Communal Trauma, History, and Memory in Toni Morrison and Shahnaz Bashir's Fiction

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study of the selected African American and Kashmiri fiction from the perspective of trauma literary studies. The thesis explores the interrelation between history, memory, and trauma as depicted in the selected works of Toni Morrison and Shahnaz Bashir. Drawing on literary trauma theories of Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996, 2013), Laurie Vickroy (2002, 2015), and Ted Morrissey (2021) the study analyzes Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Home (2012) and Bashir’s The Half Mother (2014) and Scattered Souls (2016) to explore the individual and cultural facets of trauma emanating from their respective socio historical contexts and their impact on the characters’ psyches. Drawing on Caruth, the study analyzes the selected texts as representative trauma narratives that bear witness to the unspeakable traumatic past of African Americans and Kashmiris and its impact on the lives and identities of individuals and communities. Caruth’s theorization of trauma is correlated with Vickroy’s model that emphasizes the socio-cultural milieu of literary texts to comprehend traumatic histories. Vickroy’s theorization of the specialized aesthetics of trauma is further combined with Morrissey’s approach of “trauma-based literary analysis” to analyze the specific literary devices employed by Morrison and Bashir to depict the psychic trauma of individuals and communities that may otherwise be unrepresentable in ordinary language. The thesis argues that Morrison and Bashir use specific aesthetic techniques to represent the psychic trauma of marginalized subjects, which is linked to the collective trauma of their communities through a blend of memory and history, thus giving access to the inaccessible and silenced histories of African Americans and Kashmiris. Although the relationship between trauma, history, and memory has been the subject of various studies, this thesis is unique in bringing xi together trauma fiction from African American and Kashmiri contexts, which have not been the subject of a comparative study before. Besides, by incorporating trauma fiction from a context in the Global South i.e., Kashmir, the study hopes to broaden the scope of literary trauma studies beyond its West-centric focus. Keywords: Trauma, history, memory, fiction, community, African American, Kashmiri.