Disaster Theory

The online community of vaporwave music is a cultural development that emerged in the 2010s and therefore fully within the ideological sphere of postindustrialism. Consisting of slowed-down samples from pop songs and advertising jingles from the 1980s and 1990s stitched together with original synthesizer pieces that resemble those used in horror-film scores, vaporwave is an undead, artificial soundscape that floats somewhere between music and sound. Its fake nostalgia for an alternative yet ossified past aims to confront our contemporary social paralysis in the face of postmillennial economic failure and political crisis. This article examines gothic elements of the vaporwave music phenomenon to analyze how vaporwave expresses sociopolitical traumas of late capitalism. Derridean notions of hauntology articulate the individual’s self-isolation and objectification under the neoliberal homogenization of culture in vaporwave artist Begotten’s contributions to the hushwave subgenre of the scene (2018–19). Vaporwave’s cyclical and uncanny sounds embody the spectral haunting of Marx in capitalism’s repetitive pronunciation of victory over its vanquished, communist foe in Sunsetcorp’s 2009 single “nobody here” and the manifestations of American political trauma after 9/11 in Cat System Corporation’s signalwave album, News at 11 (2016).

Armed with Madness

Increased attention to psychology in the modern novel afforded expanded thematic access to aberrant states of consciousness. In a way, this returned the novel to its prototype in Don Quixote, and rejuvenated awareness of depicted mania in realist novels. Eight novels are profiled here (by Fowles, Fitzgerald, Lowry, Dostoyevsky, Canetti, Mann, Conrad, and Woolf) in order to examine narrative strategies for exploring madness, and implicating the reader’s consciousness as a participatory component of mental aberration. This approach counters Georg Lukács’s contention that depictions of mental aberration violated the novel’s obligation to depict normality. Modernism, he claimed, privileged distortion, but the novelists examined here suggest that the historical pressures of modernity provided distortions exceeding any particular imaginative license. These pressures are acutely rendered in portraits of domesticity in The Secret Agent by Conrad and Mrs Dalloway by Woolf, two among many such reckonings with geo-political trauma casting a shadow over private life.

Imaginaries of Empire and Memories of Collapse

Producing parallel narratives of the fall of Kaifeng in 1127 and the sack of Constantinople in 1204, Ye Mengde 葉夢得 (1077–1148) and Niketas Choniates (c.1155–1217) chronicled the collapse of these imperial centres in an effort to reconstruct post-conquest political communities in exile. While Ye and Niketas were deploying different conceptual frameworks of political authority and literary blueprints for memoirs, their writings documented personal displacement as well as cultural and political trauma writ large. By recording and commemorating the chain of events that culminated in the collapse of the Northern Song and Byzantine Empires, both authors were converting oral anecdotes into cultural memory. Ye and Niketas devised ex post facto explanations for the fall of Kaifeng and Constantinople as the consequence of the actions of failed monarchs and corrupt courtiers — and, to a lesser extent — the forces of divine punishment.

When Participants' Trauma Becomes Mine

This chapter is a reflection on the author's work in the context of trauma-focused qualitative research entitled “Risk and protective factors for the mental health consequences of childhood political trauma (Argentina 1976-1983) among adult Jewish Argentinian immigrants to Israel.” By examining the author's emotional reactions during the process of the data collection and analysis of her doctoral study, the author will explore the challenges that she faced, as well as the solutions she employed (both the effective and ineffective). More specifically, using the lens of the psychoanalytical term “countertransference”, she will discuss the manifestations of her positionality as a qualitative researcher and its impact on her engagement with her study. The author will elaborate on different strategies that she used for her study, and propose qualitative researchers to use “countertransference” as a way to understand and address the complexity of a researcher's positionality in narrative research.

Trump therapy: Personal identity, political trauma and the contradictions of therapeutic practice

The election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016 has been felt by many as a political trauma. In response, this trauma has been worked through using therapeutic talk and practice. In this article, we examine the media representations of these responses across a wide range of news sources in order to understand the way that attitudes and values regarding the politicisation of therapy are captured, reinforced and shaped. It is shown that therapy provides a legitimate ground for self-management of feelings of political hurt; that this is seen as valuable for the formation of political communities of action and resistance; and that it then comes under attack from the right precisely because of this community-forming function. Criticism of therapeutic engagement emerges as a rhetorical means of disrupting solidarity and silencing political dissent. It is concluded that these representations need to be situated within the contradictory character of a therapeutic culture that heals and empowers individuals as it situates subjects within medicalised and neoliberalised structures of power.

The “Passing Clouds” of Nationalism in Anthea Nicholson and Kapka Kassabova: Cross-Border Recollection of Political Trauma

Nationalism re-emerges from contemporary cultural debates under a panoply of controversial perspectives. In some of them like, for instance, the contemporary fields of border studies and the study of migrant cultures and writing, it fairly often takes the shape of an effort to strengthen hierarchies, hold differences together into ideologically ‘sterile’, supposedly homogeneous units, and to delimit overflowing identities. What binds a great many such contemporary reassessments is the urge to retrace or excavate past experience of nationalism, especially in cases when its purportedly beneficial properties of sheltering nations are brought to such ends as dictatorship, autocratic and authoritarian rule. The present article ruminates on those violent forms through the medium of two literary works authored by contemporary writers in its attempt to analyse the traumatic, but also prolific potential of re-membering past oppression. The study is concerned with their responses to an excessively violent political form of selfproclaimed nationalism which are worth considering because of their borderline status. Both Anthea Nicholson and Kapka Kassabova fall into the category of migrant writers. Of Georgian and Bulgarian descent, both writing in English, each one of them retraces a remembered and oppressive past experience in an effort that aims to reconstruct the contemporaneity of their countries of origin. Alongside specific contextual details, the investigation meditates on the common features of their fictional responses to a shared past. A meaningful outcome of their retracings is the critical distance that forms between remembered experience and the contemporary state of their birth lands which illuminates in a creative way the problematic achievement and development of state sovereignty.

Wounded Utterance: Trauma and Italy’s Second War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems Before Congress and Last Poems

Chapter 4 traces the traumatic impact of the 1859 Second Italian War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning ’s Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Despite voicing enthusiastic support for unification, Barrett Browning’s poems also recognise the Risorgimento’s failures and costs. ‘Napoleon III. in Italy’, ‘Mother and Poet’, ‘Died . . .’, ‘The Forced Recruit’ and ‘A Tale of Villafranca Told in Tuscany’ explore the uses and limits of lyric utterance, using familial and intergenerational motifs to demonstrate how a performative poetic voice that ushers Italy into being conflicts with the historical trauma that precludes speech and severs the correspondence between words and deeds. EBB attempts a kind of wounded utterance, exploring a poetics of recognition that acknowledges the deep roots of political trauma embedded in the nation-making process while accepting and respecting the wartime suffering and grief that are beyond the powers of poetic convention and speech.