Abstract:
Trauma Studies, a truly multidisciplinary field, developed during the early 1990’s as part of the Ethical Turn within the Humanities, and became popular through scholars such as Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, Dominick LaCapra and Cathy Caruth, to name but a few. However, despite Trauma Studies self-proclaimed commitment to cross-cultural ethical engagement, many of the founding texts have focused overwhelmingly on events considered traumatic within a Euro-American context such as the Holocaust and 9/11. Critics soon began to question whether a theory developed by scholars in the West and relying heavily upon Freudian psychoanalytic thought, can be effective in addressing the trauma and suffering of non-western peoples. In 2008 a special edition of Studies in the Novel sought to bridge the gap between trauma theory and postcolonial criticism and has since evolved into a multi-disciplinary academic project aiming to move the study of trauma beyond the established Eurocentric paradigm. According to Irene Visser in her review of the publication, the underlying assumption of the project and its contributors is that Trauma Theory has certain strengths that can be incorporated into Postcolonial Theory, but also certain weaknesses that need to be corrected or reconfigured (“Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies” 271). Since then, the project has transformed into a field of interest across many disciplines and has been named an attempt to “decolonise” Trauma Studies. However, despite considerable steps taken towards bridging the gap between the two fields of study, there remains a lot of work to do. Our contribution to this project is a reading of two postcolonial Algerian novels through the lens of literary trauma theory, evaluating whether certain aspects of the theory need be reconfigured when discussed within a post-colonial context, furthering the discussion of literary trauma aesthetics beyond the current model that relies so heavily on Western psychoanalysis. We look at not just how trauma is described in the novels by way of suffering, but also how it is made clear through the methods of survival and resistance employed by the characters.
