Main description:

This book is the first of its kind to critically examine Aminatta Forna, Isabel Allende and Anuradha Roy in a global constellation, advancing existing scholarship on women's trauma narratives.

This book makes a cutting-edge contribution to knowledge production on trauma and reveals conceptual imbalances as pressing issues in the global unconscious.

Through disentangling nuances of complex psychological trauma, this book develops new temporal and conceptual dimensions.

This book offers readers critical insights into the topical concern of unrecognized suffering in the global peripheries and subversive narrative counter-practices.

Contents:

Chapter One: Introduction - Concepts and Contexts of Psychological Wounding

Canonical Cultural Trauma Theory and Emerging Critical Perspectives

The Case for a Reconceptualization of Trauma

Wound Narratives from the Global South

Chapter Two: Aminatta Forna

Fictional Representations of Traumatic Disintegration in The Memory of Love

Prolonged and Insidious Trauma in The Devil that Danced on the Water

Narrative Critique of the PTSD Category in Happiness

Narrative Negotiations of a Context-specific Trauma Model

Complicated Witnessing in The Devil that Danced on the Water

Unempathic Gazing and Professional Witnessing in Happiness

Post-traumatic Resilience in Happiness

Chapter Three: Isabel Allende

Writing during Trauma in Paula

Fictional Representations of Childhood Trauma in Portrait in Sepia

Inscriptions of Trauma in Landscape: Exile and Mental Dislocation

Resurfacing Wounds in Storytelling

Epistolary Narration in Articulating Bereavement

Magical Realist Elements in Representing the Unspeakable

Photography as a Testimonial Practice in Portrait in Sepia

Narrating 'Belonging' in My Invented Country

Chapter Four: Anuradha Roy

Fictional Representations of Prolonged Childhood Violence

Topographic and Architectural Manifestations of Traumatic Unhomeliness in An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Familial Disintegration and Unhomeliness

Self-Awareness and Transgression of Forms in Articulating Trauma

Epistolary Elements and Narrative Authority

Chapter Five Conclusion - Connecting Trauma Narratives in the Global South

Inscriptions of Complex Wounds

Towards Conceptual Inclusivity