Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds by Stef Craps (review)

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds by Stef Craps Veronica Austen Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Stef Craps’s Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds serves as a wonderful starting point for anyone interested in recent critical paths in trauma studies. Not only does it give a good overview and critique of foundational early work by such scholars as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Dominic LaCapra, and Geoffrey H. Hartman, but it also brings together the work of many recent scholars who, like the author of this monograph, have noted trauma studies’ exclusions of various groups and types of traumatic experiences. In covering this vast amount of critical territory and doing so with adept and cogent arguments, Postcolonial Witnessing proves itself a particularly useful and important introduction to the field for both students and other scholars seeking entry. In a brief 140 pages (including Notes), this text offers six chapters (including the Introduction and Conclusion) that develop the critical framework, leaving the remaining four chapters to offer close readings of various literary texts, readings that thereby serve as examples of the “‘decolonized’ trauma theory” (5) that the author seeks to construct. The main purpose of this text is to critique the limits of early trauma studies, and by extension to function in ‘out of bounds’ spaces that will allow trauma studies to evolve away from its early Eurocentric roots. As the author observes, the preoccupation of early trauma studies with the Holocaust functioned to [End Page 334] limit the field and make it unable to account for non-Western experiences of trauma. Postcolonial Witnessing, by aligning trauma studies with postcolonial theory, identifies and seeks to address four key weaknesses in early trauma studies: the neglect of non-Western experiences of trauma (Chapter One); the assumption that Western definitions of trauma are universally applicable (Chapter Two); the assumption that modernist aesthetics, like fragmentation, is the sole means of representing trauma (Chapter Three); and the failure to approach trauma comparatively and thereby to observe connections/differences across cultures (Chapter Six). Craps begins the body of this text with a review of trauma studies’ preoccupation with the Holocaust. Focussing most extensively on Caruth’s interpretations of such narratives as Tancred and Clorinda (characters in a sixteenth-century epic explored by Freud), Moses and Monotheism (Freud), and Hiroshima mon amour (a film), the author critiques Caruth’s tendency to “turn violence inflicted on a non-European other into a mere occasion for the exploration of the exemplary trauma suffered by […] European subjects” (17). In pointing out these flaws in Caruth’s work, Craps casts early trauma theory as ironically hypocritical, stating that “Trauma theory’s failure to give the sufferings of those belonging to non-Western or minority groups due recognition sits uneasily with the field’s ethical aspirations” (3). From this opening critique, Craps moves on to address trauma theory’s traditional figuring of trauma as individual- and event-based. As the title of Chapter Two—“The Empire of Trauma”—reveals, this definition of trauma, which figures the experience of the Holocaust as the sole model for traumatic experience, betrays the field’s imperialistic undercurrents. As Craps elaborates, an individualistic model dangerously concentrates on curing the individual while the sociopolitical conditions that led to the trauma go unaddressed. By extension, the assumption that trauma is rooted in a singular catastrophic event excludes the more “insiduous traumas,” a concept Craps borrows from Maria Root, like racism, from consideration. Chapter Three very briefly addresses trauma studies’ assumption that trauma is non-representable. Although this chapter does not receive the kind of development that it could have, Craps does make the important observation that the privileging of an aesthetics which assumes that trauma cannot be narrated, problematically, offers the narrator of trauma “no place” from which to “speak[] as an expert about his or her own experience” (42). As such, Craps argues for the necessity of being open to various literary forms as effective expressions of traumatic experience, although he does not in this chapter nor in the later readings of his literary texts offer a specific sense of what those alternative forms might...

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