Focusing on the interplay between violence and identity, this book examines how experiences of violence influence belonging in contemporary postcolonial Africa. It delves into the complexities of personal and collective identities, revealing the profound impact of historical and social contexts on individuals and communities. Through insightful analysis, the work highlights the nuanced ways in which violence can both fracture and forge connections among people in a rapidly changing landscape.
The contributions to this volume map the surprisingly multifarious circumstances in which trauma is invoked – as an analytical tool, a therapeutic term or as a discursive trope. By doing so, we critically engage the far too often individuating aspects of trauma, as well as the assumption of a universal somatic that is globally applicable to contexts of human suffering. The volume takes the reader on a journey across widely differing terrains: from Norwegian institutions for psychiatric patients to the post-war emergence of speech genres on violence in Mozambique, from Greek and Cameroonian ritual and carnivalesque treatments of historical trauma to national discourses of political assassinations in Argentina, the volume provides an empirically founded anti-dote against claiming a universal ‘empire of trauma’ (Didier Fassin) or seeing the trauma as successfully defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Instead, the work critically evaluates and engageswhether the term’s dual plasticity and endurance captures, encompasses or challenges legacies and imprints of multiple forms of violence.
Offering examples from a range of ethnographic settings, these essays show that gender comprises far more than sexual relationships: it takes on political significance in so far as it influences the distribution of resources and access to public and domestic spheres, to knowledge and to power