After a lot of work and effort, I’ve recently published my first book titled Women Writing Trauma in the Global South with Routledge (Taylor & Francis) as part of the series ‘Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature’. The book originated from my doctoral dissertation. After completing my PhD, I spent several months reworking the dissertation into an independent book project. This project was based on an interest in how traumatic experiences and extreme mental states translate into literary representations. I was equally interested in where the boundaries of these forms lie and how certain experiences evade representation altogether.
Writing and publishing a book with a reputable academic publisher has been a challenging and insightful process. Over the course of approximately one year, I navigated the initial conceptualisation, the book proposal, the peer review process, revisions, and the editing stage. While writing a doctoral dissertation to obtain the degree was difficult in terms of sustaining your own drive and managing your resources, this book project was a beast of its own. One of the most crucial—and surprisingly complex—aspects entailed removing overtly academic structures such as a theoretical framework and methodology section. Instead of writing for examiners and the requirements of the degree, I had to reframe my line of argument toward the expanding debate around the global politics of trauma.
As an editor, this process has provided me with more experiential knowledge of the different stages in a book project, which has enabled me to better support my clients in terms of motivation, focus, and language. Based on my own experience of publishing an academic book, I’ve collected useful tips that might help writers across genres with developmental self-editing, writer’s block, and preparing your manuscript for professional editing.
Find out more about Women Writing Trauma in the Global South below.
Feel free to have a look at my book here.
Abstract — Women Writing Trauma in the Global South
Through exploring complex suffering in the writings of Aminatta Forna, Isabel Allende and Anuradha Roy, Women Writing Trauma in the Global South dismantles conceptual shortcomings and problematic imbalances at the core of existing theorizations around psychological trauma. The global constellation of women writers from Sierra Leone, Chile and India facilitates a productive analysis of how the texts navigate intertwined experiences of individual and systemic trauma. The discussion departs from a recent critical turn in literary and cultural trauma studies and transgresses many interrelated boundaries of geocultural contexts, language and genre. Discovering the role of literary forms in reparative articulation and empathic witnessing, this critical intervention develops new ideas for an inclusive conceptual expansion of trauma from the global peripheries and contributes to the ongoing debate on marginalized suffering.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction – Concepts and Contexts of Psychological Wounding
- Canonical Cultural Trauma Theory and Emerging Critical Perspectives
- The Case for a Reconceptualization of Trauma
- Wound Narratives from the Global South
Chapter Two: Aminatta Forna
- Fictional Representations of Traumatic Disintegration in The Memory of Love
- Prolonged and Insidious Trauma in The Devil that Danced on the Water
- Narrative Critique of the PTSD Category in Happiness
- Narrative Negotiations of a Context-specific Trauma Model
- Complicated Witnessing in The Devil that Danced on the Water
- Unempathic Gazing and Professional Witnessing in Happiness
- Post-traumatic Resilience in Happiness
Chapter Three: Isabel Allende
- Writing during Trauma in Paula
- Fictional Representations of Childhood Trauma in Portrait in Sepia
- Inscriptions of Trauma in Landscape: Exile and Mental Dislocation
- Resurfacing Wounds in Storytelling
- Epistolary Narration in Articulating Bereavement
- Magical Realist Elements in Representing the Unspeakable
- Photography as a Testimonial Practice in Portrait in Sepia
- Narrating ‘Belonging’ in My Invented Country
Chapter Four: Anuradha Roy
- Fictional Representations of Prolonged Childhood Violence
- Topographic and Architectural Manifestations of Traumatic Unhomeliness in An Atlas of Impossible Longing
- Familial Disintegration and Unhomeliness
- Self-Awareness and Transgression of Forms in Articulating Trauma
- Epistolary Elements and Narrative Authority
Chapter Five Conclusion – Connecting Trauma Narratives in the Global South
- Inscriptions of Complex Wounds
- Towards Conceptual Inclusivity