Counter-Archives of Trauma in Cristina García's Monkey Hunting

In her third novel Monkey Hunting (2003), Cristina García collects lost or ignored traumas and cultural memories from China, Cuba, the U.S. and Vietnam to suggest the ways in which archives need to be further explored as well as the limitations of archival knowledge. While her other works seek to resolve characters' sufferings, García allows trauma in Monkey Hunting to remain unresolved and even unrepresented, increasing the fragmented style for which she is already well known. By reading closely the archival tropes, chronoscopes, and aporia of the novel, readers come to see how García breathes subtle life into ghostly remainders of history. By creating an epistemology of memory to access and understand García's larger literary project, this article suggests that Monkey Hunting should be read as a counter-archive, one that embraces the unknowable while simultaneously investigating cultural memory. Literary counter-archives offer alternatives to master narratives, collective memory, and nostalgia, creating new forms of knowing that remain grounded in the historic time-spaces of previous lived experiences. By reading Monkey Hunting through an archival lens and as a counter-archive, readers may also illuminate their own fraught relationships with history, culture, and trauma.