Trauma, Memory and Identity Crisis: Reimagining and Rewriting the Past

Trauma, Memory and Identity Crisis: Reimagining and Rewriting the Past

By dealing with various traumatic events, this volume shows the impact of trauma on the victims’ memory and identity on both individual and collective levels. Bringing together scholars from varying social, cultural, ethnic and political backgrounds, it foregrounds the suffering of the marginalised, thus giving them a narrative, a voice. The book shows the way in which the victims of trauma confront the past, instead of running away from it, share their stories with others, and thus (re)assert their shattered identity. It also highlights the way in which (trauma) narratives can enable the traumatised to challenge official history and to come up with an alternative version of it. Put another way, trauma narratives provide the victims and survivors the opportunity to reimagine, to reinvent and to rewrite the past in order to secure a peaceful future, and help them find a place in history. Md Abu Shahid Abdullah completed his MA in English and American Studies and PhD in English Literature at Otto-Friedrich University Bamberg, Germany. He is currently an Assistant Professor in English at East West University, Bangladesh. His research interests include trauma, alienation, memory, identity, marginalisation, postcolonialism and magical realism. His first book, Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels: Speaking the Unspeakable, was published in 2020. He is currently working on a research project on the employment of magical realism from a female perspective in the Americas.