Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning

This book questions the junctions of the private and the public when it comes to trauma, loss, and the work of mourning - notions which, it is argued, challenge our very ideas of the individual and the shared. It asks, to paraphrase Adorno, 'What do we mean by "working through the past"?, 'How is a shared work of mourning to be understood?', and 'With what legitimacy do we consider a particular social or cultural practice to be "mourning"?' Rather than aiming to present a diagnosis of the political present, this volume instead takes one step back to pose the question of what mourning might mean and what its social dimension consists in. Contributors reflect on the trauma of the Holocaust, the after-effects of the Vietnam War in the US, the Lebanese war-torn experience, victims of the Pacific War in Taiwan, and the Chilean dictatorship.

Introduction , War games—mourning loss through play , Public memory and figures of fragmentation , To mend the world—trauma, mourning, and containment , Holocaust survivor mothers and their daughters—the intergenerational mourning process as a journey in search of the mother , Unable to mourn again? Media(ted) reactions to German neo-Nazi terrorism , Politicising trauma—a post-colonial and psychoanalytic conceptual intervention , Ongoing mourning as a way to go beyond endless grief—considerations on the Lebanese experience , When the “comfort women” speak—shareability and recognition of traumatic memory , A relational approach to trauma, memory, mourning, and recognition through Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman , Victory and defeat—from Beveridge to Thatcher without tears

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