"The Sixties." The powerful images conveyed by those two words have
become an enduring part of American cultural and political history.
But where did Sixties radicalism come from? Who planted the
...intellectual seeds that brought it into being? These questions are
answered with striking clarity in Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman's
book. The result is a combination of history and biography that
vividly portrays an entire culture in transition. The authors focus
on specific individuals, each of whom in his or her distinctive way
carried the ideas of the 1930s into the decades after World War II,
and each of whom shared in inventing a new kind of intellectual
partisanship. They begin with C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, and
Erich Fromm and show how their work linked the "old left" of the
Thirties to the "new left" of the Sixties. Lewis Mumford, Rachel
Carson, and Fairfield Osborn laid the groundwork for environmental
activism; Herbert Marcuse, Margaret Mead, and Leo Szilard
articulated opposition to the postwar "scientific-technological
state." Alternatives to mass culture were proposed by Allen
Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy; and Saul Alinsky,
Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr., made politics personal.
This is an unusual book, written with an intimacy that brings to
life both intellect and emotion. The portraits featured here
clearly demonstrate that the transforming radicalism of the Sixties
grew from the legacy of an earlier generation of thinkers. With a
deep awareness of the historical trends in American culture, the
authors show us the continuing relevance these partisan
intellectuals have for our own age. "In a time colored by
'political correctness' and the ascendancy of market liberalism, it
is well to remember the partisan intellectuals of the 1950s. They
took sides and dissented without becoming dogmatic. May we be able
to say the same about ourselves." -from Chapter 7
From police on the street, to the mayor of New Orleans and FEMA administrators, government officials monumentally failed to protect the most vulnerable residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast ...during the Katrina disaster. This violation of the social contract undermined the foundational narratives and myths of the American nation and spawned a profound, often contentious public debate over the meaning of Katrina’s devastation. A wide range of voices and images attempted to clarify what happened, name those responsible, identify the victims, and decide what should be done. This debate took place in forums ranging from mass media and the political arena to the arts and popular culture, as various narratives emerged and competed to tell the story of Katrina. Is This America? explores how Katrina has been constructed as a cultural trauma in print media, the arts and popular culture, and television coverage. Using stories told by the New York Times, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Time, Newsweek, NBC, and CNN, as well as the works of artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and graphic designers, Ron Eyerman analyzes how these narratives publicly articulated collective pain and loss. He demonstrates that, by exposing a foundational racial cleavage in American society, these expressions of cultural trauma turned individual experiences of suffering during Katrina into a national debate about the failure of the white majority in the United States to care about the black minority.
In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of "cultural trauma"—and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups ...interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the "meaning making process" as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, 2001.
Vietnam: A War, Not a Country explores the conflicting ways in which the American-Vietnamese War has been collectively remembered and represented from the perspective of the war's three primary ...belligerents: the Vietnamese communists, the South Vietnamese, and the Americans. The book examines how the three different collectives memorialize this traumatizing historical event. Within each of these three groups there exists a number of competing narratives, generating not only a sense of shared meaning and community, but also impassioned social conflict. In order to trace these narratives within each collectivity, the authors develop the concept of arenas of memory, distinct discourses that are tied to specific individuals, organizations, and institutions that advocate specific narratives through specific forms of media. Their analysis leads them to make the case as to whether each of these societies experienced a cultural trauma as a result of the way in which the war is remembered.
Experiences of loss, tragedy, violence, and upheavals are ubiquitous, with the majority of individuals experiencing several distressing events during their lifetime. Such events may be conceptualized ...as “traumatic” and contribute to negative changes in mental health. Despite decades of research on the study and treatment of trauma, it remains unclear when a negative event becomes traumatic. Although biologically- and psychologically-based models shed light on this question, we propose a more comprehensive and nuanced conceptualization will emerge from the integration of cultural theories into individual-level analysis when examining the evolution of trauma processing across time.
Applying Jurgen Habermas’ distinction between the three knowledge interests guiding scientific research, this article identifies three approaches to ‘trauma’, a clinical approach, rooted in a ...medical model, a literary approach, rootedin psychoanalysis, and a cultural sociological approach. After elaborating on each of these perspectives, and the various forms through which trauma is represented aesthetically, the three are applied in an analysis of the film “QuoVadis, Aida?”. It is argued that although they entail different notions of trauma, the three are not mutually exclusive and can be combined in a rich understanding of aesthetic representation.
Covid-19 as cultural trauma Demertzis, Nicolas; Eyerman, Ron
American journal of cultural sociology,
2020, Volume:
8, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper has two aims. The first is to introduce the concept of compressed cultural trauma, and the second is to apply the theory of cultural trauma in two case studies of the current covid-19 ...pandemic, Greece and Sweden. Our central question is whether the pandemic will evolve into a cultural trauma in these two countries. We believe the pandemic presents a challenge to cultural trauma theory, which the idea of compressed trauma is meant to address. We conclude that, while the ongoing covid-19 pandemic has had traumatic consequences in Sweden and Greece, it has not evolved into cultural trauma in either country.
Applying Jurgen Habermas’ distinction between the three knowledge interests guiding scientific research, this article identifies three approaches to ‘trauma’, a clinical approach, rooted in a medical ...model, a literary approach, rooted in psychoanalysis, and a cultural sociological approach. After elaborating on each of these perspectives, and the various forms through which trauma is represented aesthetically, the three are applied in an analysis of the film “Quo Vadis, Aida?”. It is argued that although they entail different notions of trauma, the three are not mutually exclusive and can be combined in a rich understanding of aesthetic representation. Pletenac
In this book, Ron Eyerman explores the formation of the African-American identity through the theory of cultural trauma. The trauma in question is slavery, not as an institution or as personal ...experience, but as collective memory: a pervasive remembrance that grounded a people's sense of itself. Combining a broad narrative sweep with more detailed studies of important events and individuals, Eyerman reaches from Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, the New Deal and the Second World War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond. He offers insights into the intellectual and generational conflicts of identity-formation which have a truly universal significance, as well as providing a compelling account of the birth of African-American identity. Anyone interested in questions of assimilation, multiculturalism and postcolonialism will find this book indispensable.
PDF
