Trauma culture

Lynn Meskell

pp. 157-175

in: Duncan Bell (ed), Memory, trauma and world politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

In the past few decades we have witnessed an emergent debate about the relationships between history and memory. Underlying this debate is a critical "disturbance not just of the relationship between history as objective and scientific, and memory as subjective and personal, but of history itself and its promises".¹ What is increasingly being contested here is not simply an upheaval around notions of the past or the role of the past in the present, but a crisis in our imagining of possible futures. Here memory is understood as an active remembrance, a recognition of past ideas and events, the power to reproduce the past in both symbolic and material terms and the creative entailments following on from these practices. For many memory and trauma have been inextricably linked, yet this does not have to be the case. In Huyssen's view, this linkage is often predicated by the fact that trauma as a psychic phenomenon is located in the threshold between remembering and forgetting, seeing and not seeing, experience and its absence in repetition. And it is in this connection that the two discourses are so heavily imbricated in the context of South Africa, as I will argue in this chapter. In South Africa public memory discourses might ideally allow individuals to break out of traumatic repetitions. Human rights activism, truth commissions, and juridical proceedings are powerful methods for dealing with historical trauma. Again following Huyssen, I demonstrate that another powerful arena is the constitution of cultural productions including objects, memorials, museums and public spaces of commemoration.² It is thus critical that in the urban spaces of daily life, particularly in contexts such as South Africa, we can analyse how memory and forgetting pervade the public sphere and the world of things.