Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds by Stef Craps (review)

Stef Craps’s Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds attempts to adapt the rather recent advances of trauma theory to postcolonial theory and despite its flaws, it is one of the more important texts on trauma theory in recent time. In the book Craps claims to address what he sees as major flaws in traumatic theory. He wants to attend to the marginalization of non-Western as well as minority traumas, shift focus away from what he claims is a Western-centric theory that gets overlaid onto other cultures, expand the overly rigid normativity of trauma aesthetics, and correct the lack of attention to the relationship between the developed and underdeveloped nations. It is a rather tall order and some of the issues are treated more sagaciously than others, but overall it is a very strong look at trauma studies.

The major flaws in the text, then, are twofold. The first is the approach to the research that came before. Craps locates the emergence of trauma theory in the 1990s, and with Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Dominick La-Capra primarily. While one can see this moment as a significant shift in and or coalescence of the theory of trauma and its relationship to cultural products, it is important to place trauma theory in its larger historical perspective. What is more problematic, however, is his approach to the field. In his critique of some of the seminal works of trauma theory Craps takes a decidedly hostile approach to the research. This is not to say that all of his criticism is deniable, but the text attempts to enter the field via sledgehammer in the introduction only to build on said theories in a much more cogent way later.

An example of the first issue comes by way of the second flaw in the text. One of Craps’s problems with the field is its heavy concentration on Europe and the Holocaust and his tone is openly hostile toward those precursors. He writes of “trauma theory’s general blindness to or lack of interest in, the traumas visited upon members of non-Western cultures” (11–12). While I often agree with his assessment, I understand that the theory started in a particular place at a particular time. There is a historical convergence of literary technique, the two world wars, and the Holocaust, as well as a number of other conflagrations that involve the West, where at the time most literary theory was produced. In other words, trauma theory had to start somewhere. What is important and perhaps underrated by Craps is that that many other critics have taken those original theories and have moved well beyond that Eurocentric thought and the Holocaust. That said, even as Postcolonial Witnessing attempts to decenter both traumatic theory and the traumatic texts that are studied, it has a hard time letting go of the Eurocentrism. In fact, Europe or the Holocaust is mentioned, by way of negative example or comparison, in all but two of the eight chapters. Furthermore, although it is true that the primary focus of much previous research was the war in the European theatre and the Holocaust, and I agree that there is no need to compare every other traumatic event to that era and that we should instead examine events on their own terms, Craps ignores much of the work that has been going on in the Global South for years, including work by Idelber Avilar, Diana Taylor, and even some of Caruth’s more recent work on the return to democracy in Chile. That said, Postcolonial Witnessing is building on and adjusting foundational trauma theories in important ways and looks to South Africa, Guyana, Saint Kitts, and India for examples.

Once Craps moves to the analysis of the primary texts, Postcolonial Witnessing shines. Chapter four examines the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother. He argues that the event, a fictionalized account of the 1993 murder of Amy Biehl...