Main description:

In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.

Contents:

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction: History, Trauma, and Asia

Hans Pols and Mark S. Micale

Chapter 1. Tropical Stupor? An Investigation into Patients Affected by Earthquakes and Tropical Weather in Colonial Taiwan

Harry Yi-Jui Wu

Chapter 2. Male Hysteria in Modern Japan: Trauma, Masculinity, and Military Psychiatry during the Asia-Pacific War

Eri Nakamura

Chapter 3. Atomic Trauma: Japanese Psychiatry in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Ran Zwigenberg

Chapter 4. "Yankee Style Trauma": The Korean War and the Americanization of Psychiatry in the Republic of Korea

Jennifer Yum Park

Chapter 5. "No PTSD in Vietnam": Psychological Trauma, Psychic Shock, and the Biology of War Suffering in the Context of the American War

Narquis Barak

Chapter 6. Psychological Trauma and Suffering in Long Distance Friendships Involving Political Prisoners in Indonesia

Vannessa Hearman

Chapter 7. Haunting and Recovery in Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia

Caroline Bennett

Chapter 8. A Field of Happiness: Space, Trauma, and Dealing with Existential Precarity among China's Sent-Down Youth

Hua Wu

Chapter 9. Performing Songs as Healing the Trauma of the 1965 Anti-Communist Killings in Indonesia

Dyah Pitaloka and Mohan J. Dutta

Chapter 10. Healing Our Sacrifice: Trauma and Translation in the Burmese Democracy Movement

Seinenu M. Thein-Lemelson

Chapter 11. Beyond PTSD: Politics of Visibility in a Kashmiri Clinic

Saiba Varma

Chapter 12. War Memorials: Materializing Traumatic Pasts and Constructing Memories of the Asia-Pacific War

Maki Kimura

Afterword: Traumatic Pasts, Haunting Futures

Byron J. Good

Index