Bahareh Nilforoshan; Bakhtiar Sadjadi; Fariba Parvizi; Farid Parvaneh
Abstract
Introduction: Reading contemporary fiction through diverse disciplines appears to be a substantial part of narrative studies in particular and literature in general providing a tenable framework of interdisciplinary discourses of knowledge to study and explore fiction. Caryl Phillips’s The Nature ...
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Introduction: Reading contemporary fiction through diverse disciplines appears to be a substantial part of narrative studies in particular and literature in general providing a tenable framework of interdisciplinary discourses of knowledge to study and explore fiction. Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood embraces a labyrinth of narratives, the Holocaust as its ultimate point of recollection. Phillips, by narrating the horrific memories of a camp survivor, delves into the dark memories of racism and brings it to its old days, as far as Othello’s in Venice. The present study explores this dark legacy through a relatively new approach to literature using socio-cultural anthropological concepts. In doing so, the present paper scrutinized The Nature of Blood through the concepts of territorial stigma, ghetto, and punitive containment in order to delineate the true and indisputable role of fiction in other social sciences, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of literature and novel, in particular. Focusing on the conception of ghetto as a stigmatized territory narrated by Eva and Othello, the two major narrators in the novel, the article finds it as an available and costless strategy of punitive containment practiced through the course of history and represented in The Nature of Blood.Background of Study: Wacquant elucidates his ideas on the nexus of marginality, ethnicity, and penalty. However, tenets of territorial stigmatization and ghettoization would cover more nationalities and disciplinary boundaries. He builds his notions of ghetto on a comparison of some canonical cases and concludes that ghetto is an institutional form that would lead to territorial and social stigmatization: “the ghetto is an institutional form, a social-organizational device that employs space to fulfill two conflictive functions: economic extraction and social ostracization” (Urban Outcasts, 3). He develops the concept of territorial stigmatization according to this comparative approach to social theory and applies his findings about neighborhood taint on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, he has contributed to urban studies by his notion of advanced marginality. Methodology: This article is a library-based research and uses various sources both in interdisciplinary discourses and contemporary fiction. Ghetto is pictured as punitive containment strategy to push the members of periphery to territories of stigma and deprive them of their collective identity and sense of belonging. Conclusion: The present paper explores The Nature of Blood as an instance of the author’s multi-layered narration in a versatile scope of time, place and history that makes it an appropriate microcosm to apply Wacquant’s conception of territorial stigma, ghetto, and punitive containment. It is concluded that territorial stigma, along with other labels relegating the repressed to the margins of a society, is a recurrent and dynamic threat to the integrity of the underclass and the precariat making it difficult to grasp to any kind of collective action and thus, reflecting the future lives and struggles of the migrants with diverse ethno-racial and religious backgrounds, especially from the Middle East, who were trying to find refuge in Europe after the wake of ISIS. Moreover, ghetto, scrutinized by Wacquant in its modern sense, finds its roots in Renaissance Europe in Phillips’ fiction, proving the bitter fact that the ghetto is the other side of the prison aiming at the exclusionary closure of the outcasts of the society and continued almost unchanged to the modern urban metropolis. The punitive containment during the course of history proved to be a practical and priceless strategy to keep the underclass precariat and the social outcasts at bay behind the bars of the prison, sometimes embodied in the form of the ghetto and has always been reflected in literature due to its potential socio-cultural and anthropological overtones.
Seyedeh Yasaman Ghodsi; Narges Montakhabi; Razieh Eslamieh
Abstract
AbstractIntroductionAmong many others, the aftermath of the Cold War generated two poets whose works of art significantly impacted their traumatized audiences. Forché and Joudah are among those whose lives were altered following their visit to war zones. The former is known as an established, ...
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AbstractIntroductionAmong many others, the aftermath of the Cold War generated two poets whose works of art significantly impacted their traumatized audiences. Forché and Joudah are among those whose lives were altered following their visit to war zones. The former is known as an established, and the other as a doctor who is not loaded with literary studies, will be considered a non-established one. As a poet, editor, and human rights advocate, Forché is seriously concerned with traumas that ordinary people face in tragic events such as war, genocide, social and political upheavals, as well as any other similar incidents that would devastate them emotionally and psychologically. BackgroundThe poet-journalist Forché introduced a self-created term called ‘poetry of witness,’ she relates it to the poets and non-poets globally similar to herself who endured a catastrophic event and composed regarding that event. She gathered a collection of 144 poets and published the book Against Forgetting (1993).There is no record of Fady Joudah’s education in literature, yet his poems and translations were rewarded. Moreover, a poet, Baker, interviewed Joudah in his Kenyon Review Journal (2009). Baker discusses Joudah’s poetry style and states, "Joudah’s poetry is rich with the influences and styles of American and Arabic poetry. It can be personal and image-driven, by turns, as well as discursive and social” (69).MethodologyTo go through the ‘Poetry of Witness’ composed by the two traumatized artists, a blend of Laub and LaCapra’s theories has been applied to their poems; although mastered in distinct majors, psychology and historicism, respectively, Laub and LaCapra are both seriously concerned with trauma. In Bearing Witness(1991), Laub divides the process of witnessing into three classes, the “second-level,” referring to the population of people including journalists and reporters who have gathered information.As pinpointed by Laub, since both Forché and Joudah have been first-world witnesses who encountered traumas in a foreign, third-world country, they are categorized as ‘second-level witnesses.’ To come to terms with their trauma, they both initially resolved to poetry; studying their composures would illuminate their steps toward closure and, in LaCapra’s words, whether they have ‘acted out’ or ‘worked through’ their trauma. By acting out, he refers to a type of mourning for trauma, he states in his article “Trauma, Absence, Loss” (1999) that “Mourning involves a different inflection of performativity: a relation to the past that involves recognizing its difference from the present-simultaneously remembering and taking leave of or actively forgetting it” (716).The next step in LaCapra’s trauma treatment is “working-through.” the critic in “Trauma, Absence, Loss” (1999) states that “a basis of the desirable practice is to create conditions in which working-through, while never fully transcending the force of acting-out and the repetition compulsion, may nonetheless counteract or at least mitigate it in order to generate different possibilities” (718). Respectively, an amalgamation of these concepts will be administered to the chosen poems desiring to achieve the “trauma treatment” goal through poetry.ConclusionThis article aimed to disclose that a person, whether classified as established or not, would successfully ‘work through’ their trauma via reading and writing poetry. This case was considerably under suspicion when both poets did not only suffice to compose, they moved forward by editing books and gathering more than a hundred poets sharing the same pain in the matter of Forché and Joudah, as a physician, continued his medical path by helping people in need, especially in more underprivileged areas. It could be concluded that in this way, their poetry has assisted them in finding their mission of helping themselves and others physically and emotionally to overcome their trauma.
