Special Issue "Picturing the Wound: Trauma in Cinema and Photography"
A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2023
Interests: film; representations of the Holocaust; trauma studies; photography; digital media
Special Issue Information
Trauma studies may have been borne from a dissatisfaction with the prevalence of the textual approach in poststructuralist philosophy, but Cathy Caruth already kickstarted a discussion of cinema as a vehicle for trauma back in 1996. In recent years, there has been a consensus among cultural critics that trauma studies may have lost some of their vigor, losing ground to a number of more fashionable theories of affects, New Materialism, eco-criticism, etc. The ambition of this Special Issue is to reinvigorate the study of cinematic and photographic accounts of trauma, embracing a variety of new approaches to the phenomenon. The broadening of this concept is not seen herein as a problem but rather as an opportunity to engage with a greater variety of traumas. On one hand, individuals in different parts of the globe are still facing psychological burdens, stemming from interpersonal relations, violence, war, displacement, psychic trauma and physical injury, racism, bigotry, etc. On the other, the imminence of a climate catastrophe is ushering in a new set of traumas, including climate trauma (anxiety stemming from predictions of the inevitability of ecosystems being destroyed). The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the vulnerability of the social, the shortcomings of global capitalism, and the environmental consequences of the Anthropocene. Finally, media representations have extended the capacity of experiencing trauma to non-human subjects, including posthumanist beings such as cyborgs and other humanoids. Ideally, contributions to this Special Issue of Arts should reconcile a theoretical reconfiguration of the concept of trauma with an analysis of mediatized accounts of wounds.