Trauma and Public Memory: (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

During the past decade there has been a rapid growth in literature on traumatic experience, but what remains missing from the expanding field of commentary is any sustained consideration of how those who are outsiders to the experience deal with the challenge of its presence in their world. Related to this are some fundamental questions about how traumatic events are acknowledged in the public domain and come to form part of the fabric of public memory. The contributing writers to this collection are primarily from humanities and cultural history, though there are also essays from specialists in psychology and the social sciences, and interviews with professionals who have a primary involvement with traumatic events. Contributions focus on key traumatic media events of the last decade as well as those during the twentieth century in countries such as the USA, Europe, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Indonesia, Cuba and Australia.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; Jane Goodall and Christopher Lee PART I: OVERVIEWS 1. "But Why Should You People at Home Not Know?': Sacrifice as a Social fact in the Public Memory of War; Christopher Lee 2. Trauma, Dispossession and Narrative Truth: 'Seeds of the Nation' of South Sudan; Wendy Richards 3. Trauma and the Stoic Foundations of Sympathy; Jane Goodall 4. Unremembered: Memorial, Sentimentality, Dislocation; Laurie Johnson PART II: INTERVIEWS 5. Ross Anderson, Clinical Psychologist 6. Therese Lee, Emergency Nursing Specialist 7. Norman Fry, Disaster Response Co-ordinator, Toowoomba Regional Council 8. Sue Hewett, Senior Recovery Officer and Tanya Milligan, Chair of Human and Social Response Committee for the Lockyer Valley Council 9. Mark Willacy, Foreign Correspondent Australian Broadcasting Commission PART III: REFLECTIONS 10. Unburied Trauma and the Exhumation of History: An American Genealogy; Lindsay Tuggle 11. The Atrocity Tour; Lindsay Barrett 12. Regaining Lost Humanity: Dealing with Trauma in Exile; Robert Mason and Geoffrey Parkes 13. Popular Entertainments as Survival Strategies During World War Two; Victor Emeljanow 14. A Soldier's Perspective; Richard Gehrman Conclusion Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Jane Goodall is adjunct Professor with the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Her most recent publications include two essays on the theme of cultural trauma: 'Bucharest in Recovery', Griffith Review (2012) and 'When the Present Comes to Get You' (in John Potts and Charles Merewether (eds.), After the Event: New Perspectives in Art History (2010). Christopher Lee is Professor and Head of the School of Humanities at Griffith University, Australia. His research explores interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural history. He is a former national President of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and a founding editor of its internationally refereed journal JASAL.

Review :
'The genesis of this book is improbable: a peaceful regional city on the top of a range is washed by an inland tsunami. What surfaces in the aftermath are these diverse essays on public memory, communal identity and archives of feeling that mesh interviews and interdisciplinary critique in a transnational frame. This collection presents memory studies with a compelling new collection of historical and contemporary essays on trauma and its after-effects.' - Professor Gillian Whitlock FAHA, University of Queensland, Australia 'Trauma and Public Memory breaks the comfortable and distanced mold of media-circumscribed public memory and exposes us to the complex, contradictory, and seemingly ineffable ways in which personal experiences of the traumatic become collective ones. We read of events so challenging as to defy naming, of events so searing that public memory demands a reassuring narrative, the harm obscured. The editors have preserved the freshness and depth of the conversation among authors, and the unusual organizational scheme of coupling overview essays with interviews and concluding 'reflections' conveys the immediacy and vibrancy of the dialogue among contributors. This book deserves a wide readership and promises to shape the conversation for some time.' - Robert D. Hicks, Director, Mutter Museum/Historical Medical Library, Philadelphia, USA