Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

The concept of trauma has become one of the key critical tools in theoretical humanities and in literature to
think about the impact of violence on individual and collective subject formation, including questions of
temporality, memorialization, witnessing and creation of archival imagery of what has been idiomatized as
“catastrophic events.” What has become apparent, however, is that the Eurocentric trauma theory has
traditionally relied on a specific cultural and philosophical notion of violence, which Freud describes in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the breaking through the body’s “protective shield”—violence, then, has an
event-like structure, and it interrupts the realities of political and socio-economic life, rather than remains
enmeshed within and constituted by them. The paper offers a reading of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2014 novel The
People in the Trees from the perspective of two ostensibly conflicting theoretical approaches to trauma:
psychoanalytic and neurobiological. It positions the Freudian psychoanalytic view of trauma as a repetitive
psychic event vis-à-vis the neurobiological concept of “post-trauma” proposed by Catherine Malabou in
order to engage with the poetics of violence in Yanagihara’s novel, and, in particular, with its scripting of
colonial exploitation and dispossession as forms of relational traumatization.
Jeanne-Marie Viljoen Integrating identity in the context of ongoing violence: reading the Khan Younis massacre
through Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza
Žižek argues that violence is composed of a visible and an invisible aspect, which together form a perpetual
cycle of violence. The visible aspect of violence is what is generally addressed by the mass media via the
Western practice of trying to approach this violence ever more closely and directly. However, he warns that
this direct focus on visible violence distracts our attention from the invisible violence, which we ignore. He
further suggests that the best way to address invisible violence is by approaching it indirectly through
aesthetic representations. Chute proposes that that the graphic narrative is a particularly good aesthetic
form through which to build a political intervention because of the way that it aligns the personal and the
political. This paper offers Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza as an effective way to approach the violence of the
1956 Khan Younis massacre in Gaza, a context of ongoing violence. Approaching both the visible and invisible
aspects of violence in a context of ongoing violence through Sacco’s text, provides a way to develop a
political intervention.
5C
Affective worlds (Chair, Susan Gannon)
Nick Fox* & Pam Alldred*
Memory, space/time mattering and the production of social life
Memory is conventionally considered as a psychological phenomenon, or as a source of data on experiences,
identity construction or maintenance. Here we instead treat memories as material and as a key process in
social production, social continuity and change. We apply a post-anthropocentric, “new materialist”
ontology, in which bodies, things, social formations, ideas, beliefs and memories can all possess capacities to
materially affect and be affected. We explore the part that memory can play in producing the present and
hence the future, by looking at data from in-depth interviews in a study of adults’ food decision-making and
practices. We examine how memories deriving from childhood affect current food practices, and how these
contribute to the materiality of people’s consumption of food stuffs and to both overweight/obesity and to
efforts to lose weight. We conclude by reflecting on the wider importance of memory for social production
and for significant social change.
Genine Hook* & Melissa Wolfe Affective violence; on notice
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