Trauma,MemoryTransnational AW

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The Arab world today is arguably one of the most politicized, militarized, and, thus, traumatized regions of the globe. Yet, trauma theory has had a marginalized or, at best, uneven engagement in studies of the region’s ongoing crises. In this course we will explore the major concepts and paradigms informing the fields of Arab, transnational, memory, and trauma studies, drawing critical lines of connection often unmade or unseen between these schools of thought. By studying key traumatic experiences of the 20th and 21st centuries (including but not limited to the historical and ongoing Palestinian Nakba, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Syrian Revolution) and their resultant geopolitical shifts, we will explore how the Arab world today, in particular, the Levant, has become heavily affiliated with notions of war, violence, terrorism, refugeeism, exile, and migration. We will also be learning about and thinking through intersectional and transnational frameworks by reading critical scholarship from within and across multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The interdisciplinary critical theories we study will be grounded in analyses of various cultural productions that engage trauma and memory within and across notions of nation/national borders, religion, class, and gender. Therefore, as we read, we will pay attention to key questions such as: How does the transnational Arab world bear witness to trauma today? What role does testifying to trauma play in contemporary Arab cultural productions? Who is allowed to speak/testify and whose voices are marginalized or erased? What is the role of the listener? By placing the transnational Arab world in conversation with the broader theoretical debates in trauma and memory studies, we will thus examine how these multiple and interdisciplinary fields of thought shape and inform one another. Doing so will allow us not only to better understand the ongoing implications of different contexts of war and violence in the contemporary Arab world, but also the ways in which we can collectively move towards healing and remembrance.