Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors

Front Cover
Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff, Graham Dawson
Transaction Publishers, 2004 - Biography & Autobiography - 262 pages
Traumatic experiences and their consequences are often the core of life stories told by survivors of violence. In Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors leading academics explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which survivors remember, and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.

International case studies include the migration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, the life stories of Guatemalan war widows, violence in South Africa, persecution of political prisoners in South Africa and the former Czechoslovakia, lynching in the Mississippi Delta, resistance in Zimbabwe's liberation war, sexual abuse, and the ongoing Irish troubles. The volume reveals the complexity of remembering and forgetting traumatic experiences, and shows that survivors are likely to express themselves in stories containing elements that are imaginary, fragmented, and loaded with symbolism. Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors is a groundbreaking work of relevance across the social sciences. This new perspective on trauma will be of particular importance to researchers in psychology, history, women's studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.

Kim Lacy Rogers is professor of history and American studies at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania. Selma Leydesdorff is based at the Belle van Zuylen Instituut, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Graham Dawson is a senior lecturer in cultural and historical studies at the University of Brighton, UK.
 

Contents

Trauma and life stories
1
Case studies
27
Trauma signals in life stories
29
Remembering and forgetting Guatemalan war widows forbidden memories
45
Interviewing in a culture of violence moving memories from Windermere to the Cape Flats
60
Oppression resistance and imprisonment a montage of different but similar stories in two countries
80
The unending war social myth individual memory and the Malvinas
95
Lynching stories family and community memory in the Mississippi Delta
113
Naming and claiming The integration of traumatic experience and the reconstruction of self in survivors stories of sexual abuse
160
Trauma memory politics the Irish Troubles
180
Debates and reviews
205
Reality or nothing False and repressed memories and autobiography
207
Human disaster social trauma and community memory
220
Trauma and the longterm life story
232
Paul Antze and Michael Lambek eds Tense Past Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory
241
Elaine Showalter Hysteries Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture
245

Containing violence poisoning and guerillacivilian relations in memories of Zimbabwes liberation war
131

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About the author (2004)

Selma Leydesdorff is professor of oral history and culture at the University of Amsterdam and is co-editor (with Nanci Adler) of the Memory and Narrative series for Transaction Publishers

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