Postcolonial trauma

Abstract

Postcolonial criticism has tended to critique, analyze, or describe the nature of the relation between the “postcolonial” and trauma by focusing on the manners in which the wounds from which peoples of non-Western cultures or minority groups suffer cannot be accounted for by traditional psychoanalysis. It has also tended to focus on the failures of psychiatric approaches to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and of modernist approaches to the question of text and the understanding of history to address the cultural specificities of lived experience. In specifically calling upon the poststructuralist maneuvers of what has been designated as “trauma theory” in the field of trauma studies, the critical conjunction between the postcolonial and trauma consistently emerges according to the character of the value of the postcolonial suspicion of the universal in which the “universal” is thought of in a materialist sense - that is, universals can only apply if they are made to apply. Postcolonial criticism, as Benita Parry once concluded, is constituted by the “constant slippage between significations of an historical transition, a cultural location, a discursive stance, and an epochal condition” (Parry 1997: 3). By whatever method or means the term postcolonial challenges the particularly Western character of regimes of knowledge (as distinct from truths) about the results of its circularity, the value of postcolonial studies inevitably pertains to its subjective applications, for which it is necessarily reserved. The analytic strategies of the postcolonial critique of the poststructuralist methods employed by trauma theory concentrate on subjective experiences of pain and suffering in the effort to disclose the ways in which the very concept of trauma is a Western artifact. Such strategies aim to show how the theoretical thinking of trauma assumes the immediate applicability and adaptability of the event-based model to any and all forms of violent effractions, including forms of structural oppression such as apartheid and colonialism in which trauma is not a momentary intrusion on everyday life, but rather a way of life, a permanent state of things.