Memory, Trauma, and Performance 2023

Memory, trauma, and performance are deeply entangled. They shape and express each other through our individual and collective bodies. Trauma (from Greek for a blow or wound), expresses itself viscerally, through bodily symptoms, ‘reenactments,’ flashbacks, nightmares, and other forms of repeats, experienced in the here and now. The fact that we cannot neatly separate ‘trauma’ from ‘post-traumatic stress’ points to the centrality of reiterated effects that constitute the condition. Violent acts wound families, communities, and entire societies sometimes for years, even generations. This course focuses on historical trauma (conquest, enslavement, discrimination, and disenfranchisement), political trauma (dictatorships, criminal politics), and personal trauma. Trauma is never just personal, and never just political. How is trauma transmitted, and how is it ‘repaired’? We will study how theorists, practitioners, and artists turn traumatic memory into reparative memory.