Panel: Alternative Knowledges
Copanelists: Julia Watson and Gillian Whitlock
Eight years into the new millennium the global community has witnessed countless traumas: civil wars, terrorist attacks, cultural genocide, famine, natural disasters, and mass murders. Every day people are witnessing atrocities in unparalleled ways, and this witnessing has resulted in an outpouring of traumatic life narrative texts, from popular autobiographies through to documentaries and do-it-yourself cyber projects. Life narrative, as is its tradition, has provided crucial interventions into recent political and cultural conflicts.
Life narrative scholarship over the past decade has focused on the (often graphic, realist) ways in which trauma is represented within cultural texts, and the potential effects these traumatic representations might have on those consuming this trauma. This is the focus of my current research: to examine some of the particular ways in which traumatic life narratives texts are taken up in scholarly environments. I have become increasingly preoccupied with what I refer to as “antidote texts”—texts which opt to represent trauma in more indirect, subtle, and perhaps less confronting ways. In this paper I dissect some of the strategies employed by creative artists in translating traumatic life narratives to mainstream audiences and/or readerships. By “translate” I refer to the ways in which the traumatic life narratives are made more accessible, comprehensible, and even more palatable to audiences and readers as they travel from the first-person experiential witness to the second-person viewer/reader. How do such texts reflect the diverse ways in which trauma can circulate via cultural texts? And how do these texts work dynamically to reach audiences—to solicit empathetic and/or political responses?
I explore these questions in light of the documentary Ayen’s Cooking School for African Men (Dir. Sieh Mchawala, 2007). This South Australian documentary tells the story of (male) Sudanese refugees in Adelaide through their experiences attending a cooking school. As cooking is taboo for men in Sudan, the cooking school becomes a metonym for change, tolerance, and acceptance. The documentary, through its affectionate and humourous tone, consciously evades overt representations of the traumatic experiences these refugees have endured prior to their arrival in South Australia. In doing so, the documentary uncovers the trauma in particularly potent ways.
Kate Douglas is a Lecturer in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Australian Studies at Flinders University (South Australia). Her primary research interest is the social work of life writing—the ways in which life narrative texts engage with the politics of the moment and affect social change. Her research investigates who is authorised to write autobiographically at particular historical moments, and the technologies they use to record their lives. Her forthcoming book Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (Rutgers, 2008) explores autobiographies of childhood as vehicles of cultural memory. She has edited (with Professor Gillian Whitlock) two special issues on trauma of the journal Life Writing (April 2008; September 2008). Kate has been published in the journals Biography, a/b: Auto/Biographical Studies, and Life Writing. Her work reflects a strong interest in, and commitment to, new modes of life writing, particularly those that emerge from the margins of culture.