Traumatic Affect

Traumatic Affect examines the intersection of trauma theory and affect theory, two areas of crucial relevance to contemporary thought. While both fields continue to offer insights into individual and collective experience, exploring their nexus offers timely and necessary critiques of film, literature, art, culture and politics.This collection of essays by established and emerging thinkers considers the dynamic relations within and between affect and trauma. Varied in style and approach, this volume asks how the relational subject conceived by affect theory might bring into question certain presuppositions common to trauma theory and how the ethical imperatives of trauma might require a rethinking of aspects of affect theory. Thus the contributors reimagine the unrepresentability of trauma, reveal its affective economies, and chart innovative understandings of experiences, embodiments, and events. From the silence into which Walter Benjamin fell after the suicide of his closest friend to the trauma of becoming the emblematic media figure of the London bombings, Traumatic Affect traverses diverse terrain: gesture and the everyday, cinema and torture, art and writing, civility and specters, media representation and Indigenous Australian film. Featuring essays by Shoshana Felman, Karyn Ball, Jennifer L. Biddle, Anna Gibbs, Ben O'Loughlin, Anne Rutherford, Magdalena Zolkos, Aaron Kerner, Ricardo Mbarkho, Jonathan L. Knapp, Michael Richardson and Meera Atkinson, Traumatic Affect ventures into bold new territories at the juncture between trauma and affect, illuminating pressing realities that demand engagement.

About the Author :
Meera Atkinson is a writer and poet whose works have appeared in many publications, including Salon.com, Griffith REVIEW, Best Australian Stories 2007 and Best Australian Poems 2010. She completed her PhD on the transgenerational transmission and poetics of trauma in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. Michael Richardson is an academic and writer who has published on trauma, writing, torture and politics. He completed his PhD with the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. Previously, he was speechwriter to Jack Layton, former leader of Canada's New Democratic Party.