MACMILLAN Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of Historical Trauma (Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict)

This book engages the globally pressing question of how to live and work with the haunting power of the past in the aftermath of mass violence. It brings together a collection of interdisciplinary contributions to reflect on the haunting of post-conflict memory from the perspective of diverse country case studies including South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Northern Ireland,  North and South Korea, Palestine and Israel, America and Australia. Contributions offer theoretical, empirical and practical insights on the nature of historical trauma and practices of collective healing and repair that include embodied, artistic and culturally relevant forms of wisdom for dealing with the past. While this question has traditionally been explored through the lens of trauma studies in relation to the post-Holocaust experience, this book provides new understandings from a variety of different historical contexts and disciplinary perspectives. Its chapters draw on, challenge and expand the trauma concept to propose more contextually relevant frameworks for transforming haunted memory in the aftermath of historical trauma. Review “This sparkling collection of essays explores the pressing question of how societies emerging from conflict can deal with the haunting legacies of the past in such a way as to prevent recurrence and lay the ground for a just and lasting peace through a dazzling array of case studies from around the world. Resolutely international as well as interdisciplinary in its scope and ambition, Post-Conflict Hauntings can be seen to respond to recent calls for memory and trauma studies to become more diverse, pluralistic, culturally sensitive, and future-oriented. It models precisely the kind of scholarship needed to understand the spectral presence of the past in an increasingly globalized and troubled world. Anyone interested in issues of memory, trauma, and justice in post-conflict settings will find this book an invaluable resource” (Professor Stef Craps, Director of the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative at Ghent University, Belgium) “The editors of Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of Historical Trauma, have created and compiled an indispensable aggregate of master narratives that scholars, public policy analysts, clinicians and artists, among others, will forever treasure. The authors provide us with myriad epistemic conversations and manifestations of psychologically-charged “post” external world trauma outside the Jewish Holocaust. They succinctly and successfully challenge us to come to grips with historical precepts, new texts and new contexts so that when we are able to recontextualize our histories, we may be able to have hope in the face of irreparable large-scale and as yet unmetabolized injury” (Professor Maurice Apprey, Dean of African American Affairs, University of Virginia, USA) From the Back Cover This book engages the globally pressing question of how to live and work with the haunting power of the past in the aftermath of mass violence. It brings together a collection of interdisciplinary contributions to reflect on the haunting of post-conflict memory from the perspective of diverse country case studies including South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Northern Ireland,  North and South Korea, Palestine and Israel, America and Australia. Contributions offer theoretical, empirical and practical insights on the nature of historical trauma and practices of collective healing and repair that include embodied, artistic and culturally relevant forms of wisdom for dealing with the past. While this question has traditionally been explored through the lens of trauma studies in relation to the post-Holocaust experience, this book provides new understandings from a variety of different historical contexts and disciplinary perspectives. Its chapters draw on, challenge and expand the trauma concept to propose more contextually relevant frameworks for transfor