Cultural Trauma

The current paper aims at presenting a close reading of the protagonist’s reminiscences in Mohsen Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in terms of an eclectic approach toward representation of trauma. Freud and Breuer’s theory of psychological trauma, Judith Herman’s concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and Jeffery Alexander’s notion of cultural trauma are employed as the conceptual framework of this analysis. Psychological trauma refers to the unbearable, untreatable, and unspeakable psychological wounds remaining on the subject’s unconsciousness. PTSD concentrates on troublesomeness in regular physical activities including rapid distraction, insomnia, and shifting in and out through past memories, triggered by trauma. Cultural trauma traces the changes at the level of collective identity of a group due to a formerly experienced horrendous event. The Adventures of Changez, the novel’s narrator, dating back to around the 9/11 attack are represented in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The paper conducted a survey through theories of trauma depicting memory as a venue where the subject’s psychical status could be fully scrutinized. The results of the study demonstrated that a traumatic event such as that of the 9/11 has a long-term devastating impact on Changez’s subjectivity as well as a collective negative consequence for Pakistan’s new generation of intellectual immigrants.

Leslie Marmon Silko, an American Indian writer, is one of the pioneers of literary renaissance in Native American literature. Her works are focused on cultural identity, the Native people’s struggle to preserve their past and culture by means of storytelling. This article focuses on Silko’s fictional world as both fiction and history. Moreover, it deals with the cultural trauma ingrained in the Indigenous people’s collective memories, which have shaped Silko’s imagined geography in her works. Regarding the theoretical axis of discussions concerning history, historiography and emplotment of history, this article uses theories of Hayden White to explore the place of historiography in narrative. Furthermore, it applies the critical arguments concerning cultural trauma proposed by Jeffrey C. Alexander. The research proves that Silko and her characters are haunted not by the desire for history, or the past itself; but rather, they are haunted by the desire for the act of historical recollection and the process of remembering and surviving. Finally, this article shows that Silko, as a historical figure with certain literary-historiographical ambitions, reconstructs her cultural heritage and cultural identity through storytelling and fictionalizes history to give voice to her silenced land, past and history, and dismantle the dominant Euro-American historiography.