University of Sussex
Browse
MINOLI_SALGADO_Shattered_Selves_TP_clean.pdf (260.45 kB)

Shattered selves and border witnessing: globalising trauma studies in Cambodian survivor narratives

Download (260.45 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 21:55 authored by Minoli Salgado
Calls to decolonise trauma studies have drawn attention to the need to extend our reading of testimonial narrative beyond the West; to the significance of Cathy Caruth’s observation that ‘trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures’; and to the importance of generating new critical paradigms that speak to testimonial narratives from the Global South. An analysis of narratives that bear witness to surviving the Cambodian genocide allows for an engagement with a critically-marginalised form of extreme aesthetics and extends our understanding of diasporic border witnessing on and across the threshold of life and death. My evaluation of the witness subject in transnational texts by Loung Ung, Madeleine Thien and Vaddey Ratner reveals the role of borders in the poetics of bearing witness, the significance and value of Khmer readings of grief, loss and suffering, and shows how a culture-specific reading of personhood speaks to both poststructuralist readings and postsecular scriptings of the self. Further, it shows how their soteriological readings of the ‘shattered’ self work to foreground shared precarity and the interhuman , providing a metaphysical rationale for a re-evaluation of the inscription of bare life in ways that create a space for globalising trauma studies.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Textual Practice

ISSN

0950-236X

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Page range

1-20

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2020-10-20

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2022-04-20

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2020-10-20

Usage metrics

    University of Sussex (Publications)

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC