Academic literature on the topic 'Traumatized historical-political memory'

Literary depiction of contemporary socio-political escalations remains a major issue in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines as it dramatizes the plight of Chandrashekhar Datta Chaudhuri’s family members in the wake of Indian partition. This paper critically examines the reasons for shattered lives and trauma in the characters of The Shadow Lines. This qualitative analysis of the text deploys the theoretical perspectives of memory studies. To substantiate the objective, this study explores how the historical partition and its consequent socio-political uprising killed so many people, displaced the family members from their home and country, haunted them with dreadful memories, shattered the lives and consequently traumatized them psychologically for ages. Understanding the impacts of the political spaces on the personal lives of the characters supports people to comprehend the extent of traumatic consequences in a similar context.

The present study aims to critically review the aspects of war in selected Iraqi war novels— Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist (2017), Corpse Washer (2013) Zauhair Jabouri, The Corpse Hunter (2014)—that focus on depicting vividly the traumatic experiences of Iraqi, particularly after the US-led invasion of Iraq 2003 and how these novels could recur constantly to humanist themes and traumatized figures, the psychological suffering of minorities and the oppressed. In other words, it aims to make visible specific historical instances of trauma in Iraqi war fiction. The present study undertakes an in-depth investigation of the socio-political and historical dimensions of Cathy Caruth’s literary trauma simply because trauma experiences in Iraq were emanated from several causes such as social injustice, the oppression of minorities, political despotism, and the persecution of religious minorities, the displacement of Iraqis from the homeland, and the genocidal policies of jihadist. The study has found that Iraqi war fiction depends on the stylistic technique of repeating certain expressions, phrases, and lexical items to intensify the extraordinary events. It is a narrative of traumatic haunting known for its non-linear and circular style that often leads to ambiguity where readers are often unable to decode the authorial intentions, deriving its ambiguity from the traits of dreams and nightmares, the interpretations of which are continually and unredeemably haunted by the memory of loss.

Paul Auster, one of the most distinguished contemporary American writers, creates a multi-layered narrative within his novel Man in the Dark. Published in 2008, this literary work addresses essential themes and concerns relating to American history as well as social and political agendas of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Precisely the events of September 11, which dramatically added a new dimension to the trauma studies, lie in the core of the Auster’s narrative. The author besides focusing on the effects of a traumatic experience on a human being, creates an alternative vision of history that pushes the reader to question the essence of existence. By merging countless narratives, both personal and national, the author initiates a journey of healing for his characters, ultimately guiding them toward recovery. Thus, one of the major focuses of this article will be to follow the evolution of traumatized personalities within the frames of current trauma studies. On the other hand, investigating the subtle bond between national and personal traumas will illuminate the reciprocal relationship between collective memory and individual experience, shedding light on the profound ways in which historical events can shape personal narratives. Hence the article seeks to disentangle the intricate connections between history, memory, and healing, offering a comprehensive exploration of Auster's contribution to the understanding of the human predicament.

The writer Sergiu Matei Nica (1917–1973), considered one of the most representative Bessarabian poets and publicists, configures in his texts a stratified, mobile Chisinau urban space from a heterogeneous contiuum of experiences, remembered by confrontation with major historical-social or political traumas. The moving fictional radiography of Chisinau converges towards the creation of nostalgic products of the mnemonics of multiple experiences and the understanding of urban space as a living space that shapes collective images. Multilocation by analogy with multivocality expresses in Sergiu Matei Nica’s texts the reflective relationship with the city, the different experimentation depending on the change of place identity and the complex historical: the interwar city of youthful memories, of the remembrance of bohemian life in all sectors of the capital, of the tragedy of June 28, 1941; the city guarded by superhumans from poetry published in volumes, periodicals and unpublished, but also the city of seminarian experience, the destroyed city, through the fire, of the bitterness of the irreparable, with a strong trace of alienation on return and the Soviet city with a severely changed soul from short prose, the city of longing dreams of the convict at forced labor at the Danube-Black Sea Canal, of the fugitive who lives another inner existence from original newspaper pages.

Purpose. The article examines the influence of the city on a person, component parts of the urban space that form the spirit of the city, evolution of the average city dweller and everyday life over the past hundred years, patterns of the past in modern cities. Our responses based on the analysis of the modern Poland and Ukrainian novels. Methods. The methodology of the work is based on the approaches of everyday life history and historical memory studying. We have drawn on the novels of S. Khvin, A. Stasyuk, M. Krajewski, R. Mruz, N. Osinska, J. L. Vyshnevsky, N. Gurnytska, S. Zhadan, Y. Vinnychuk, Y. Andruhovych, O. Krasovytskyi, E. Kuzhavska, M. Hrymych, published in 1995-2021. Results. Such factors as "traumatized memory", features of the creation of the city space and its markers were mainly affected the lives of residents of Gdansk, Poznan, Wroclaw, Warsaw, Lviv, Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and small cities of Donbas. The city itself erased national, estate, social, gender stereotypes and conventions. It happened faster in Poland, Ukraine is moving more slowly in this direction. Each specific city shapes its residents, and they start to feel themself like a citizens of the city and personalities. This process chiefly occurs under the influence of everyday relations between people, external political events of the national and global level, not thanks to the actions of the city authorities. Conclusions. All texts provide a holistic view on the relationship between man and the urban environment. The perception of the city by dwellers, authors and heroes of the works can be divided into several types: a magical space, a space of love, a terrain of the fight against evil, a set of stations on the route of one suburban railway line.

Through the lens of cultural memory, this article explores the relationships between the representation of cultural memory and the construction of ethnic cultural identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. I argue that in the novel, Morrison highlights and manipulates three media of cultural memory: the architecture, the inscription, and the body, to interrogate and challenge the validity of numerous historical monuments and museums in America that are eviscerated of their complicity and function as tools in the atrocity of instituting slavery. To externalize his values, White colonizer Jacob builds a superfluous mansion, which, with the slave trade involved, actually serves as a profane monument to the slavery culture. To highlight the invalidity of the White cultural memory, Morrison crafts Florens who inscribes in the mansion the collective traumatic memory of the African female slaves, deforming the secular memorial from within. In the same fashion, culturally traumatized, Native American Lina adulterates the White culture by insinuating into it the Indigenous Indian cultural fragments and by performing the remolded Indigenous Indian culture, she sediments it into her body. By historicizing the issue of cultural memory in A Mercy, Morrison invites the reader to reconsider what makes a true American cultural memory.

There is a close relationship between displacement and trafficking of human beings. Every year many people are being trafficked nationally and internationally. Traffickers always target the most vulnerable sections of the society. They always try to take advantage of social and political turmoils and displacement of people caused by natural disasters, economic crisis and armed conflict. Trafficking has become an issue of growing concern all over the world particularly in South Asia because of common cultural, traditional and historical reasons. This region especially India has become the center of operations for human trafficking. This paper, therefore, tries to examine the link between displacements and trafficking particularly of women and child trafficking and it aims to provide an overview of the condition of the displaced and trafficked women and their traumatised lives. Trafficking involves a gross violation of human rights. The survivors in most cases not only suffer from physical abuse but also they cannot forget the memory of emotional and psychological abuses by the traffickers. Images of their traumatic past affects their present. The whole International community including the Indian state is trying hard to reintegrate the trafficking survivors to the mainstream society because human trafficking is posing a serious threat to human security. Therefore, all the countries of the world are trying to combat everything including trafficking that challenges the true freedom of the human beings. But the task of reintegration and rehabilitation is not very easy. It is not possible for the survivors to erase the memories of their past life at one stroke even if they are physically rescued. Their memory is full of traumatic experiences and most often they suffer from memory loss also. There is a complex relationship between trauma and memory. No doubt, the effects of trauma on the memory of the survivors are not always identical and the healing process of the victims depends on how they recollect and reconstruct, remember or forget those memories of their dark past. Therefore, this article tries to analyse how the traumatised memory of the survivors affects their healing process and presents innovations that might be effective for ensuring human security by combating human trafficking and erasing the traumatised memories of the displaced persons and also proposes how the Indian state can handle this growing domestic and international human rights catastrophe and take active part in the rehabilitation of the deceased persons. Key words: displacement, trafficking, memory, trauma, human security, anti-trafficking initiatives.

In the so-called West, feminist activists and scholars have long been traumatised by the erasure of their histories via dominant patriarchal narratives, which has served as an impediment to the intergenerational transmission of feminist knowledge. Recently, while acknowledging the very real and ongoing impact of this historical omission, some feminists have issued a call to turn away from a narrative of women’s history as ‘serial forgetting’ and towards an acknowledgement of the affirmative capacity of feminist remembering. At the same time, memory theorist Ann Rigney has advocated for a ‘positive turn’ in memory studies, away from what she perceives to be the field’s gravitation towards trauma and instead towards an analysis of life’s positive legacies. In this article, I combine both approaches to investigate one feminist memory-keeper’s archive, analysing what it reveals about ‘the mechanisms by which positive attachments are transmitted across space and time’. Throughout her life, little-known ‘between-the-waves’ Australian feminist Ruby Rich (1888–1988) performed multiple intersecting activist activities. While she created feminist memories through her work for various political organisations, she also collected, stored and transmitted feminist memories through her campaign for a dedicated space for women’s collections in the National Library of Australia. Propelled by fear of loss and inspired by hope for remembering, Rich constructed a brand of archival activism that was both educational and emotional. In this paper, I examine the strategies Rich employed to try to realise her dream of effecting intellectual and affective bonds between future feminists and their predecessors.

Over a period of ten years Paul Ewing documented the life of his family on film – initially using Super 8 film and then converting to VHS with the advent of the new technology. Through the lens of home movies, autoethnography and memory I discuss his approach to amateur image making and its lasting legacy. Home movies have been the driving force behind a number of autobiographical documentaries such as Tarnation, Video Fool for Love and Stories We Tell. Here I take an auto ethnographical look at the films my own father made over a ten year period, prior to my parents divorce, and examine their impact on my own life and look to see if there is any value to them outside of my own personal investment. “Autoethnography is predicated on the ability to invite readers into the lived experience of the presumed “Other” and to experience it viscerally” (Boylorn and Orbe 15). It is a research method that connects “the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political” (Ellis xix). Autoethnography involves the turning of the ethnographic gaze inward on the self (Denzin 227). Autoethnographers use their personal experience as primary data reflexively to bend back on self and look more deeply at self-other interactions.Paul Francis Ewing was born in 1947 in Redhill in the United Kingdom. Inez Anne Taveira was born eight years previously in another part of the world entirely, Taiping in Malaysia or Malaya as it was known then. She immigrated to the UK when she was 21 to study acting and later teaching. She married Paul in 1970 and by 1976 they had two children – my brother Brendan and myself. Around 1978 Paul, or Dad, started to film the family. He wanted to “capture the moment. Like writing a diary”. Patricia Zimmerman writes, “Amateur film represents psychic tracings of diaries and dreams. The family, dreams, and nightmares create new hybrids, new discourses” (276). In the beginning of the last century Pierre Janet already noted that: "certain happenings ... leave indelible and distressing memories – memories to which the sufferer continually returns, and by which he is tormented by day and by night.” Janet, postulated that intense emotional reactions make events traumatic by interfering with the integration of the experience into existing memory schemes. Intense emotions, Janet thought, cause memories of particular events to be dissociated from consciousness, and to be stored, instead, as visceral sensations (anxiety and panic), or as visual images (nightmares and flashbacks). Schachtel defined it as: “Memory as a function of the living personality can be understood as a capacity for the organization and reconstruction of past experiences and impressions in the service of present needs, fears, and interests” (284).The images captured by Paul Ewing are part of both my consciousness and unconsciousness. I have revisited them on numerous occasions for varying reasons. Amateur film’s otherness requires analysis of active relationships between maker and subject (Zimmerman 277). When I questioned Paul in regards to this research, he suggested that screening the films was very important to him. “Mum and I enjoyed them and then later the grand parents. Also you and Bren.” I found it more than interesting that he placed my brother and myself last in the list of those who enjoyed the screenings. As a student of film I have looked for the stories within these images, looking to understand whom the man behind the lens was: potentially who the men behind the lenses have been. Who was the man from my/our memories, who was the boy, who were the boys who became the man/men we are? Van der Kolk and Fisler suggest that ‘dissociation refers to a compartmentalization of experience: elements of the experience are not integrated into a unitary whole, but are stored in memory as isolated fragments consisting of sensory perceptions or affective states” (510). Karen L. Ishizuka insists, “Within home movies ... lie hidden histories of the world.” In this case, perhaps only hidden histories of myself. Given a consistent dissociative reaction to stressful situations my honest agenda in watching and re-watching my father’s home cinema may indeed be to attempt to decode what Janet claimed people experience when intense emotions, memories cannot be transformed into a neutral narrative: a person is “unable to make the recital which we call narrative memory, and yet he remains confronted by the difficult situation” (660). This results in a phobia of memory that prevents the integration of traumatic events and splits off the traumatic memories from ordinary consciousness. Piaget claimed that dissociation occurs when an active failure of semantic memory leads to the organization of memory on somatosensory or iconic levels (201). It cannot be coincidence that these descriptors sound familiar to any student or practitioner of cinema. We, the automaton: a moving mechanical device made in imitation of a human being.“The limbic system is thought to be the part of the central nervous system that maintains and guides the emotions and behavior necessary for self-preservation and survival of the species, and that is critically involved in the storage and retrieval of memory” (Van der Kolk 10). Of all areas in the central nervous system, the amygdala is most clearly implicated in the evaluation of the emotional meaning of incoming stimuli. It is thought to integrate internal representations of the external world in the form of memory images with emotional experiences associated with those memories (Calvin). In a series of experiments, J LeDoux utilized repeated electrical stimulation of the amygdala to produce conditioned fear responses. He found that cortical lesions prevent their extinction. This led him to conclude that, once formed, the subcortical traces of the conditioned fear response are indelible, and that "emotional memory may be forever". Paul filmed us for approximately eight years. First using the Super 8 format and later straight onto VHS using a cumbersome, oversized camera that fed into a VHS deck carried over the shoulder in a plastic satchel. Zimmerman suggests that home movies graph the contradictions between the realities of family life bounded by class, race, and gender expectations and the fantasies of the nuclear family, and they also reveal the unfinished production of obedient subjects and histories (278). They create expectations that wrestle with the fragile nature of family. Paul wasn’t the only “cinematographer” in the family. The camera was often passed to Inez so that Paul’s presence in family occasions could be authenticated. Eventually both Brendan and myself were allowed moments of seeing the world through the black and white view finders. Perhaps those early cinematographic moments started me on the path to today. The picture as a model of reality. The “real” and the “performed” act is twofold in the home movie. Our many different roles exemplify the separation and interrelation of our public and private lives. The act of mimesis seems to signify “I exist” or, rather, “I represent myself here for immortality.” This imitation of ourselves is an authentic “copy” of the original, since actor and role are identical (Forgacs 52). Identical yet problematic: dissociated? Merilee Bennett’s 1987 film, A Song of Air, is a compilation film composed of home movies shot by Merilee’s father, Reverend Arnold Lucas Bennett, who regularly filmed his family with a Paillard Bolex 16mm camera between 1956 and 1983. I saw A Song of Air as an undergraduate and it has never left me. It did not occur to me until years later to work with my own family’s filmic archive but Bennett’s work is undoubtedly a key influence. The film invites two levels of reading: first, the level of the home movies made by the father; second, the analysis made by Merilee of her father’s home movies through her own reediting of the images and her omnipresent commentary in the form of a letter addressed to her father (Odin 256).No other types of films evidence as much direct address as the home movie. The family filmmaker’s camera functions first as a go-between and only secondly as a recording instrument. To film is to take part in a collective game in the family domain. These familial interactions are not always peaceful. In a personal letter, Merilee Bennett recounts one of these conflicts. “The shot of him [my father] talking directly into the camera with a tree and blue sky behind him was shot by me when I was 12 years old and he is actually telling me to stop, that it was enough now. I remember holding my finger on that button knowing that he couldn’t get really mad at me because I would have it on film, so he had to keep smiling even though he was getting cross.” Merilee reclaims her identity through editing, imposing her own order on her father’s films. The father, “like an omnipotent God,” uses cinema to mold his family.Paul Ewing may have been doing the same – he was the only one aware of how fractured the family, his family, our family, my family actually was.In her autobiography The Words to Say It, Marie Cardinal explains to her psychoanalyst that after clinical treatment she had the strength to undertake a search for the origin of her trauma. I had a similar experience in that I was encouraged by a therapist to ask my father about the reasons behind his infidelity and what he felt were the grounds for his divorce. I had for many years believed it was because of me, that I had disappointed him as a son. Cardinal remembered her father filmed her pissing in the forest. Conscious that her urination has not only been watched, but also filmed, she felt traumatized and thought, “I want to hurt him. I want to kill him! (151)” Shooting a home movie does not always have such dramatic consequences, but it always carries a risk for the subjects filmed, especially children. Parents are not aware of the psychic consequences of a seemingly harmless act. Paul Ewing filmed my brother and I in the bath. I was using the toilet as the filming started and jumped, laughing into the tub with my brother. There is nothing suspect in this description. As a father myself I can understand the desire to film all aspects of my child’s life. At last count I have approximately thirty thousand digital photos and videos of my five year old son and the numbers are rising for his one year old sister. As Paul films us, my brother and I, playing with action figures and acting up for the camera, I laugh at my father. Some days later we were assembled to watch Paul’s latest film. The family convened in the living room, along with our maid Yolanda. When the image came on screen, it seemed to slow down. All I saw was my bottom and then as I entered the bath, my penis. And I saw it being seen by Yolanda. I was devastated, ashamed and furious at my father for showing this private moment. I ran off in tears.Unlike traditional cinematographic projection, to watch a home movie is to be involved in a “performance.” Boris Eikhenbaum proposed the notion of “interior language”: “The process of interior discourse resides in the mind of the spectator.” This interior language can be understood without referring to a context because it is located in the Subject. With the home movie, the context resides in the experience of the Subject. This model explains how completely banal images can refer to representations far removed from what is represented. Contrary to the generally euphoric collective experience, this process of returning to the self often conjures painful memories. One image, of Inez, my mother, comes up in my mind a lot. She stares into the camera as my Father films her. She appears to be engaged in a non verbal conversation with him, with the camera. She doesn’t smile but looks ready to resign, the request to stop filming that is present in so many other instances of her in Paul’s films is absent – it seems to suggest there is no point in her asking. Shortly after the date stamped onto the video image, she revealed to my brother and myself that Paul had been having an affair. “Your father does not love us anymore”. In therapy I have explored both moments – the memory and the video taped image. Something in my mother’s gaze suggests the break, the end of the illusion Paul had crafted both on film and video, and in life. Pierre Bourdieu, discussing family photography, argued that nothing could be filmed outside of what