Ahmad Reza Rahimi; ُShideh Ahmadzadeh Heravi
Abstract
Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories have been studied more or less as expressing the cultural conflicts and problems of living in a host land. However, this study hopes to open new horizons in studying works of Lahiri from a new point of view – that of trauma and traumatic studies, with the special focus ...
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Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories have been studied more or less as expressing the cultural conflicts and problems of living in a host land. However, this study hopes to open new horizons in studying works of Lahiri from a new point of view – that of trauma and traumatic studies, with the special focus on works of Cathy Caruth. Traditionally defined as the wounds to the body of a person in an event, the word trauma has come to be related with the mental problems resulting from being a participant in the events which happen so suddenly that the person would not have enough time to understand it. Cathy Caruth, following the ideas of Sigmund Freud, attributes the shock experienced by the people in a traumatic event to the fact that the people do not have an access to the reality of trauma, which necessitates its recurrence which would provide an opportunity for the same person to experience it again. This paper intends to have a view on the short story “A Temporary Matter” by Lahiri from the viewpoint of the trauma studies. It will clarify how the ideas expressed by Caruth and similar critics can be detected so well in this story – ideas such as the unconscious and incomplete meeting of the trauma by the people going through it and that in order to overcome the following problems and restless feelings, it would necessary for having the trauma re-experienced by the same person.
Bahareh Bahmanpour; Amir Ali Nojumian
Volume 14, Issue 19 , October 2018, , Pages 77-97
Abstract
The present article is based on the hypothesis that immigration, in all shapes or forms (either as a forced exile or a voluntary displacement), is an unsettling and traumatic experience which leads to the formation of traumatized subjectivities. This trauma (also referred to as "diasporic trauma" or ...
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The present article is based on the hypothesis that immigration, in all shapes or forms (either as a forced exile or a voluntary displacement), is an unsettling and traumatic experience which leads to the formation of traumatized subjectivities. This trauma (also referred to as "diasporic trauma" or "trauma of displacement") is, like many other types of trauma, transgenerational: that is, it affects not only the lives of the first-generation diasporic subjects but also the diasporic experience of their descendants by problematizing any illusory sense of a coherently hybrid self. Since from the view of many trauma theorists, literature (from autobiography and testimony to fiction and poetry) highlights the problematics of the representation and the narrativization of trauma; the present article, then, aims to explore the possibility and the means of the literary representation of trauma of displacement in diasporic literature. Employing the Post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory of trauma within a diasporic context, it thus opens up new avenues to offer a psychoanalytic study of the diasporic trauma in Lahiri's trilogy of "Hema and Kaushik" (including, "Once in a Lifetime," "Year's End," and "Going Ashore") from her Unaccustomed Earth (2008) through the lens of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's theory of hauntology—particularly their notion of the phantom, the two processes of introjection and incorporation, and the crypt. Drawing on the dead-mother metaphor around which the whole trilogy revolves as well as underlining the notion of afterwardsness which is circuitously performed within the unconscious structure of the whole text, it thus argues that trauma of displacement whose psychoanalytic pain amounts to that of being ripped off the mother's womb and a life-long exposure to the phantom of an absent/present mother is so disconcerting and deep that it takes it about a generation (if not more) to be resolved and to be possibly put to rest. This possibility, of course, can be only opened up if the diasporic subject has, often transgenerationally, acknowledged, claimed, and confronted the phantom of the loss of the motherland and has even begun a belated mourning process for it. This process, however, as Lahiri's texts suggest, does not often run smoothly since the diasporic subject constantly, though unconsciously, incorporates (rather than introjecting) that constitutive element of loss at the core of his/her subjectivity by activating a series of defense mechanisms, erecting dysfunctional crypts, and getting stuck in a vicious circle of acting-out (rather than working through).