Child Journalists, the Civil War, and the Intersectional Work of Reporting Grief

In 1864, editors of two nationally-circulating periodicals, Nellie Williams (aged 14) and her sisters, Allie and Mary (aged 12 and 17), reported that their only brother and Union Soldier, Leroy K. Williams, was missing in action. Filtering personal trauma through the performative discourses of nineteenth-century journalism, these young writers publicised their anguish over their brother’s capture. The culturally-situated intersectional identities reflected in and contested by their reporting—as white Northerners, working-class youth, loyal sisters, and enterprising journalists—expose a kaleidoscope of fissures and collisions between private and public, silence and enunciation, gender and class, trauma and resilience. The resulting tensions illustrate the ways by which genres shaped, and were shaped by, children’s articulations of suffering for a national audience during wartime.

“Never Trust a Survivor”: Historical Trauma, Postmemory and the Armenian Genocide in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard

The article focuses on Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser-known and underappreciated 1987 novel Bluebeard, which is analyzed and interpreted in the light of Marianne Hirsch’s seminal theory of postmemory. Even though it was published prior to Hirsch’s formulation of the concept, Vonnegut’s novel intuitively anticipates it, problematizing the implications of inherited, second-hand memory. To further complicate matters, Rabo Karabekian, the protagonist-narrator of Bluebeard, a World War II veteran, amalgamates his direct, painful memories with those of his parents, survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Both the novel and the theory applied to it centre on the problematics of historical and personal trauma, engendered by two genocides which are often the object of comparative analyses: the Armenian Genocide, also referred to as the Armenian Holocaust, and the Jewish Holocaust. The latter is central to Hirsch’s interdisciplinary work in the field of memory studies, encompassing literature, the visual arts and gender studies. In Bluebeard, Vonnegut holds to account a humanity responsible for the atrocities of twentieth-century history: two world wars and two genocides for which they respectively established the context. The article examines the American writer’s reflection on death and violence, man’s destructive impulse and annihilation. In a world overshadowed by memories of mass extermination, Vonnegut interrogates the possibility of a new beginning, pointing to women as agents of renewal and sociopolitical change. He also identifies the role that art plays in the process of potential reconstruction, the story of Karabekian, a failed artist and highly successful art collector, being a Künstlerroman with a feminist edge.

Rigoberta Menchú

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a K’iche’ Maya woman from highland Quiché, Guatemala, is an international advocate for indigenous rights and the winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Born in 1959, she came of age during the country’s brutal and eventually genocidal armed conflict (1960–1996), and has been involved in organizing and advocacy most of her life. As a young woman, Menchú participated in Catholic activism seeking better conditions for people in Guatemala’s rural highlands, mostly indigenous Mayas. She and other Catholic Action catechists led efforts for rights and dignity in the here and now, challenging a traditional Catholic emphasis on rewards for the poor in heaven. The work led to involvement in the Committee for Peasant Unity (Comité de Unidad Campesina, or CUC), a group uniting campesinos from the region’s many Maya communities and connecting them to Maya and ladino (non-Maya) workers on coastal plantations. CUC was the first organization to achieve such a presence in Guatemala, and it quickly drew the attention of a military state determined to quell social mobilization. In the context of brutal repression in the late 1970s and early 1980s, CUC—like many opposition movements—developed an alliance with the revolutionary Guerrilla Army of the Poor (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, or EGP). Violence spiraled, for the country and for the Menchú Tum family specifically. In January 1980, students and CUC activists, including Menchú’s father, occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to call attention to state terror. State forces firebombed the building, and the protestors and others burned to death. The army had murdered Menchú’s brother the year before, and tortured, raped, and killed her mother a few months after the embassy massacre. Rigoberta Menchú fled to Mexico in 1981. Personal trauma did not prevent her from becoming a compelling spokesperson for the opposition, and in that capacity she traveled to Europe to raise awareness of the violence in Guatemala. That is where interviews for the famous I, Rigoberta Menchú were recorded, facilitated by the EGP. That testimonio introduced audiences worldwide to repression in Guatemala while arguing for multiethnic resistance to it. Over the years, critics have levied charges that Menchú’s testimonio—with a narrative style blending many people’s lived experiences—misrepresented her life and served the interests of the revolutionary Left. These critiques in turn generated impassioned defenses of her testimonio as an important expression of political voice. Menchú has continued to work on behalf of Mayas and other marginalized people both internationally and within Guatemala.

Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s ‘two fathers’

Tvardovsky’s evolution as writer and editor reflected the paradoxes of his epoch, and was crystalised in his relationship to ‘two fathers,’ his biological father and Stalin. In his youth in the 1930s he renounced the former because he idealised the latter’s ideology and programme. The renunciation caused him personal trauma, which was intensified by the experience of the arrest and condemnation of several of his close literary colleagues in the late 1930s. Those experiences raised in him questions he could not answer at the time. After 1953, however, as Stalin’s past crimes were gradually publicly revealed, Tvardovsky reassessed his admiration of him. He remained faithful to socialism as an ideal, but now aimed to clear the way for its future optimum development by using memory to rediscover and understand the Soviet Union’s true history. This process required him also to reassess the memory of his father, and to take full responsibility for having renounced him. He completed this evolution only with the composition of his last major work, By the Right of Memory [Po pravu pamyati].

