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.