Traumatic bodies and diasporic disaffection: a study of Iranian American literature in English
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Abstract
This study is an effort to name a condition that has been generally overlooked by most scholars in trauma theory. Trauma has been mainly defined as a specific bodily condition resulting from the infliction of intense and unexpected pain on people and communities. This conception cannot explain the structural violence, injustices, and meaningless pain that people suffer in countries with prolonged and complex socio-political conflicts. People in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Haiti, and many more, have been so severely affected by multiple rounds of traumatizing historical events that have never found the chance in their lived memory to imagine a peaceful future. The unending violence, constant threats, paralyzing pressures and anxieties, and dehumanizing portrayals create a new condition that deserves a novel theory. In this research, using Catherine Malabou’s concept of Traumatic Disaffection, I develop a new theory that views contemporary trauma not as a psychological result of an unexpected event, but as a neurological consequence of the nudging forces of a multitude of violent events. Combining the findings in cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis, I highlight the plasticity of traumas and their enduring bodily affects. To do so, I consult a host of scholars including Sigmund Freud, Antonio Damasio, Elaine Scarry, Slavoj Žižek, Iris Marion Young, Gilles Deleuze, Bisel Van der Kolk, and a number of trauma theorists. Using the case of Iran as a modern state, I study the impacts that experiences of pernicious maximum social, economic, and political pressures may have on people’s bodies. Studying a set of representative texts by Iranian and Iranian-American women, I examine the impacts of traumas on people’s bodies imagined in these texts. Finding traces of traumatic disaffection, I explain how bodies and pain become an object and a tool for modern political institutions and how traumas can be deployed to obstruct imagination and limit the human power of acting. Through analyzing the bodily affects, this text offers a new theory of structural violence and trauma that can better represent the historical conditioning of many countries in the Global South and specifically in the Middle East.
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Introduction -- Toward a theory of traumatic disaffection -- Disaffected bodies and traumatic specters in diaspora -- Women's bodies and the possibility of affection -- Conclusion
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Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)