Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema: Uncoming Communities

(Hardback)

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Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema: Uncoming Communitiesuses philosophy and critical theory to examine films that participate in debates concerning trauma and representation. Our book reflects upon films that invent, rather than represent the moment history breaks down. It proposes a 21st century way forward across problems of trauma, inheritance, and representation into exceptional communities of artistic invention. Revisioning War Traumainvolves a confrontation with death and the hole that trauma exposes. We build our subtitle from a play on words, namely the un-coming as a resistance tojouissanceand as a limit to cultural demands. Uncoming also refers to the traumatic departure of figures in the films from their homes and their symbolic places. As always already in the process of departure, characters in the films our book discusses embody the hemorrhaging of imaginary belonging that nationhood compels. The bookuses psychoanalytic theory as a framework and a robust language that allows us to speak about what evades sense. Our book also engages with other post-modern theories of disaster and politics to examine how trauma might serve as an opportunity to foreground an aesthetics and politics of difference. Each chapter is a close reading of a film that critically examines a cinematic screen that allows for the emergence of what history fails to transmit.

Reviews

The essays in Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema challenge us to re-vision well-known cinematic representations of the Holocaust through the lens of key insights from trauma studies. The authors lucid and accessible language renders reading their unsettling analyses an enriching journey into some of the most complex Holocaust films made. Scholars as well as aficionados of cinematic representations will find the authors re-visionings both absorbing and exciting. -- Ingeborg Majer-OSickey, Professor Emerita, Binghamton University, State of New York University
On almost every page ofWar Trauma in Cinemathe authors show not only how psychoanalysis speaks to the state of Europe after the Holocaust (and, in the last chapter, the state of America after its civil war: death is not just a master from Germany, as Celan wrote), but how much what was relevant then speaks to the trauma of our reality at this moment. May it be widely read. -- J. Todd Dean, American Psychoanalytic Association
Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema is an excellent and extensive intervention into the areas of trauma, film studies, and psychoanalysis. Through brilliant close readings of contemporary films on the trauma of war and its aftermath, Datema and Steinkoler examine the fundamental questions of memory in the face of catastrophe and the possibility of constructionin the psychoanalytic senseof community in a world in which we are all exiles. The authors work is a sinthomatic resistance to the violence and narcissism of the injunction of becoming as citizens and subjects, and explores the power of film to see the real differently, an uncoming that begets survival creation amid disaster. -- Alexander Howe, University of the District of Columbia

Author Bio

Jessica Datema is associate professor of literature at Bergen Community College. Manya Steinkoler is practicing psychoanalyst in New York City and teaches English and film at Borough of Manhattan Community College.