Making the Case for a Cultural Trauma

Catalog description

The twenty-first century dawned for the United States with the airplane hijackings of September 11, 2001. That event has been characterized as traumatic for individuals at crash sites who witnessed or narrowly survived the destruction taking the lives of many around them, for those who grieved the loss of loved ones, and also for people who had no direct connection whatsoever either to the danger or to personal loss. What can it mean to have a single word apply to such divergent experiences? In considering this question, we will first interrogate our premise term, “trauma,” to understand its definitions and its uses under a variety of circumstances and across different disciplines. Specifically, we will draw on secondary readings from psychology, sociology, history, and literary and cultural studies to explore whether and how cultural trauma (as well as similar concepts, including social and collective trauma) might be distinct from psychological trauma. We will also draw on primary sources, including within American popular culture, whose commonly accessible texts such as film and television occasion a site for meaning construction, negotiation, and contestation about historical events across a diversely and differentially situated population. This approach structures our assessment of the implications of viewing an historical occurrence as “traumatic” for a group of people.