Ep. 23 - Panel 6A - Part 1 - Regarding Testimony and multidirectional memory - Westley Barnes (U EA)

NPPSH Conference

This paper makes a pedagogical argument for applying studies of what Michael Rothberg terms “multidirectional memory”, a practice which stresses relation between the effects of the Holocaust and Postcolonial studies on contemporary research of trauma and historiography. By examining Rothberg’s theory alongside the documentary films Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) and States of Fear (Mary Rafferty, 1999), I intend to examine how visual testimonies of genocide, religious suppression and the psychological affects attributable to transitioning postcolonial states affect the ways in which historians discuss trauma. By bridging the major concerns of Holocaust Studies with studies of Church related suppression in postcolonial Ireland this paper investigates the similar aspects of how memory and trauma are represented. Debates concerning the methodology and historical impact of documentary approaches have resonated throughout trauma studies, and this paper demonstrates how filmed research that has generated mass public debate have simultaneously attracted significant controversies. Considering the debate established by Susan Sontag that visual evidence of trauma are a means of “making real (“or more real”) matters that the privileged or merely safe would prefer to ignore” questions surrounding documentary’s aim at producing an authentic reading of trauma, and how this relates to intellectual discourse that exists outside of historical locations of traumatic memory, frame the narrative of how postcolonial trauma and memory studies are taught in classrooms. Westley Barnes is a 3rd year PhD candidate in the Department of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where he is currently completing his thesis which is entitled ‘American dream, American disillusionment: Forms as ideology and the discontent of cultural assimilation in Michael Chabon’s Post-2000 Fiction’. He obtained an MA in American Literature at UCD in 2012. His interests include postwar/contemporary American, British and Irish fiction, the influence of continental philosophy on contemporary fiction, trauma studies and contemporary film and documentary.