Making my bed : Tracey Emin's hysterical confessions of the abject

Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) presents an alternative representation to normative notions of the body, offending hegemonic propriety so greatly that it caused a tabloid media sensation when it was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize. Emin applies certain feminist notions as she continues the motif of the reclining nude, offering semiotic gestures that indicate evidence of the body rather that the body itself. My Bed is the site of trauma and disgust, with all of the abjection left intact, and above all, a self expressionist piece documenting her personal trauma. The expressionist qualities harkens back to cultural discourse of hysteria, reinforcing the legitimacy of the feminist lens. Hysteria is a performance that Emin represents through confessing her traumatic history. Like the archetypal reality television star, she confesses personal emotions and histories, but breaks the status quo by offering an alternative representation with the abjected authenticity of the bed.

Making my bed : Tracey Emin's hysterical confessions of the abject

Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) presents an alternative representation to normative notions of the body, offending hegemonic propriety so greatly that it caused a tabloid media sensation when it was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize. Emin applies certain feminist notions as she continues the motif of the reclining nude, offering semiotic gestures that indicate evidence of the body rather that the body itself. My Bed is the site of trauma and disgust, with all of the abjection left intact, and above all, a self expressionist piece documenting her personal trauma. The expressionist qualities harkens back to cultural discourse of hysteria, reinforcing the legitimacy of the feminist lens. Hysteria is a performance that Emin represents through confessing her traumatic history. Like the archetypal reality television star, she confesses personal emotions and histories, but breaks the status quo by offering an alternative representation with the abjected authenticity of the bed.

Female Offenders in Child Sexual Abuse

In the United States criminal justice system, female sexual offenders are among the most unrepresented groups of individuals, and they have evaded detection and/or prosecution for many reasons. This chapter explores the characteristics and patterns of female sexual offenders based on the collection of available literature. We will discuss how personal trauma histories, mental health, substance abuse, and motivations of female sexual offenders differ from their male counterparts. Additionally, we cover how social perception presents female sexual offenders in a light that adversely impacts their interactions with the social systems and explore empirically validated myths, risks, and interventions for this population.

The Other Side of Me: Moving words into motion

This article reflects upon the practice-led research project The Other Side of Me. It asks how to translate the life story of a young Aboriginal man born in Australia’s Northern Territory – adopted by an English family and raised in a remote hamlet in Cornwall, United Kingdom – into a narrative that engages with experiences of indigeneity in the contemporary world. At the project’s core is a collection of approximately 30 letters and poems that are crucially concerned with the trauma he suffered as a transracial adoptee – the conflicts of an individual coming to terms with two very different cultures. Telling his story raises issues of cultural appropriation. We propose here that adapting his story into dance offers one way to negotiate the challenges of cultural appropriation. Importantly, this process of adaptation is iterative, creating space for multiple voices and bodies to retell and reinterpret a story of personal trauma that sits at the limits of linguistic expression.

AN ANALYSIS OF PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA IN KHALED HOSSEINI’S NOVEL SEA PRAYER

This research study is an attempt to explore the literary text of "Sea Prayer" written by Khaled Hosseini with the perspective of trauma study that includes personal trauma model of Cathy Caruth and collective trauma model of Kia Erikson. The theoretical framework focuses on both i.e., Caruth (1996) personal trauma discussed in "Unclaimed Experience: trauma, narrative and history" and Erikson (1991) collective trauma discussed in "Notes on Trauma and Community". This research study examines the elements of personal trauma of the Narrator's character through flashbacks, timelessness and unspeakablity. On the other hand, the elements of collective trauma are also investigated that are breakage of communal bond, distrust in future, mood of fear and depression on the collective level. In addition, the method used is the qualitative analysis. Through aforementioned elements, the researcher has discussed the collective trauma of Syrian community as a whole. Keywords: Trauma, Sea Prayer, textual analysis, Cathy Caruth.

Homelife Stressors and Their Long-Term Impact

There are five theories on human development: Psychoanalytic, Behaviorist, Cognitive, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary- all playing a large role in how humans: interact with one another, battle unconscious impulses, respond to stimuli, form concepts, learn values of society, and develop the need to survive and reproduce (Berger, 2017). From a sociocultural perspective, a lot of these traits we learn are more nurture rather than nature. From birth to old age, connections are being made socially and cognitively from sensorimotor functioning levels to advanced formal operational levels. Family functioning is a very in-depth topic that be used to further examine the effects on children as they grow into adulthood. There are certain necessities that must exist in these family homes to insure a healthy development- physically, mentally, and emotionally. However, there are certain life circumstances that can serve as a barrier to a stress-free lifestyle. A few that have been annotated are relocation, divorce, and unemployment (Berger, 2017). All of which are understood to a more sophisticated degree by the parents and can affect their children depending on their child’s age, genes, and gender. It is not until the ages of six to eleven that children start to cognitively apply logic and begin to have a thinking experience from direct experiences. A study was conducted to measure the effects of high-conflict divorce on separating families. The goal was to further understand the level of internalizing and externalizing problems that resulted withing the children of separated parents. The child’s perception was one of the measurement tools that were used to determine frequency of stressful situations that were displayed by the parents and it was concluded that parental quality (PQ) can have an effect on their child’s externalizing and internalizing problems, post-divorce (Hara, Sandler, Wolchik, Tein, & Rhodes, 2019). Several adults were surveyed on their current relationship satisfaction, personal trauma history and other participant data history to further uncover complications that can occur in family homes that may have impact on the family function and the current mental state of these families. There was a total of twenty-two respondents who participated in a ten-item survey.