Most scholars would agree that Josiah’s death in the Book of Chronicles is negatively portrayed, especially as contrasted with his laudable Passover. But why should the king par excellence, according to 2 Kings, die such an ignominious death in the Chronicler’s portrayal? By applying a methodological framework derived from cultural trauma theory in its relation to social identity theory, this dissertation argues that the Chronicler’s negative recounting of Josiah’s death not only marks the initiation of cultural trauma for the Chronicler’s community but ends by encouraging the hopeful alleviation of the community’s enduring cultural trauma. In analysing the Chronicler’s markers of cultural trauma within the context of the social identities that appear in the genealogies and subsequent narratives in the book of Chronicles, the failure of Josiah can be most clearly seen in his seeking battle with Pharaoh Neco without seeking YHWH. Not only did Josiah fail to heed the word of God not to confront Neco, but his very disobedience initiates the cultural trauma experienced through the fall of Jerusalem and subsequent forced migration, which follows swiftly after the death of Josiah according to the Chronicler. In turn, the narrative of Josiah’s death is connected to the cultural trauma of the broader community primarily through the appearance of Jeremiah. The first reference of Jeremiah in the book of Chronicles has him issuing a lament in the wake of Josiah’s death (2 Chr 35:25), while Jeremiah’s final reference recounts the fulfilment of his prophecy of “seventy years” rest (2 Chr 36:21-22) signalling the end of forced migration in the wake of the fall of Jerusalem. At the same time, by examining the Chronicler’s markers of cultural trauma, this dissertation presents evidence that the Chronicler is seeking to recategorize the community within a superordinate identity of “all Israel” as a means to alleviate their cultural trauma that was initiated and symbolised by the death of Josiah. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The dissertation argues that depictions of cultural trauma in literature are a natural progression from depictions of individual trauma by tracing the development of trauma studies from its roots in Freudian psychoanalysis to its current position as an interdisciplinary field of study. It accomplishes this by focusing on one symptom of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, a tendency to perceive illusory patterns - patterns that do not really exist, such as conspiracy theories - in response to feelings of helplessness that stem from a traumatic event. This study contends that depictions of illusory pattern perceptions, while they may initially suggest a simple and definitive answer to healing from the traumatic event if the individual can fully grasp the pattern and get others to see it, actually demonstrate an extension of the trauma by forcing the individual to continuously relive it. Through the use of poetry, fiction, film, and graphic novels from three lingering national crises - a chapter each for the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and 9/11 - this study demonstrates that the perception of an illusory pattern is a simplistic attempt to deal with the ramifications of a traumatic event which must be dismissed in favor of embracing the complexities of the trauma in order to move beyond it. Finally, in the conclusion this study argues that depictions of memorials in literature can serve as a positive alternative to the destructive force of illusory pattern perception.

In this thesis, I explore the cultural traumas and memories that shape Arab American identity in the US, and how such events influence their interactions and relationships with other Arab and non-Arab Americans. Drawing on memory and trauma literature, this study highlights the impact of collective memory and cultural trauma on individual and collective Arab American identity formation. Through 11 in-depth interviews, I found that trauma affected the respondents in two particular ways, through enduring traumas from their countries of immigration and the continuing impact of 9/11. Specifically, I found that the traumas of immigrating from a country where respondents had experienced direct violence through war or oppression, or where they lacked socio-economic stability, deeply impacted how they understand and utilize their Arab American identity as a tool to uplift the voices of other Arabs. Additionally, I found although the participants did not explicitly consider 9/11 as a personal trauma, they saw it as a significant cultural event that influenced their self-perception as Muslims and their sense of belonging in U.S. society. Specifically, the profiling of Arabs post-9/11 caused the respondents to constantly self-surveil as well as had negative effects on the community. 9/11 also resulted in the respondents becoming more supportive of Arab American organizations through intra-country donations, as well as becoming more accepting of alternative ways to practice and understand Islam. This study contributes to the social science literature by examining how collective trauma affects the daily lives and identities of Arab Americans. It underscores the importance of inclusivity in research, recognizing the significance of Arab American voices and the need for a comprehensive understanding of the Arab American community. / M.S. / This study explores how cultural trauma and collective memory have shaped the identity of Arab Americans in the U.S. I found that Arab Americans were affected in two ways. First, the enduring trauma of war, violence, and oppression from their countries of origin impacted how they understood their Arab American identity and used it to advocate for fellow Arabs. Second, the continuing impact of 9/11 resulted in racial/ethno-religious profiling and constant self-surveillance, which affected the community’s acceptance of alternative ways to practice and understand Islam. These experiences strengthened their sense of collective identity.

