Three decades on, the founding categories of trauma theory (e.g., belatedness, aporia, the unspeakable) remain largely those of a single archive: European, modernist, post-Holocaust. Stef Craps’s decolonising critique (2010; 2013; 2014) has exposed the field’s marginalisation of non-Western suffering, its universalisation of a Euro-American psycho-diagnostic invention, and its prescription of fragmentary modernist form as the only authentic witness. Yet that critique has been prosecuted largely through postcolonial and Anglophone Global South materials. The Chinese-language archive, though vast, catastrophic, and formally heterodox, remains theoretically under-read, while Chinese studies scholarship has often reproduced the very paradigm it might have provincialised. Grounded in Chinese historiographical traditions, Yomi Braester’s Witness Against History (2003) reads texts that stage the failure, refusal, or impossibility of witnessing, and shows the witness testifying against official and teleological representations of the past. Jeffrey Alexander’s social theory of trauma (2012) suggests that meaning-making after historical catastrophe is politically contingent, and so are its failures. 

This seminar asks what happens to witnessing when it is thought from Chinese aesthetic, medical, and cosmological traditions rather than merely translated into them. What becomes of “belatedness” where the deferral of testimony is structural (Hillenbrand 2020 on public secrecy)? Of the “unspeakable” in a lineage where madness speaks social truth, from Qu Yuan to the Diary of the Madman? Of “haunting” where the wronged dead (yuanhun) demand ritual redress, not returns of the repressed? Of “working through” where official memory runs on wound-and-remedy national teleology, and state, clinic, and market alike prescribe closure? We are equally concerned with form: is fragmentation really the default? Where Freudian-Caruthian trauma is organised around lack, breeding poetics of rupture and aporia after the spectacular event, Chinese vocabularies of suffering may well run through excess: soul-loss and its ritual redress (shihun/zhaohun), retribution (baoying), monster-history (taowu), and the strange tale (zhiguai) form an aetiology that challenges the wound-and-aporia model. To move beyond Western trauma models, however, is not simply to substitute Chinese conceptual repertoires, but also to treat working-through, and its refusal, as irreducibly social, political and intersubjective procedural knowledge.

We welcome papers across periods, genres, and media in literature and films that may address event-based witnessing (Imperial Aggression, the Great Leap famine, the Cultural Revolution, etc.), or the structural, the slow, and the ordinary. Comparative papers reading Sinophone materials alongside Latin American post-dictatorship, postcolonial African, Holocaust, or Indigenous memory work are especially welcome, as are papers on translation, circulation, and reception.