5/13/2023 0 Comments Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna![]() ![]() I illustrate this argument – developed at greater length in my book Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) – with a case study of a literary text that seems to me to call for a more inclusive, materialist, and politicized form of trauma theory. I contend that the suffering engendered by colonialism and its aftermath needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, and in its own terms if trauma theory is to redeem its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. In this chapter, I take issue with the tendency of the founding texts of the field to marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority groups, to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity, and to favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma. ![]() Despite a stated commitment to cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory – an area of cultural investigation that emerged out of the “ethical turn” affecting the humanities in the 1990s – is marked by a Eurocentric, monocultural bias. ![]()
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