Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization

265 Pages·2020·21.982 MB·English

by  Jennifer Ballengee, David Kelman

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TRAUMA AND LITERATURE IN AN

AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
While globalization is often associated with economic and social progress, it has also brought
new forms of terrorism, permanent states of emergency, demographic displacement,
climate change, and other “natural” disasters. Given these contemporary concerns, one
might also view the current time as an age of traumatism. Yet what— or how— does the
traumatic event mean in an age of global catastrophe? This volume explores trauma theory
in an age of globalization by means of the practice of comparative literature. The essays and
interviews in this volume ask how literary studies and the literary anticipate, imagine, or
theorize the current global climate, especially in an age when the links between violence,
amorphous traumatic events, and economic concerns are felt increasingly in everyday
experience. Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization turns a literary perspective upon
the most urgent issues of globalization— problems of borders, language, inequality, and
institutionalized violence— and considers from a variety of perspectives how such events
impact our lived experience and its representation in language and literature.
Jennifer Ballengee is Martha A. Mitten Professor of Liberal Arts and Director of the
Graduate Program in Global Humanities at Towson University. She is the author of The
Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture (SUNY 2009) and articles in the Yale Journal of
Criticism, Modern Language Studies, Ancient Narrative, Literary Imagination, and Post 45, among
others. Her work addresses questions of the body, politics, rhetoric, and representation. She
is currently finishing a monograph on ruins, tragedy, and national ideology.
David Kelman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at California State
University, Fullerton. He is the author of Counterfeit Politics: Secret Plots and Conspiracy
Narratives in the Americas (Bucknell UP, 2012). He is also the author of several articles on
the theory and practice of comparison. His work has been published in New Vico Studies,
CR: The New Centennial Review, Comparative Literature, Pynchon Notes, Discourse: Journal for
Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Mosaic, and Angelaki.
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TRAUMA AND

LITERATURE IN AN AGE
OF GLOBALIZATION
Edited by
Jennifer Ballengee and David Kelman
iv
First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Jennifer Ballengee and David Kelman;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Jennifer Ballengee and David Kelman to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 51605- 5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 52081- 6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 003- 05631- 7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
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CONTENTS

List of figures viii

Introduction 1

Jennifer Ballengee and David Kelman
PART I
Trauma, Deconstruction, and Global Relations 7

1 Globalization and the Theory of Trauma: A Conversation with
Cathy Caruth 9

Cathy Caruth
2 The Cut that Links: Paracomparatism in Caruth and Danticat 36

David Kelman
3 Common Catastrophes: or, Personification Reconsidered 50

Brian McGrath
4 Fugitive Sovereignties in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis
Trilogy: Deconstructing the “Unparalleled Catastrophe”
of the Human 65

Mina Karavanta
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vi Contents
PART II
Politics and Literature 79

5 The Foreign Body in Psychoanalysis and Politics: A
Conversation with Elissa Marder 81

Elissa Marder
6 Reverberations: Traumatic Histories, Cultural Difference, and
the Drama of Listening in Eileen Chang’s Yuannü and The
Rouge of the North 100

Emily Sun
7 Some Iterations of Blood 113

Brett Levinson
8 “How very Godfather Part II of you”: Trauma and Intertextual
Comparison in A Brief History of Seven Killings 127

Jay Rajiva
9 Framing the World: Texts that Circulate and People Who
Cannot 141 vi

Başak Çandar
PART III
Literature and Human Rights 155

10 Literature, the Humanities, and Political Action: A
Conversation with Elisabeth Weber 157

Elisabeth Weber
11 Killing Dogs: Animality and Trauma in Waltz with Bashir and
Deogratias 179

Russell Samolsky
12 Flood Poetics: Nigeria, New Orleans, and Oṣundare’s City
Without People 196

Avery Slater
13 Phantom Work: Refugees, Antigone, Comparative Literature 213

Jennifer Ballengee
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Contents vii
14 Rights, Politics, and Engagement: A Conversation with
Thomas Keenan 227

Thomas Keenan
List of contributors 243

Index 246

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nvewiiigenprepdf
FIGURES

11.1 “The dogs have been coming” (Ari Folman and David Polonsky,
Waltz with Bashir) 180
11.2 “Twenty- six dogs” (Ari Folman and David Polonsky, Waltz with
Bashir) 186
11.3 “From up there, they are watching them fight” (Jean- Phillipe
Stassen, Deogratias) 190
11.4 “… I came back and the dogs were there …” (Jean- Phillipe
Stassen, Deogratias) 191
11.5 “ All that’s left are corpses, madmen and dogs” (Jean- Phillipe
Stassen, Deogratias) 192
1
INTRODUCTION

Jennifer Ballengee and David Kelman

While globalization is often associated with economic and social progress, it has
also brought new forms of terrorism, permanent states of emergency, demographic
displacement, climate change, pandemics, and other “natural” disasters. Given
these contemporary concerns, one might view the current time as an age of trau-
matism. Yet what— or how— does the traumatic event mean in an age of global
catastrophe? How can we continue to identify or read trauma when its presence
or threat consistently limns the edges of everyday experience? In addressing these
questions, this volume differs from other recent studies of globalization and its
increasingly dire aspects, in that it engages with a range of concepts and effects of
globalization from within the frame of trauma and representation.
Theorizing globalization and trauma together brings their historic correspond-
ence into sharp relief. After all, both phenomena begin to emerge with particular
clarity in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the rise and fall of nation- states
that culminated in World War I, victims of which would provide Freud with
his first formulation of traumatic neurosis disorder. While undoubtedly world
exploration, exchange, and conflict extend millennia into the past, modern glo-
balization reflects a mutual interdependence of economics and politics that led
to the construction of national boundaries and the exceeding of them, a dyadic
movement that has emerged with particular clarity in today’s hyper- interest in
reifying and protecting national boundaries in tandem with an inflated rhetoric
of globalization.
This volume explores trauma and trauma theory in an age of globalization
in terms of this historic co- incidence, by means of a disciplinary approach that
has emerged from the articulation of these two phenomena: comparative litera-
ture. Responding always to an event of language and politics, the comparative
approach to literature developed as a product of a late- 18th- and 19th- century