Ebook: Traumatic Affect

Traumatic Affect explores the intersection of trauma theory and affect theory, two areas of significant relevance in contemporary literary, cultural and political studies. While both fields continue to independently offer crucial insights into individual and collective experience, an examination of the nexus of trauma and affect that develops new textual analyses and theoretical approaches is timely and necessary. This collection of essays considers circuitries and dynamic relations within, and between, affect and trauma, suggesting previously uncharted ways of thinking about testimony and witnessing. It 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. Considering the productive and problematic tensions between trauma and affect and their interest in irreducible experience, embodiment, and events, Traumatic Affect explores their movements and operations in literature, art, film, institutions and society. It considers the potential of affect theory to reimagine the unrepresentability of the traumatic event; affective economies in and between subject, image and, or text; trauma and affect in the process of creative practice; and the politics and ethics that emerge at the juncture of trauma and affect. 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, this volume traverses diverse terrain: gesture and the everyday, cinema and torture, art, civility and specters, media representation and Indigenous 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 of theory and critique to offer insight into pressing realities that demand engagement.