Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?

Abstract

It would seem that we can map the psychological effects of trauma on to the cultures that undergo colonization. Similar analogies have been drawn between the process of recovery in therapy and decolonization. But in the case of colonialism, I argue, the relation to the past is strictly not a relation to one's own past but to a social history and its material and institutional effects and is in no simple way a matter of internal psychic dynamics. The problem then emerges as to how the transition from the level of the individual to the social can be theorized, since it is not self-evident that there is any necessary relation between the psychological and the social that is not already ideological. I want to suggest that a non-therapeutic relation to the past, structured around the notion of survival or living on rather than recovery, is what should guide our critique of modernity and ground a different mode of historicization. I turn to an Irish instance, the recent years devoted to the commemoration of the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, in order to think through a number of issues relating to the recuperative drive of modernizing nationalism, to historical representation and popular memory, to survival and mourning.

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