Reading Violence and Trauma in Asia and the World

Yiru Lim is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Interdisciplinary and Experiential Learning at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her dissertation focused on the changing novel form and its relationship to the imagination from the twentieth century to the contemporary, and her main research interests include ekphrasis, narrative and the imagination, and narratives of illness and pain. She has published in the Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE) and was co-author of Coal Mining and Gentrification in Japan published in 2019. Kit Ying Lye is currently Senior Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her dissertation focuses on the use of magical realism in the re-presentation of Cold War violence in Southeast Asian literature. Her research interests are mainly, the Cold War in Southeast Asia, history and its remembrance, and death in Southeast Asian literature and culture, and Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage. She has published works that discuss the use of literature to represent civil wars in Southeast Asia. She is also the principal investigator of the research project on Singapore Chinese Funerary Practices. She is the co-editor of Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City (Routledge).

List of Figures and Table

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reading Trauma and Violence: Expanding Horizons

Yiru Lim and Kit Ying Lye

i

Part 1

Imagining and Reimagining

1.

The Human Inclination Toward Violence and Where We Stand in the Age of Mass Consumption

Michael Kearney

2.

Fictional Testimonies: Narrative structures of resistance in White Chrysanthemum and How We Disappeared

W. Michelle Wang

3.

Fictive Realities: Witnessing and the Imagination in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Yiru Lim

4.

Representing Anthropocene Trauma: Disaster Narratives of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in Indian Cinema

Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh

5.

The Unbearable Lightness of the Future-Shock-Myth-Traumatized Swallowers: A Reading of the Assassination of Shinzo Abe

Setsuko Adachi

Part 2

Remembering and Forgetting

6.

National Identities, Hybrid Postmemory, and Cultural Remediation in Akira Mizubayashi's Novel Reine de Coeur

Priscilla Charrat-Nelson

7.

Giving a Voice Back to the Families of Soviet ‘Public Enemies’ Through Postmemory Graphic Narratives

Iana Nikitenko

8.

The Telling of Violence, and the Violence of the Telling: Narrative and the Choice to Forget in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists

Claudia J. M. Cornelissen

9.

Mass Graves and Topography: Narrating Violence through the Visible Reminders of the Nellie Massacre, 1983

Jabeen Yasmeen

10.

Refugee Poetics: Reassembling the Syrian Identity on Digital Media

Waed Hasan

Part 3

Reclaiming and Telling

11.

Beyond the Impossibility of Representation: Aesthetic Politics in Yun Ch’oe’s There a Petal Silently Falls

Heejung Kang

12.

Words Stuck in the Throat: The Paradox of Deep Silence and Narrative Plenty in Postwar Lebanese Fiction

Renée Ragin Randall

13.

Speaking the Unspeakable in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman

Judy Joo-Ae Bae

14.

Listening to Lost Voices: Reading Wartime Rape in Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue

Nicole Ong

15.

“We Must Find a Way to Do More Than Endure,” Silence as Resistance in Charmaine Craig’s Miss Burma

Kit Ying Lye

16.

Tasting Loss

Joy Xin Yuan Wang and Hairuo Jin

Index