Meera Atkinson

A brilliant, fiercely profound work of creative non-fiction in the vein of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. In this extraordinary book, Meera Atkinson explores the ways trauma reverberates over a lifetime, unearthing the traumatic roots of our social structures and our collective history. Using memoir as a touchstone, Atkinson contemplates the causes of trauma and the scars it leaves on modern society. She vibrantly captures her early life in 1970s and '80s Sydney and her self-reflection leads the reader on a journey that takes in neuroscience, pop psychology, feminist theory, and much more. Searing in its truthfulness and beauty, Traumata deals with issues of our time -intergenerational trauma, family violence, alcoholism, child abuse, patriarchy - forging a path of fearless enquiry through the complexity of humanity.

Traumata

Michael Richardson

Traumatic Affect examines the intersection of trauma theory and affect theory, two areas of crucial relevance to contemporary thought. While both fields continue to offer insights into individual and collective experience, exploring their nexus offers timely and necessary critiques of film, literature, art, culture and politics. This collection of essays by established and emerging thinkers considers the dynamic relations within and between affect and trauma. Varied in style and approach, this volume asks how the relational subject conceived by affect theory might bring into question certain presuppositions common to trauma theory and how the ethical imperatives of trauma might require a rethinking of aspects of affect theory. Thus the contributors reimagine the unrepresentability of trauma, reveal its affective economies, and chart innovative understandings of experiences, embodiments, and events. From the silence into which Walter Benjamin fell after the suicide of his closest friend to the trauma of becoming the emblematic media figure of the London bombings, Traumatic Affect traverses diverse terrain: gesture and the everyday, cinema and torture, art and writing, civility and specters, media representation and Indigenous Australian film. Featuring essays by Shoshana Felman, Karyn Ball, Jennifer L. Biddle, Anna Gibbs, Ben O’Loughlin, Anne Rutherford, Magdalena Zolkos, Aaron Kerner, Ricardo Mbarkho, Jonathan L. Knapp, Michael Richardson and Meera Atkinson, Traumatic Affect ventures into bold new territories at the juncture between trauma and affect, illuminating pressing realities that demand engagement.

Traumatic Affect

The first decades of the twenty-first century have been beset by troubling social realities: coalition warfare, global terrorism and financial crisis, climate change, epidemics of family violence, violence toward women, addiction, neo-colonialism, continuing racial and religious conflict. While traumas involving large-scale or historical violence are widely represented in trauma theory, familial trauma is still largely considered a private matter, associated with personal failure. This book contributes to the emerging field of feminist trauma theory by bringing focus to works that contest this tendency, offering new understandings of the significance of the literary testimony and its relationship to broader society. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma adopts an interdisciplinary approach in examining how the literary testimony of familial transgenerational trauma, with its affective and relational contagion, illuminates transmissive cycles of trauma that have consequences across cultures and generations. It offers bold and insightful readings of works that explore those consequences in story-Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Hélène Cixous's Hyperdream (2009), Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1992), Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (1999), and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), concluding that such testimony constitutes a fundamentally feminist experiment and encounter. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma challenges the casting of familial trauma in ahistorical terms, and affirms both trauma and writing as social forces of political import.

Meera Atkinson

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