RESEARCH SUMMARY
My research explores the ways in which social narratives can alternately shape and shatter collective identity. Focussing on racial, ethnic, and national identity, I have written on what it might mean for a social group to be traumatized. When a collectivity experiences a fracturing of its identity and responds by reconstructing its self-understanding, it has suffered a cultural trauma. Specifically, I have analyzed Vietnamese-American cultural trauma, where the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States has engaged in the contentious process of re-narrating its self-understanding in light of both its war-time experience in Vietnam and subsequent resettlement in America.
I am currently co-editing Interpreting Trauma (Bristol University Press, forthcoming), an interdisciplinary volume that integrates psychological, aesthetic, and social approaches to the analysis of trauma. Here I argue that cultural trauma theory has concentrated primarily on traumatic events that involve direct, physical injuries to people within a collectivity. However, this focus has left unexamined the trauma resulting from the dissolution of a society’s cherished value or ideal. My empirical case centers on the concept of a “post-truth era” with its associated despondency over the loss of truth. In this novel approach the traumatized subject is still a social group that must re-narrate its collective identity in light of a perceived injury, but instead of understanding the traumatic event as deriving from harm to human bodies, it is understood to have arisen from a damaged or destroyed ideal, one that had been considered integral to the group’s collective identity. FORTHCOMING PROJECTMy next project begins with an investigation into the ways in which race is narrativized through the notion of wokeness. I explore this concept from liberal, illiberal, and leftist ideological perspectives and analyze how this narration both reveals and reinforces different conceptualizations of race and collective identity. Based on this investigation I will detail the impact these different conceptualizations have on contemporary political and rhetorical strategies, which often belie the common depiction of race in the United States as a bipolar issue.
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