The idea of witnessing through the lense of cultural trauma is one which has been described by Dominick LaCapra and others as a encompassing and far reaching from the private to the public spheres. In some cases, when trauma is so overwhelming, the response is to remain silent and do nothing to acknowledge acceptance of the causing factors of the cultural trauma. Novelists such as Kazuo Ishiguro employ various methods of discussing cultural trauma in their works. Ishiguro’s novels, Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day harbor narrators whose inner traumas reflect the trauma of the culture at large. The silent spaces in these novels arise in situations where the extreme measures taken by governing entities is also clearly stated, particularly in their discussions of the Holocaust and World War II.

In the wake of Eric Garner’s 2014 public execution at the hands of NYPD officers, online spaces such as Twitter saw an influx of remediated imagery referencing Ramsey Orta’s bystander cell phone video of Garner’s death. These images often explicitly reference the chokehold that killed Garner and/or they reappropriate Garner’s last words: “I can’t breathe.” To what formal dimensions in Orta’s video are these remediated images responding? What broader cultural work is the creation of these images doing? In this project, I regard Orta’s video as the point of entry for considering the cultural work of remediating images from it, as understanding its formal dimensions are necessary to recognizing the ways in which the remediated images attend to Garner’s body. I read this video using Scott Richmond’s revision of Christian Metz’s theory of cinematic identification to identify the concerning and compelling tension between over and under-identifying with onscreen subjects in Orta’s video, ultimately asserting that aligning with any body onscreen is ultimately a choice. Further, the remediated images attending to Garner’s body signal viewer’s chosen alignment with him or Orta, and claim Garner’s death as a socially constructed cultural trauma. These claims not only signal collective identification around the trauma on behalf of those who did not initially witness it, but also express belief in Garner’s experience despite a public discourse that continually emphasized his (and other black men’s) perceived violent potential.

In considering the Israel-Palestine conflict, focus has remained on conventional major issues: borders, settlements, Jerusalem, Palestinian refugee rights and water. Should there be one binational state, or two states for two peoples? Yet this is a conflict that is sustained by factors more profound than the dispute over limited resources or competing nationalisms. The parties’ narratives, continually rehearsed, speak of a cataclysmic event or chain of events, a collective trauma, which has created such deep suffering and disruption that the rehearsers remain ‘frozen’ amid the overarching context of political violence. This study offers a critical analysis of the concept of collective trauma together with the role of commemorative practices, including core contemporary canonical days of memory, and asks to what extent they may hinder progress in the resolution of an intractable conflict, such as the Israel/Palestine conflict. Without addressing the powerful traumatic current that underpins a chronic conflict, no amount of top-down formal peace-making is likely to be sustainable.

Existing scholarship on modern Tibetan writing takes the 1980s as its point of “birth” and presents this period as marking a “rupture” with traditional forms of literature. This study seeks to go beyond such an interpretation by foregrounding the persistence of Tibet’s artistic past and oral traditions in the literary creativity of the present. An appreciation of genres, styles, concepts and techniques derived from Tibet’s rich and diverse oral art forms and textual traditions exposes the inadequacy of a simple “rupture” perspective. Whilst acknowledging the novel features of modern Tibetan literary creations this work draws attention to hitherto neglected aspects of continuities within the new. It reveals the innovative presence of Tibetan kāvya poetics, the mgur genre, biography, the Gesar epic and other types of oral compositions within modern Tibetan poetry and fiction. It also brings to prominence the complex and fertile interplay between orality and the Tibetan literary text. All these aspects are demonstrated by bringing the reader closer to Tibetan literature through the provision of original English translations of various textual and oral sources. Like any other national literature modern Tibetan literary production is also informed by socio-political and historical forces. An examination of unexplored topics ranging from popular music, Tibet’s critical tradition and cultural trauma to radical and erotic poetries shows a variety of issues that fire the imagination of the modern Tibetan writer. Of all these concerns the most overriding is the Tibetan nation, which pervades both fictional and poetic writing. In its investigation into modern Tibetan literature this thesis finds that Tibet as a nation - constituted of history, culture, language, religion, territory, shared myths and rituals, collective memories and a common sense of belonging to an occupied land - is inescapable. Embracing a multidisciplinary approach drawing on theoretical insights in literary theory and criticism, political studies, sociology and anthropology, this research demonstrates that, alongside past literary and oral traditions, the Tibetan nation proves to be an inevitable attribute of modern Tibetan literature.

