Katastrofens lokala poetik

Reflektioner kring postkolonial melankoli och traumaframställning

Abstract

Justifying its existence and acts as a part of a civilizing and modernizing mission; the colonial order has made a deep mark on definitions of history in colonized regions. Here the history is often described as a series of zero-points, of completed phases on the civilization-ladder for moving on toward a concrete Modernism. In this kind of history general trauma, such as drastic interruption of the modern line of progress, is often a landmark for the zero-point. Individual trauma however is subordinated this process. This article aims to illustrate how the personal trauma is used in the local cultural space, as a continuous form of remembering. Here the trauma is rather fragmented, searching but not for context or meaning. The searching itself, the act of telling and repeating the trauma, produces an own cultural space of melancholic history-telling. In this history the zero-point is rather a continuous breaking up of the linear time and truth. The trauma, the past is rather a process of reinterpretations, of returns. Throughout its traumas a local culture justifies its existence, tells its own history in the shadow of a modern history.