must be filmed. The same ritual ceremonies (marriage, birth, family meals, gift-giving), the same daily scenes (a baby in his mother’s arms, a baby having a bath), the same vacation sequences (playtime on the beach, walks in the forest) appear across most home movies. Discussing “common things,” Georges Perec contended the difficulty is “to free these images from the straitjacket in which they are trapped, to make them produce meaning and speak about what they are and what we are.” Home movies are precisely “common things.” Erving Goffman terms the process of “shifting of frame.” A film of minor importance can suddenly become a fabulous document when the historical context of reading changes. Every old home movie that operates within a different spatial, cultural, ethnic, or social framework will benefit from de-framed readings. Even if these images were not documents and were stereotypical home movies, they become precious because they look new. Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács “creates masterful reflections on the notion of the document itself: why one makes films; the language of the images and language itself; and the possibilities that the image holds for cognition” (Odin 266). The cinematography of Paul Ewing remains a source of possibilities. ReferencesAnderson, Steve F. Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011.Bourdieu, Pierre. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Cambridge: Polity, 1990Boylorn, Robin M., and Mark P. Orbe, eds. Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013.Calvin, WH. The Cerebral Symphony. New York: Bantam, 1990.Cardinal, Marie. The Words to Say It: An Autobiographical Novel. London: Women's Press, 1993.Denzin, NK. Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.Ellis, C. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004. Eikhenbaum, Boris. “Problemes de Cine-Stylistique.” Cahiers du Cinema 220-221 (1970): 70-78.Forgacs, Peter. “Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Reflections of Home Movies.” Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Berkeley. Eds. Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 47-56.Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.Ishizuka, Karen L. “The Home Movie: A Veil of Poetry.” Jubilee Book: Essays on Amateur Film (1997): 45-50.Janet, P. L’Automatisme Psychologique. Paris: Alcan, 1889. Janet, P. Les Medications Psychologiques. Paris: Alcan, 1925. MacLean, PD. “Brain Evolution Relating to Family, Play, and the Separation Call.” Arch Gen Psychiat 42 (1985): 505-517.Odin, Roger. “Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach.” Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Eds. Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 255-271.Perec, Georges. “Approche de Quoi.” Le Pourrissement des Societies. 1975. 251-255.Piaget, Jean. Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Florence: Routledge, 2013.Schachtel, Ernest G. Metamorphosis: On the Development of Affect, Perception, Attention, and Memory. New York: Basic Books, 1959.Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Post Traumatic Stress. Boston: Harvard Medical School, 1994.Van der Kolk, Bessel, and Rita Fisler. “Dissociation and the Fragmentary Nature of Traumatic Memories: Overview and Exploratory Study.” Journal of Traumatic Stress (1995): 505-525.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. University of Chicago Press, 1984.Zimmerman, Patricia. “Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future.” Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Eds. Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 275-288.

“People live here, they die here so they must leave traces.” (Read 140) “Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettling and unsettled.” (Gibson, Badland 2) Introduction What does it mean for [a] country to be haunted? In much theoretical work in film and Cultural Studies since the 1990s, the Australian continent, more often than not, bears traces of long suppressed traumas which inevitably resurface to haunt the present (Gelder and Jacobs; Gibson; Read; Collins and Davis). Felicity Collins and Therese Davis illuminate the ways Australian cinema acts as a public sphere, or “vernacular modernity,” for rethinking settler/indigenous relations. Their term “backtracking” serves as a mode of “collective mourning” in numerous films of the last decade which render unspoken colonial violence meaningful in contemporary Australia, and account for the “aftershocks” of the Mabo decision that overturned the founding fiction of terra nullius (7). Ray Lawrence’s 2006 film Jindabyne is another after-Mabo film in this sense; its focus on conflict within settler/indigenous relations in a small local town in the alpine region explores a traumatised ecology and drowned country. More than this, in our paper’s investigation of country and its attendant politics, Jindabyne country is the space of excessive haunting and resurfacing - engaging in the hard work of what Gibson (Transformations) has termed “historical backfill”, imaginative speculations “that make manifest an urge to account for the disconnected fragments” of country. Based on an adaptation by Beatrix Christian of the Raymond Carver story, So Much Water, So Close to Home, Jindabyne centres on the ethical dilemma produced when a group of fishermen find the floating, murdered body of a beautiful indigenous woman on a weekend trip, but decide to stay on and continue fishing. In Jindabyne, “'country' […] is made to do much discursive work” (Gorman-Murray). In this paper, we use the word as a metonym for the nation, where macro-political issues are played out and fought over. But we also use ‘country’ to signal the ‘wilderness’ alpine areas that appear in Jindabyne, where country is “a notion encompassing nature and human obligation that white Australia has learned slowly from indigenous Australia” (Gibson, Badland 178). This meaning enables a slippage between ‘land’ and ‘country’. Our discussion of country draws heavily on concepts from Ross Gibson’s theorisation of badlands. Gibson claims that originally, ‘badland’ was a term used by Europeans in North America when they came across “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Badland 14). Using Collins and Davis’s “vernacular modernity” as a starting point, a film such as Jindabyne invites us to work through the productive possibilities of postcolonial haunting; to move from backtracking (going over old ground) to imaginative backfill (where holes and gaps in the ground are refilled in unconventional and creative returns to the past). Jindabyne (as place and filmic space) signifies “the special place that the Australian Alps occupy for so many Australians”, and the film engages in the discursive work of promoting “shared understanding” and the possibility of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal being “in country” (Baird, Egloff and Lebehan 35). We argue specifically that Jindabyne is a product of “aftermath culture” (Gibson Transformations); a culture living within the ongoing effects of the past, where various levels of filmic haunting make manifest multiple levels of habitation, in turn the product of numerous historical and physical aftermaths. Colonial history, environmental change, expanding wire towers and overflowing dams all lend meaning in the film to personal dilemmas, communal conflict and horrific recent crimes. The discovery of a murdered indigenous woman in water high in the mountains lays bare the fragility of a relocated community founded in the drowning of the town of old Jindabyne which created Lake Jindabyne. Beatrix Christian (in Trbic 61), the film’s writer, explains “everybody in the story is haunted by something. […] There is this group of haunted people, and then you have the serial killer who emerges in his season to create havoc.” “What’s in this compulsion to know the negative space?” asks Gibson (Badland 14). It’s the desire to better know and more deeply understand where we live. And haunting gives us cause to investigate further. Drowned, Murderous Country Jindabyne rewrites “the iconic wilderness of Australia’s High Country” (McHugh online) and replaces it with “a vast, historical crime scene” (Gibson, Badland 2). Along with nearby Adaminaby, the township of Old Jindabyne was drowned and its inhabitants relocated to the new town in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. When Jindabyne was made in 2006 the scheme no longer represented an uncontested example of Western technological progress ‘taming’ the vast mountainous country. Early on in the film a teacher shows a short documentary about the town’s history in which Old Jindabyne locals lament the houses that will soon be sacrificed to the Snowy River’s torrents. These sentiments sit in opposition to Manning Clark’s grand vision of the scheme as “an inspiration to all who dream dreams about Australia” (McHugh online). With a 100,000-strong workforce, mostly migrated from war-ravaged Europe, the post-war Snowy project took 25 years and was completed in 1974. Such was this engineering feat that 121 workmen “died for the dream, of turning the rivers back through the mountains, to irrigate the dry inland” (McHugh online). Jindabyne re-presents this romantic narrative of progress as nothing less than an environmental crime. The high-tension wires scar the ‘pristine’ high country and the lake haunts every aspect of the characters’ interactions, hinting at the high country’s intractability that will “not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson, Badland 14). Describing his critical excavation of places haunted, out-of-balance or simply badlands, Gibson explains: Rummaging in Australia's aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies […] recuperate scenes and collections […] torn by landgrabbing, let's say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration (Transformations). Tourism is now the predominant focus of Lake Jindabyne and the surrounding areas but in the film, as in history, the area does not “succumb to the temptations of pictorialism” (McFarlane 10), that is, it cannot be framed solely by the picture postcard qualities that resort towns often engender and promote. Jindabyne’s sense of menace signals the transformation of the landscape that has taken place – from ‘untouched’ to country town, and from drowned old town to the relocated, damned and electrified new one. Soon after the opening of the film, a moment of fishing offers a reminder that a town once existed beneath the waters of the eerily still Lake Jindabyne. Hooking a rusty old alarm clock out of the lake, Stuart explains to Tom, his suitably puzzled young son: underneath the water is the town where all the old men sit in rocking chairs and there’s houses and shops. […] There was a night […] I heard this noise — boing, boing, boing. And it was a bell coming from under the water. ‘Cause the old church is still down there and sometimes when the water’s really low, you can see the tip of the spire. Jindabyne’s lake thus functions as “a revelation of horrors past” (Gibson Badland 2). It’s not the first time this man-made lake is filmically positioned as a place where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson, Badland 13). Cate Shortland’s Somersault (2004) also uses Lake Jindabyne and its surrounds to create a bleak and menacing ambience that heightens young Heidi’s sense of alienation (Simpson, ‘Reconfiguring rusticity’). In Somersault, the male-dominated Jindabyne is far from welcoming for the emotionally vulnerable out-of-towner, who is threatened by her friend’s father beside the Lake, then menaced again by boys she meets at a local pub. These scenes undermine the alpine region’s touristic image, inundated in the summer with tourists coming to fish and water ski, and likewise, with snow skiers in the winter. Even away from the Lake, there is no fleeing its spectre. “The high-tension wires marching down the hillside from the hydro-station” hum to such an extent that in one scene, “reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)”, a member of the fishing party is spooked (Ryan 52). This violence wrought upon the landscape contextualises the murder of the young indigenous woman, Susan, by Greg, an electrician who after murdering Susan, seems to hover in the background of several scenes of the film. Close to the