated in a number of questions about the operation of traumatic memory in these regions, the ideological and political work done by mourning rituals and commemorations, the interaction between private and public forms of memory, the significance of recently devised structures for remembering (such as truth commissions and oral history projects), and the dynamics between psychological and material recovery. It was also prompted by the recognition that trauma is a category largely codified by Western medical and psychological institutions, that "trauma studies" as a field has been grounded in events and processes of Western modernity—such as industrialization and world wars—and that there has been insufficient exploration not only of how Western theoretical and diagnostic models translate into a "non-Western" context but of how sites of traumatic memory in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (dis)confirm, challenge, or revise dominant Western conceptions of trauma and memory. Coediting this volume of CSSAAME offered us a unique chance to explore these issues from a comparative perspective; to assess experiences, narratives, and concepts that cross national and regional borders; and to do so not from the uncluttered comfort of abstract theory and essentializing axiom but from the intractable complexity of local detail, irreducible specificity, and contestatory cultural and personal perspectives.¹

Traumatic experiences of individuals and groups, whether physical or psychological, leave deep scars and have long-lasting social, psychological, political, and material effects. But does traumatic memory operate in the same way in communities as it does in individuals? The vast bulk of research on trauma has focused on individual psychology and has been dominated by the clinical parameters of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The category of PTSD is based on the concept that, as Ruth Leys puts it:

Owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic memories. The experience of the trauma, fixed or frozen in time, refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually reexperienced in a painful, dissociated, traumatic present.²

While this clinical paradigm is focused on the individual psyche, Kai Erikson's work on disaster argues that "sometimes the tissues of community can be damaged in much the same way as the tissues of mind and body" and that the term trauma can thus "serve as a broad social concept as well as a more narrowly clinical one."³ Distinguishing between individual and collective trauma, Erikson suggests that the latter might be conceived as "a blow to the basic tissues of social life"—to the scaffolding of trust constructed by families, communities, and nations.⁴ Dominick LaCapra has also extended clinically derived terms to larger social entities. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, for example, he employs the psychoanalytic categories of "acting out" (Freud's term for the behavior of a subject who is controlled by repetitive, unconscious wishes and fantasies) and "working through" (Freud's term for a repetition modified by interpretation, capable of arresting unconscious repetitions by integration of a traumatic event into the subject's psyche) to analyze collective responses to historical events such as the Holocaust. The first of these terms ("acting out"), psychoanalytically associated with melancholy, LaCapra associates with dehistoricized nostalgia and political mythmaking; the second ("working through"), he aligns with cultural practices that allow for historicization, mourning, and...