This lofty volume analyzes a circular cultural relationship: not only how trauma is reflected in cultural processes and products, but also how trauma itself acts as a critical shaper of literature, the visual and performing arts, architecture, and religion and mythmaking. The political power of trauma is seen through US, Israeli, and Japanese art forms as they reflect varied roles of perpetrator, victim, and witness. Traumatic complexities are traced from spirituality to movement, philosophy to trauma theory. And essays on authors such as Kafka, Plath, and Cormac McCarthy examine how narrative can blur the boundaries of personal and collective experience. Among the topics covered: Television: a traumatic culture. From Hiroshima to Fukushima: comics and animation as subversive agents of memory in Japan. The death of the witness in the era of testimony: Primo Levi and Georges Perec. Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and the possibility of writing a traumatic history of religion. Placing collective trauma within its social context: the case of the 9/11 attacks. Killing the killer: rampage and gun rights as a syndrome. This volume appeals to multiple readerships including researchers and clinicians, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and media researchers.

This book explores the intersection of clinical and social aspects of traumatic experiences in postdictatorial and post-war societies, forced migration, and other circumstances of collective violence. Contributors outline conceptual approaches, treatment methods, and research strategies for understanding social traumatizations in a wider conceptual frame that includes both clinical psychology and psychiatry. Accrued from a seven year interdisciplinary and international dialogue, the book presents multiple scholarly and practical views from clinical psychology and psychiatry to social and cultural theory, developmental psychology, memory studies, law, research methodology, ethics, and education. Among the topics discussed: Theory of social trauma Psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic approaches to social trauma Memory studies Developmental psychology of social trauma Legal and ethical aspects Specific methodology and practice in social trauma research Social Trauma: An International Textbook fills a critical gap between clinical and social theories of trauma, offering a basis for university teaching as well as an overview for all who are involved in the modern issues of victims of social violence. It will be a useful reference for students, teachers, and researchers in psychology, medicine, education, and political science, as well as for therapists and mental health practitioners dealing with survivors of collective violence, persecution, torture and forced migration.

In Images of War in Contemporary Art, Uroš Cvoro and Kit Messham-Muir mount a challenge to the dominance of theoretical tropes of trauma, affect, and emotion that have determined how we think of images of war and terror for the last 20 years. Through analyses of visual culture from contemporary "war art" to the meme wars, they argue that the art that most effectively challenges the ethics and aesthetics of war and terror today is that which disrupts this flow-art that makes alternative perceptions of wartime both visible and possible. As a theoretical work, Images of War in Contemporary Art is richly supported by visual and textual evidence and firmly embedded in current artistic practice. Significantly, though, the book breaks with both traditional and current ways of thinking about war art-offering a radical rethinking of the politics and aesthetics of art today through analyses of a diverse scope of contemporary art that includes Ben Quilty, Abdul Abdullah (Australia), Mladen Miljanovic, Nebojša Šeric Šoba (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Hiwa K, Wafaa Bilal (Iraq), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), and Arthur Jafa (United States).

This handbook represents the interdisciplinary and international field of "cultural memory studies" for the first time in one volume. Articles by renowned international scholars offer readers a unique overview of the key concepts of cultural memory studies. The handbook not only documents current research in an unprecedented way; it also serves as a forum for bringing together approaches from areas as varied as sociology, political sciences, history, theology, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, psychology, and neurosciences. "Cultural memory studies" - as defined in this handbook - came into being at the beginning of the 20th century, with the works of Maurice Halbwachs on m moire collective. In the course of the last two decades this area of research has witnessed a veritable boom in various countries and disciplines. As a consequence, the study of the relation of "culture" and "memory" has diversified into a wide range of approaches. This handbook is based on a broad understanding of "cultural memory" as the interplay of present and past in sociocultural contexts. It presents concepts for the study of individual remembering in a social context, group and family memory, national memory, the various media of memory, and finally the host of emerging transnational lieux de m moire such as 9/11.

A comprehensive synopsis of theory and research on human development, with every chapter drawing together findings from cultures around the world.

This handbook represents the interdisciplinary and international field of “cultural memory studies” for the first time in one volume. Articles by renowned international scholars offer readers a unique overview of the key concepts of cultural memory studies. The handbook not only documents current research in an unprecedented way; it also serves as a forum for bringing together approaches from areas as varied as sociology, political sciences, history, theology, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, psychology, and neurosciences. “Cultural memory studies” – as defined in this handbook – came into being at the beginning of the 20th century, with the works of Maurice Halbwachs on mémoire collective. In the course of the last two decades this area of research has witnessed a veritable boom in various countries and disciplines. As a consequence, the study of the relation of “culture” and “memory” has diversified into a wide range of approaches. This handbook is based on a broad understanding of “cultural memory” as the interplay of present and past in sociocultural contexts. It presents concepts for the study of individual remembering in a social context, group and family memory, national memory, the various media of memory, and finally the host of emerging transnational lieux de mémoire such as 9/11.