opening of Jindabyne, through binoculars from his rocky ridge, Greg spots Susan’s lone car coursing along the plain; he chases her in his vehicle, and forces her to stop. Before (we are lead to assume) he drags her from the vehicle and murders her, he rants madly through her window, “It all comes down from the power station, the electricity!” That the murder/murderer is connected with the hydro-electric project is emphasised by the location scout in the film’s pre-production: We had one location in the scene where Greg dumps the body in some water and Ray [Lawrence] had his heart set on filming that next to some huge pipelines on a dam near Talbingo but Snowy Hydro didn’t […] like that negative content […] in association with their facility and […] said ‘no’ they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Jindabyne DVD extras) “Tales of murder and itinerancy in wild country are as old as the story of Cain in the killing fields of Eden” (Badlands 14). In Jindabyne we never really get to meet Greg but he is a familiar figure in Australian film and culture. Like many before him, he is the lone Road Warrior, a ubiquitous white male presence roaming the de-populated country where the road constantly produces acts of (accidental and intentional) violence (Simpson, ‘Antipodean Automobility’). And after a litany of murders in recent films such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and Gone (Ringan Ledwidge, 2007) the “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson Transformations 13) in the isolating landscape. The murderer in Jindabyne, unlike those who have migrated here as adults (the Irish Stuart and his American wife, Claire), is autochthonous in a landscape familiar with a trauma that cannot remain hidden or submerged. Contested High Country The unsinkability of Susan’s body, now an ‘indigenous murdered body’, holds further metaphorical value for resurfacing as a necessary component of aftermath culture. Such movement is not always intelligible within non-indigenous relations to country, though the men’s initial response to the body frames its drifting in terms of ascension: they question whether they have “broken her journey by tying her up”. The film reconfigures terra nullius as the ultimate badland, one that can never truly suppress continuing forms of physical, spiritual, historical and cultural engagement with country, and the alpine areas of Jindabyne and the Snowy River in particular. Lennon (14) points to “the legacy of biased recording and analysis” that “constitutes a threat to the cultural significance of Aboriginal heritage in alpine areas” (15). This significance is central to the film, prompting Lawrence to state that “mountains in any country have a spiritual quality about them […] in Aboriginal culture the highest point in the landscape is the most significant and this is the highest point of our country” (in Cordaiy 40). So whilst the Jindabyne area is contested country, it is the surfacing, upward mobility and unsinkable quality of Aboriginal memory that Brewster argues “is unsettling the past in post-invasion Australia” (in Lambert, Balayi 7). As the agent of backfill, the indigenous body (Susan) unsettles Jindabyne country by offering both evidence of immediate violence and reigniting the memory of it, before the film can find even the smallest possibility of its characters being ‘in country’. Claire illustrates her understanding of this in a conversation with her young son, as she attempts to contact the dead girls’ family. “When a bad thing happens,” she says, “we all have to do a good thing, no matter how small, alright? Otherwise the bad things, they just pile up and up and up.” Her persistent yet clumsy enactment of the cross-cultural go-between illuminates the ways “the small town community move through the terms of recent debate: shame and denial, repressed grief and paternalism” (Ryan 53). It is the movement of backfill within the aftermath: The movement of a foreign non-Aboriginal woman into Aboriginal space intertextually re-animates the processes of ‘settlement’, resolution and environmental assimilation for its still ‘unsettled’ white protagonists. […] Claire attempts an apology to the woman’s family and the Aboriginal community – in an Australia before Kevin Rudd where official apologies for the travesties of Australian/colonial history had not been forthcoming […] her movement towards reconciliation here is reflective of the ‘moral failure’ of a disconnection from Aboriginal history. (Lambert, Diasporas) The shift from dead white girl in Carver’s story to young Aboriginal woman speaks of a political focus on the ‘significance’ of the alpine region at a given moment in time. The corpse functions “as the trigger for crisis and panic in an Australia after native title, the stolen generation and the war-on-terror” (Lambert, Diasporas). The process of reconnecting with country and history must confront its ghosts if the community is to move forward. Gibson (Transformations) argues that “if we continue to close our imaginations to the aberrations and insufficiencies in our historical records. […] It’s likely we won’t dwell in the joy till we get real about the darkness.” In the post-colonial, multicultural but still divided geographies and cultures of Jindabyne, “genocidal displacement” comes face to face with the “irreconciled relation” to land “that refuses to remain half-seen […] a measure of non-indigenous failure to move from being on the land to being in country” (Ryan 52), evidenced by water harvesting in the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and the more recent crises in water and land management. Aftermath Country Haunted by historical, cultural and environmental change, Jindabyne constitutes a post-traumatic screen space. In aftermath culture, bodies and landscapes offer the “traces” (Gibson, Transformations) of “the social consequences” of a “heritage of catastrophe” that people “suffer, witness, or even perpetrate” so that “the legacy of trauma is bequeathed” (Walker i). The youth of Jindabyne are charged with traumatic heritage. The young Susan’s body predictably bears the semiotic weight of colonial atrocity and non-indigenous