AustLit

'Around the turn of the 20th century, Imperial Russia was a volatile place. Living conditions were harsh for most people, labour was exploitative and taxes were high. There were strikes and rebellions, and Jewish immigrants were restricted to an annexed region known as the Pale of the Settlement, where “pogroms” – antisemitic riots and mob persecutions – had long menaced.' (Introduction)

'This article explores creative responses to crises that are written and technologically mediated in a liminal zone between threat and trauma. In considering how poetic texts witness social injustice-related crises – henceforth referred to as social justice-crisis – I posit that this liminal zone produces a different kind of witnessing than the post-traumatic witnessing traditionally associated with literary trauma testimony, and as such, it is an emergent 21st century mode of witnessing and testimony.' (Introduction)   

'When I heard Anita Lane had died aged 61 in April 2021, a memory flashed up: I’m sitting beside her at the foot of a bed in the mid-1980s, and she turns to me to say how much my hair has grown.'

'Wintery rain slaps the window. I have the flu. I'm a linguist, a mechanic of language. I work with words and history. I'm lying in bed, reflecting on the word "sick." 'Old English'. Bringing me a cup of tea this morning before heading off to work, my wife Mia referred to me as "ill." 'Norse'. I shake free from the oblivion of fever momentarily to consider these two words, the cultures and wars behind them, the mystery of why I used one word and Mia used the other. I'm telling this story telepathically from a chamber of my mind unaffected by malaise and time...' (Publication abstract)

'In this extraordinary book, Meera Atkinson explores the ways trauma reverberates over a lifetime, unearthing the traumatic roots of our social structures and our collective history.

'Using memoir as a touchstone, Atkinson contemplates the causes of trauma and the scars it leaves on modern society. She vibrantly captures her early life in 1970s and ’80s Sydney and her self-reflection leads the reader on a journey that takes in neuroscience, pop psychology, feminist theory and much more.

'Searing in its truthfulness and beauty, Traumata deals with issues of our time – intergenerational trauma, family violence, alcoholism, child abuse, patriarchy – forging a path of fearless enquiry through the complexity of humanity.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Sara Ahmed analyses the construction of the national ideal, conceiving of nationhood as a formation dependent on the stickiness of an ideal-image informed by complex individual and collective physic processes. In this article, I focus on the Narungga poet, artist, and scholar Natalie Harkin’s debut collection of poems, Dirty Words, through the lens of Ahmed’s work on the socialisation of affect to argue that Harkin’s poetics stage an intervention on national numbness (a consequence, in part, of Australia’s traumatic establishment as a penal colony) and Australia’s Anglo-centric national ideal. I examine Harkin’s challenge to those who continue to fly the traumatising, colonising flag and her witnessing to transgenerational trauma in the post-invasion context, showing how her testimony confronts the denial and division entrenched in the national ideal, past and present. Harkin’s mediation contributes to a burgeoning First Nations poetics in Australia that demands recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ experience and knowledge, and calls for justice, accountability, reflection, and response from non-Indigenous Australians.'  (Publication abstract)

'The first decades of the twenty-first century have been beset by troubling social realities: coalition warfare, global terrorism and financial crisis, climate change, epidemics of family violence, violence toward women, addiction, neo-colonialism, continuing racial and religious conflict. While traumas involving large-scale or historical violence are widely represented in trauma theory, familial trauma is still largely considered a private matter, associated with personal failure. This book contributes to the emerging field of feminist trauma theory by bringing focus to works that contest this tendency, offering new understandings of the significance of the literary testimony and its relationship to broader society.

'The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma adopts an interdisciplinary approach in examining how the literary testimony of familial transgenerational trauma, with its affective and relational contagion, illuminates transmissive cycles of trauma that have consequences across cultures and generations. It offers bold and insightful readings of works that explore those consequences in story-Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Hélène Cixous's Hyperdream (2009), Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1992), Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (1999), and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), concluding that such testimony constitutes a fundamentally feminist experiment and encounter. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma challenges the casting of familial trauma in ahistorical terms, and affirms both trauma and writing as social forces of political import.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Do you read Australia’s First Nations (Indigenous) writers? If not, why not? People read for many reasons: information, entertainment, escape, to contemplate in company, to be moved. Reading can also be a political act, an act of solidarity, an expression of willingness to listen and to learn from others with radically different histories and lives.' (Introduction)

'I first read the fiction of Alexis Wright when I was writing a thesis on transgenerational trauma for my doctorate at Western Sydney University. I was exploring the ways in which literature testifies to transmissions of psychic trauma, which, in Unclaimed Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Cathy Caruth defines as the impact of an unassimilated event or experience that makes its presence known belatedly and often illogically. In Carpentaria, Wright’s second novel, I found a prime example of such testimony: a fierce epic that both honours Indigenous sovereignty and culture and attests to the ravages wrought by colonisation.' (Introduction)