Abstract
Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways. By constructing cultural traumas, social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations, not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering, but may also take on board some significant moral responsibility for it. Insofar as they identify the cause of trauma in a manner that assumes such moral responsibility, members of collectivities define their solidary relationships that allow them to share the suffering of others. In thinking that the suffering of others might in fact also be their own, societies expand the circle of the "we" and create the possibility for repairing societies to prevent the trauma from happening again. By the same token, social groups can, and often do, refuse to recognize the existence of others' suffering, or place the responsibility for it on people other than themselves. Empirically, this article extensively considers trauma construction in the case of the Holocaust — the mass murder of Jews by the German Nazis — but also examines trauma processes in relation to African-Americans, indigenous peoples, colonial victims of Western and Japanese imperialism, the Nanjing Massacre, and victims of the early Communist regimes such as in Soviet Russia.
First Page
85
Last Page
95
Recommended Citation
Jeffrey, C. Alexander. 2015. "Culture Trauma, Morality and Solidarity: The Social Construction of "Holocaust" and Other Mass Murders." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 35, (5): pp.85-95. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol35/iss5/6