environmental development. Evidence of witnesses, perpetrators and sufferers is still being revealed after the corpse is taken to the town morgue, where Claire (in a culturally improper viewing) is horrified by Susan’s marks from being secured in the water by Stuart and the other men. Other young characters are likewise haunted by a past that is environmental and tragically personal. Claire and Stuart’s young son, Tom (left by his mother for a period in early infancy and the witness of his parents strained marital relations), has an intense fear of drowning. This personal/historical fear is played with by his seven year old friend, Caylin-Calandria, who expresses her own grief from the death of her young mother environmentally - by escaping into the surrounding nature at night, by dabbling in the dark arts and sacrificing small animals. The two characters “have a lot to believe in and a lot of things to express – belief in zombies and ghosts, ritual death, drowning” (Cordaiy 42). As Boris Trbic (64) observes of the film’s characters, “communal and familial harmony is closely related to their intense perceptions of the natural world and their often distorted understanding of the ways their partners, friends and children cope with the grieving process.” Hence the legacy of trauma in Jindabyne is not limited to the young but pervades a community that must deal with unresolved ecologies no longer concealed by watery artifice. Backfilling works through unsettled aspects of country by moving, however unsteadily, toward healing and reconciliation. Within the aftermath of colonialism, 9/11 and the final years of the Howard era, Jindabyne uses race and place to foreground the “fallout” of an indigenous “condemnation to invisibility” and the “long years of neglect by the state” (Ryan 52). Claire’s unrelenting need to apologise to the indigenous family and Stuart’s final admission of impropriety are key gestures in the film’s “microcosm of reconciliation” (53), when “the notion of reconciliation, if it had occupied any substantial space in the public imagination, was largely gone” (Rundell 44). Likewise, the invisibility of Aboriginal significance has specificity in the Jindabyne area – indigeneity is absent from narratives recounting the Snowy Mountains Scheme which “recruited some 60,000 Europeans,” providing “a basis for Australia’s postwar multicultural society” (Lennon 15); both ‘schemes’ evidencing some of the “unrecognised implications” of colonialism for indigenous people (Curthoys 36). The fading of Aboriginal issues from public view and political discourse in the Howard era was serviced by the then governmental focus on “practical reconciliation” (Rundell 44), and post 9/11 by “the broad brushstrokes of western coalition and domestic political compliance” (Lambert, CMC 252), with its renewed focus on border control, and increased suspicion of non-Western, non-Anglo-European difference. Aftermath culture grapples with the country’s complicated multicultural and globalised self-understanding in and beyond Howard’s Australia and Jindabyne is one of a series of texts, along with “refugee plays” and Australian 9/11 novels, “that mobilised themselves against the Howard government” (Rundell 43-44). Although the film may well be seen as a “profoundly embarrassing” display of left-liberal “emotional politics” (44-45), it is precisely these politics that foreground aftermath: local neglect and invisibility, terror without and within, suspect American leadership and shaky Australian-American relations, the return of history through marked bodies and landscapes. Aftermath country is simultaneously local and global – both the disappearance and the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality post-Mabo and post-9/11 are backfilled by the traces and fragments of a hidden country that rises to the surface. Conclusion What can be made of this place now? What can we know about its piecemeal ecology, its choppy geomorphics and scarified townscapes? […] What can we make of the documents that have been generated in response to this country? (Gibson, Transformations). Amidst the apologies and potentialities of settler-indigenous recognition, the murdering electrician Gregory is left to roam the haunted alpine wilderness in Jindabyne. His allegorical presence in the landscape means there is work to be done before this badland can truly become something more. Gibson (Badland 178) suggests country gets “called bad […] partly because the law needs the outlaw for reassuring citizens that the unruly and the unknown can be named and contained even if they cannot be annihilated.” In Jindabyne the movement from backtracking to backfilling (as a speculative and fragmental approach to the bodies and landscapes of aftermath culture) undermines the institutional framing of country that still seeks to conceal shared historical, environmental and global trauma. The haunting of Jindabyne country undoes the ‘official’ production of outlaw/negative space and its discursively good double by realising the complexity of resurfacing – electricity is everywhere and the land is “uncanny” not in the least because “the town of Jindabyne itself is the living double of the drowned original” (Ryan 53). The imaginative backfill of Jindabyne reorients a confused, purgatorial Australia toward the “small light of home” (53) – the hope of one day being “in country,” and as Gibson (Badland 3) suggests, the “remembering,” that is “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands.” References Baird, Warwick, Brian Egloff and Rachel Lenehan. “Sharing the mountains: joint management of Australia’s alpine region with Aboriginal people.” historic environment 17.2 (2003): 32-36. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Cordaiy, Hunter. “Man, Woman and Death: Ray Lawrence on Jindabyne.” Metro 149 (2006): 38-42. Curthoys, Anne. “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous.” Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney, UNSW P, 2000. 21-36. Gelder, Ken and Jane M. Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness an Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. 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