Visible and Invisible Wounds: Trauma and Representation in Global South Diasporic Literature
Description
This seminar examines the representability—and limits of representation—of trauma in the literature of Global South diasporic communities. Loss of home, whether through voluntary or involuntary displacement, is a defining index of diasporic identity, shaping life at the margins of nation-states and national boundaries. Dislocation due to slavery, colonization, foreign occupation, civil war, or political and economic precarity marks these communities with psychic and cultural wounds. At the same time, adjustment and assimilation in the host land are impeded by systemic discrimination, racialization, and social marginalization.
Homi Bhabha’s concepts of the “Third Space of Enunciation” and “Cultural Hybridity” provide a productive foundation for reading the colonial and postcolonial migrant experience in its specific geopolitical, cultural, and economic contexts. Stef Craps has argued that much of trauma theory—emerging from Freud through Caruth—remains bound to Euro-American historical events, neglecting the traumatic experiences of non-Western and minority cultures. Such theories risk universalizing trauma while overlooking histories of colonization, displacement, and structural violence in the Global South. Rothberg’s notion of “complicity” further complicates trauma studies, inviting attention to the ways victims and survivors are enmeshed in broader political and historical processes.
This panel asks whether existing trauma theory can be adapted to capture the complexity of diasporic subjectivities, or whether new conceptual tools are required to analyze their lived experiences and cultural expressions as evidenced in the literary productions of Global South diaspora. It explores how visible and invisible traumas shape diasporic ontology in liminal spaces of belonging and unbelonging, aiming to illuminate the intersections of displacement, memory, and cultural signification, and to expand both diaspora studies and trauma theory.
- We invite papers on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Trauma narratives in Global South diasporic literature.
- Hybridity, Affect, and memory in migrant self-representation.
- Spatiality and the politics of place in diasporic trauma representation.
- Intergenerational transmission of trauma in immigrant communities.
- Narratives of resilience, recovery, and healing in diasporic literature.
- Adaptation or critique of existing trauma theory in postcolonial contexts.
- Comparative trauma frameworks beyond Euro-American paradigms.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am a doctoral student in the department of Comparative Literature and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. My work examines the memorialization of the transatlantic slave trade across literature, art and heritage tourism. I focus on how artistic and literary representations of slavery and its aftermath explore intergenerational trauma, creating inventories of memory that resist erasure, and how these cultural forms create alternative sites of remembrance beyond heritage tourism.
Speaker Bio
Maïté Marciano is a Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Williams College. She received a PhD from Northwestern University, conferred jointly by the Comparative Literary Studies Program and the Department of French and Italian in the spring of 2022. She is currently working on her first book project, The French Novel in the Time of Disaffection, which explores how authors have mobilized disaffection to respond to political forms of violence.
Speaker Bio
Jiajia Gu is a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. She holds an MA in English and Translation from the University of Science and Technology of China. Her research explores comparative and world literature with particular attention to women’s trauma and women’s writing, postcolonial and feminist theory, and Asian diasporic literature.
Speaker Bio
Feride Elsaidi is a writer, educator, and master’s graduate in English Language and Literature from Istanbul Bilgi University, where she also earned a BA in Comparative Literature with a Minor in International Relations. Her thesis explored feminist adaptation and myth revision in Elena Ferrante and Toni Morrison. Her interests include trauma studies, diaspora, and postcolonial literature. She also teaches English as a second language and organizes graduate conferences.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jeeeun Jung is a PhD candidate and graduate instructor at the State University of New York, Binghamton. She is interested in women's and gender studies, postcolonial feminist studies, Asian/Asian American studies, and diaspora/migration studies. She is currently working on a chapter of her dissertation with a concentration on the theory of trauma and Korean studies, while organizing her dissertation's publication.
Speaker Bio
Tucker Lloyd is pursuing a M.A. in comparative literature at the Université de Montréal, where they completed their B.A. in modern languages with a focus on Italian and Hispanic language and culture. Their current research interests include Italian, Canadian, and American contemporary queer literature.
Speaker Bio
Laura Catterson is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Davis specializing in modernist and contemporary literature in Persian and Arabic. Her dissertation, Echoes of a Rebellious Past: Contemporary Engagement with Modernist Iranian Literature, explores the significance of Iranian modernism in contemporary literature. It examines texts from Iran, the Iranian diaspora, and France that engage with and adapt Iranian modernist works.
Speaker Bio
Anmol Sahni is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Emory University. His research synthesizes postcolonial theory and ecocriticism, focusing on marginalized South Asian and Eastern African literatures. He examines literary representations of insurgency, state violence, and war’s environmental impacts. His work has appeared in the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, African Studies Review, and others. Anmol also tutors at the Emory Writing Center, where he advocates for educational accessibility.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Julie Williams is a final-year postgraduate researcher from the University of Sheffield, UK. Her thesis, ‘Fractured Relationality: Madness, Identity, and Psychoanalysis in Nigerian Literature' is funded by the UK Research and Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Council (specifically, White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH)). She holds an MA in English Literature and has twice been awarded the Neil Roberts Prize by the School of English.
Speaker Bio
Bhawana Pillai is a Post-doctoral Teaching Fellow in the English Department in Texas Tech University. She received her PhD from Texas Tech's English Department in Aug 2024. Her dissertation compares 20th and 21st century women's life writings from Middle East, North Africa and South Asian countries. She is currently researching on transcultural adaptations of the comic form by South Asian graphic artists for telling narratives of protest and minority experiences in South Asia.
Speaker Bio
Abhik Banerjee holds a PhD in English and has taught as a full-time faculty at GSU Perimeter College. He is currently pursuing a Master’s in Heritage Preservation. His area of research centers around the confluence of South Asian Diaspora Studies and Trauma Studies, where he examines how trauma configures the ontology of immigrants. His secondary research is in food culture studies and digital cartography. His work has appeared in several peer reviewed journals.