The Nanjing Massacre and the Making of Mediated Trauma

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongtao Li ◽  
Shunming Huang ◽  
Xinyue Chang ◽  
Edwin A. Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
MELUS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-149
Author(s):  
Richard C Sha

Abstract Wing Tek Lum’s 2012 poetry collection The Nanjing Massacre raises vital questions about trauma. How do we know when a traumatic event begins? What cognitive options are open to victims of trauma? What are the ethical implications of our theories of trauma? I thus situate this volume between Bessel van der Kolk’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories of trauma because these poems challenge their key assumptions. Lum turns to poetry to think through how trauma begins and ends, the degree to which healing the gap between body and mind is part of the “cure” or part of the disease, and how much cognitive stretching is possible in trauma’s wake.


2000 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 601
Author(s):  
John H. Boyle ◽  
Joshua A. Fogel
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yunya Song ◽  
Ran Xu

Social networking sites (SNSs) facilitate self-expression and promote social connections. There has been growing scholarly attention to the affect-charged collectivities created online in the aftermath of disasters and mass traumas. This study was designed to examine how individuals affiliate in SNS-based commemoration of a mass trauma, taking advantage of a large Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) data set which captures users’ responses over 4 years to the anniversary of the Nanjing massacre, a major traumatic event in Chinese history. Machine learning–based content analysis was combined with dyadic-level network analysis to examine the content Weibo users create and the conversational structures they formed. The results reveal that homophily, geographic proximity, and preferential attachment work in tandem with displays of emotion to influence the formation of online conversational ties. Expressions of negative emotions were found to facilitate or inhibit the homophily effect. Being exposed to the display of anger amplifies the homophily effect among the users, while sadness weakens it. The findings point to the importance of examining specific emotions rather than global (positive–negative) feelings in understanding the dynamics of SNS-based interaction.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrizia Violi

This article analyzes the Memorial Hall for Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders, opened in its present form in 2007 to commemorate the massacre perpetrated by the Japanese in 1937, when in the course of six weeks a significant number of harmless civilians were brutally slaughtered. The memorial is a highly complex semiotic object: it includes a large museum but is also, and perhaps above all, a huge thematic park that occupies an extremely large surface area of seventy-four thousand square meters. Through a close reading of the site, this article seeks to show how the Nanjing Memorial, more than serving the function of conservation and transmission of a tragic, traumatic memory, is mostly a monument to Chinese nationhood, an important step in the construction of a new national identity.


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