Violence, Trauma, Repair

This course offers an interdisciplinary encounter with three rich concepts of abiding interest to scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences: violence, trauma, and repair. A central goal for the seminar is to think through the relationships between these concepts and their effects in our contemporary world. The course readings comprise several kinds of primary objects: literary texts, ethnographies, psychoanalytic case studies, memoirs, and journalism. These are drawn from the four historical contexts that will serve as touchstones throughout the course: the Holocaust, the legacies of the slave trade, the Rwandan genocide, and the South African TRC. My intention is that the works we cover in this course will give you the tools to think comparatively across these cases, and that you'll be able to bring the insights of the class to bear on your own projects. By the end of the course, my hope is that you will be familiar with some of the central questions regarding political violence and its ramifications; be able to theorize trauma in light of scholarly attempts to complicate and historicize the concept and have developed a critical account of how trauma has been harnessed to varying contexts, including social justice demands for individual and societal repair.