Images of the Wounded Mouth: Dissonant Approaches to Trauma in Literary, Visual and Performance Cultures

Images of ‘wounded mouths’ occur frequently in literary and visual artworks artefacts from both the Global South and the Global North and often imply some form of language loss in relation to trauma. There is, however, a decisive difference between language loss as a symptomatic reaction towards a single traumatic event as explained by Western trauma theorists, and language loss as part of an insidious trauma, caused and perpetuated by continuing forms of structural discrimination. This study contrasts literary and visual images from the Global South to the Global North so as to understand strategies of trauma confrontation within the ambit of what it terms Global South trauma theory.
The study begins by examining works where language loss as insidious trauma is embedded in individual traumas that have led to the ‘wounding of the mouth’. It then turns to works that deal explicitly with insidious trauma, and teases out the ways in which they may either unintentionally perpetrate the victimization caused by insidious trauma, or conversely, may create – via ‘affective ties’ – empowering affiliations and coalitions that foster resilience. Rather than aiming at a recovery and restoration of the individual, such forms of resilience, given expression in a range of visual and literary texts from the Global South, hold the community together despite ongoing traumas.


Inhalt:
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION: Images of the Wounded Mouth
Concept and Purpose
The Loss of Language and the Absence of Speech
Outline of Chapters

PART I: TONGUE-TIED

TONGUE-TIED: INTRODUCTION
Methodology
Structure

CHAPTER ONE: Vitiated Voices in Jones’s Sorry
Western Trauma
Insidious Trauma
Affective Ties

CHAPTER TWO: Audible Crying in Miller’s REwind
Western Trauma Theory
Insidious Trauma
Affective Ties/Cries

CHAPTER THREE: Silent Weeping in Searle’s Mute
Western Trauma
Insidious Trauma
Affective Ties

TONGUE-TIED: CONCLUSION – De Kok’s A Room Full of Questions

PART II: MUTED MOUTHS

MUTED MOUTHS: INTRODUCTION
Methodology
Structure

CHAPTER FOUR: Muzzled Mouths
Bailey’s “Still-life with Negro”
Aestheticized Horror
The Returned Gaze
Framing the Victim
Lôbo’s Iron Mask, White Torture
Anastácia’s Gaze
Taking off the Muzzle
The Female Black Panther
Speech as Resistance
Conclusion: An Entangled History of Black Female
Empowerment

CHAPTER FIVE: Sealed Lips
Bailey’s “Survival of the Fittest”
Ethnography
Social Darwinism
Contemporary Migration Policies
Al Assad’s “Asylum” in Dialogue with Parr’s Close the Concentration Camps
The Refugee Camp as a Zone of Indistinction
Homo Sacer as a Threat
Denial of a Shared Humanity

CHAPTER SIX: Suffocating Silence
Waterboarding and the Perpetuation of Victimization
The South African TRC and the Jeffrey Benzien Amnesty
Hearing
The Ticking Bomb Threat and the Global War on Terror
The Loss of Humanity
An Exception to the Exception – Empowering Protest
Questioning the State of Exception: Yazir Henry
World Can’t Wait: Turning the Threat Inside Out
De Kok’s “What kind of man?” and the Loss of Humanity

MUTED MOUTHS: CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION: The Cut-Off Tongue

APPENDIX
“Tongue-Tied” by Ingrid de Kok from Terrestial Things (2002)
“The Archbishop chairs the first session” by Ingrid de Kok from Terrestial Things (2002)
“The transcriber speaks” by Ingrid de Kok from Terrestial Things (2002)
“Sorry Song” (1998; 2007) by Kerry Fletcher
South Africa’s national anthem “Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika” (1997)
“Beasts of No Nation” (1989) by Fela Kuti
“On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge” (1986) by Audre Lorde

BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
Literary texts
Artworks
Music
Films / TV series
SECONDARY SOURCES

Autor:inneninformation:
Tatjana Pavlov-West ist Research Associate der Universität von Pretoria in Südafrika, Dozentin für englischsprachige Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften, Visual Cultural Studies sowie Lehrkraft für Englisch und Französisch an einer Waldorfschule.