This essay is a study of the character Pilate in Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. It employs a postcolonial theoretical perspective in order to explore the cultural trauma that Pilate experiences in the aftermath of slavery. Furthermore, it analyses the impact of that trauma on the formation of Pilate’s own cultural identity. When defining cultural trauma and cultural identity, the works of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon are used. In this discussion, terms such as "double consciousness", "unhomeliness" and the "Other" are employed as a theoretical background to the analysis. Pilate’s trauma consists of being an orphan. Moreover, she is rejected as "Other" both by her brother as well as by each society that she settles into. Although suffering from this trauma and being all alone in the world, Pilate manages to both affirm her cultural heritage as well as to use it in a positive way when dealing with the trauma and creating her own cultural identity. In her case, she is able to stay close to her roots and to avoid the feeling of double-consciousness and unhomeliness. Instead she has a solid foundation in her ancestral past and the cultural identity it represents.

China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) deeply wounded the collective identity of the nation’s population, as it caused dramatic chaos and violence in every social arena, bringing the country into a decade-long crisis. In the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of autobiographical works was published in China and overseas, commemorating the authors’ (mainly former Red Guards) participation in the Cultural Revolution and post-1968 Rustication Movement (1968-1980). Focusing on the Red Guards, the main participants of the movements, this research inquiries how autobiographical works reflect the impacts of their direct engagement in the history on their self-identification. This study applies a theoretical framework combining Maurice Halbwachs’s insights into collective memory and Jeffrey C. Alexander’s conceptualization of cultural trauma, with trauma and identity as the cores of textual analysis. This research analyses two selected works in each region to observe how the different cultural and social contexts in China and North America affect former Red Guards’ self-identification and their navigation of the traumatic past. Textual analysis of the four selected works shows that Red Guard autobiographies embody the nexus between individual memory and the social framework of the collective memory of the Cultural Revolution and Rustication Movement, as the latter reveals itself in the forms of narrative chronology, verbal conventions, and recurring scenes in the texts. While the social framework of collective memory shapes the Red Guard writers’ textual representations, the Red Guard writers engage in the collective remembering process and construct a victimhood-oriented narrative of the two movements through concentrating on the narrator or other characters’ tragedies. In social and practical aspects, Red Guard autobiographies have multiple roles in the trauma process of the events: the channel for emotional catharsis, the discursive field for former Red Guard writers’ exploration of their memories, and the medium through which the former Red Guard writers articulate their identities. Published in distinctive cultural and political contexts, China and North America, the Red Guard autobiographies embody authors’ different claims: the domestic Red Guard writers remain ambiguous in attribution of the undesired outcomes of the two movements and provide no clear identity of the victims, whereas the expatriate Red Guard writers in North America claim the movements’ experimental nature with stress laid on the inner-party struggles and identify the generation of the Red Guards and educated youths as the victims. Concentrating on collective memory and cultural trauma, this thesis provides new angles to understand the relations among personal narratives, social and cultural contexts, and national history. This study analyzes Red Guard memoirs’ functions in the working-through process of the two unsuccessful mass movements, showing how literary representations assist individuals and collectives with trauma healing and self-reflection. / Graduate

In this essay, the aim is to analyse the representation of collective and cultural trauma within the narrative of Tommy Orange's novel There There, as well as how the novel is redressing the experience of traumatisation, leading a way towards healing. To do this, the essay will focus on six of the novel's characters as well as the title, prologue and interlude. By using concepts of colonial and transgenerational trauma as well as survivance to approach the novel, the essay will argue that, as it makes the trauma visible, the narrative shows that healing can still be possible after traumatisation.