1st Edition

Trauma Life Stories of Survivors

By Selma Leydesdorff Copyright 2004
    272 Pages
    by Routledge

    272 Pages
    by Routledge

    Traumatic experiences and their consequences are often the core of life stories told by survivors of violence. In Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors leading academics explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which survivors remember, and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.International case studies include the migration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, the life stories of Guatemalan war widows, violence in South Africa, persecution of political prisoners in South Africa and the former Czechoslovakia, lynching in the Mississippi Delta, resistance in Zimbabwe's liberation war, sexual abuse, and the ongoing Irish troubles. The volume reveals the complexity of remembering and forgetting traumatic experiences, and shows that survivors are likely to express themselves in stories containing elements that are imaginary, fragmented, and loaded with symbolism. Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors is a groundbreaking work of relevance across the social sciences. This new perspective on trauma will be of particular importance to researchers in psychology, history, women's studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.

    1: Case Studies; 1: Trauma Signals in Life Stories; 2: Remembering and Forgetting: Guatemalan war-widows’ forbidden memories; 3: Interviewing in a Culture of Violence: Moving memories from Windermere to the Cape Flats; 4: Oppression, Resistance and Imprisonment: A montage of different but similar stories in two countries; 5: The Unending War: Social myth, individual memory and the Malvinas; 6: Lynching Stories: Family and community memory in the Mississippi Delta; 7: Containing Violence: Poisoning and guerilla/civilian relations in memories of Zimbabwe’s liberation war; 8: Naming and Claiming: The integration of traumatic experience and the reconstruction of self in survivors’ stories of sexual abuse; 9: Trauma, Memory, Politics: The Irish Troubles; 2: Debates and Reviews; 10: Reality or Nothing!: False and repressed memories and autobiography; 11: Human Disaster, Social Trauma and Community Memory; 12: Trauma and the Long-Term Life Story; 13: Review Article; 14: Review Article: Epidemics of our time: trauma or fantasy?

    Biography

    Selma Leydesdorff