Stef Craps
Biographic Data
| ID | 5513016 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stef Craps |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stef |
| FAMILY NAME | Craps |
| SIGNATURE | CRAPS S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ghent University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Lost Words and Lost Worlds
This essay explores the problem of society’s environmental memory loss and the potential for literary and cultural works to counteract it. It uses the concepts of environmental generational amnesia and shifting baseline syndrome to argue that our connection to the natural world has been eroded by our severely limited experience of it. Each generation’s perception of what is “normal” in nature is shaped by their own experience rather than an objec…
Flooded cities in Low Countries fiction
In a range of environmentally oriented international novels, future cities in the Low Countries have been flooded, with Dutch populations relocated to higher grounds or to floating cities. In contemporary Dutch and Flemish fiction, however, reflections on cities by the water are few and far between. More conspicuously, in the few literary novels that imagine cities under threat from rising water levels, the cities in question are not located on t…
Grief as a Doorway to Love
Grief as a Doorway to Love:An Interview with Chris Jordan Stef Craps (bio) and Ida Marie Olsen (bio) The renowned American photographer, filmmaker, and artist Chris Jordan is no stranger to ecological grief. His stunning 2017 film Albatross, which tells the story of a gut-wrenching environmental tragedy that is unfolding on Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean, is steeped in it. Today Midway Island is part of the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refu…
Beyond Identification in Human Rights Culture
In this article, we analyse two testimonial narratives written or published by Dave Eggers, an American author, editor, and publisher whose oeuvre shows a marked interest in harnessing the power of narrative to engage in human rights activism. Both narratives focus on the case of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American who suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and at the hands of the state through its response to that natural disaster. Ou…
Contemporary Fiction vs. the Challenge of Imagining the Timescale of Climate Change
Fiction writers who try to do justice to the vast temporal and spatial scales and the enormous complexity of climate change are faced with the problem that the phenomenon exceeds human perception and that it is not dramatic in the traditional sense. In this article we explore the formal challenges that arise when fiction takes on the temporality of climate change by examining three very different novels that seek to capture the geological timesca…
Humanitarianism, Testimony, and the White Savior Industrial Complex
Humanitarianism, Testimony, and the White Savior Industrial ComplexWhat Is The What versus Kony 2012 Sean Bex (bio) and Stef Craps (bio) This article examines two instances of human rights advocacy—Dave Eggers's What Is the What (2006) and Invisible Children's Kony 2012—that have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. It aims to show how the former exposes and challenges the neocolonial assumptions underlying humanitarian campaigns …
Decolonizing Trauma Studies Round-Table Discussion
This round-table, which featured literary critics Professor Stef Craps, Professor Bryan Cheyette and Dr. Alan Gibbs, was recorded as part of the “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” symposium organized by Dr. Sonya Andermahr and Dr. Larissa Allwork at The School of The Arts, The University of Northampton (15 May 2015). Convened a week after the University of Zaragoza’s “Memory Frictions” conference, where Cheyette, Gibbs, Andermahr and Allwork gave pape…
Nachträglichkeit
The Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit is central to the psychoanalytical understanding of trauma. However, it has not received much attention within the contemporary field of trauma studies. This paper attempts to reconstruct the logic inherent to this concept by examining Freud’s remarks on the case of Emma. Furthermore, it is argued that Nachträglichkeit offers an interesting perspective on both (a) the well-established yet controversial fin…
Badiou’s theory of the event and the politics of trauma recovery
There exists a conceptual parallel between psychological accounts of psychic trauma on the one hand, and French philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of the event on the other: both are defined by a relation of incommensurability or excessiveness with regard to the pre-existent context or system. Further development of this parallel, i.e., viewing trauma as an event in the Badiouian sense, enables us to pinpoint and clarify a logical fallacy at work …
Entangled Memories in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay
This chapter will examine the mnemonic connections established between the Holocaust and histories of (post)colonial suffering in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1998 [1988]), another novel which reflects and elicits a relational understanding of trauma. Baumgartner’s Bombay recounts the tragic life and violent death of Hugo Baumgartner, a Jew who emigrates from Nazi Germany to India in the late 1930s, thus escaping the Holocaust in which his…
Beyond Trauma Aesthetics
I have argued that trauma theory needs to become more inclusive and culturally sensitive by acknowledging the sufferings of non-Western and minority groups more fully, for their own sake, and on their own terms. In this chapter, I will address the textual inscription of such experiences and suggest that certain received ideas and assumptions about how literature bears witness to trauma may need to be revised. The title of this chapter is adapted …
The Trauma of Empire
As Rebecca Saunders points out, “while trauma theory has primarily been produced in Europe and the United States, trauma itself has, with equal if not greater regularity and urgency, been experienced elsewhere” (15). However, most attention within trauma theory has been devoted to events that took place in Europe or the United States, especially the Holocaust and, more recently, 9/11. In fact, the impetus for much of the current theorization abou…
The Empire of Trauma
Today the concept of trauma is widely used to describe responses to extreme events across space and time, as well as to guide their treatment. However, as Allan Young reminds us in The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (1995), it is actually a Western artefact, “invented” in the late nineteenth century: “The disorder is not timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity. Rather, it is glued together by the practices…
Mid-Mourning in David Dabydeen’s “Turner” and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts
Just as Magona’s novel can be read as a critique of the TRC’s tendency—which it shares with trauma theory in its classical formulation—to map Western conceptions of trauma straightforwardly onto an apartheid-colonial situation, so the two literary works that I will look at next can be seen to challenge traditional understandings of trauma, mourning, and recovery that risk obscuring the continuing oppressive effects of racial trauma. David Dabydee…
Conclusion
In this book, I have tried to expose the limitations and blind spots that I think trauma theory will need to confront if it is to deliver on its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. To some extent, this is already happening. Though in the early stages of its development trauma theory focused predominantly on the Holocaust, in recent years the field has begun to diversify. It now also includes a still relatively small but significant amou…
Cross-Traumatic Affiliation
If, as Cathy Caruth observes in Unclaimed Experience , “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, ... history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24), then traumatic colonial histories not only have to be acknowledged more fully, on their own terms, and in their own terms, but they also have to be considered in relation to traumatic metropolitan or First World histories for trauma studies to have any hope of re…
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas in the Work of Caryl Phillips
In this chapter, I will investigate the links forged between memories of black and Jewish suffering in the fiction and non-fiction of the British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips, one master of the genre Rebecca Walkowitz has called “comparison literature.” 1 In his novels Higher Ground (1989) and The Nature of Blood (1997), as well as in his travel book The European Tribe (1987), Phillips interweaves stories of anti-Semitic and racist violence se…
Ordinary Trauma in Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother
Considered in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery, the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked shed an interesting light on the debate over the monocultural bias of trauma theory in its “classical,” mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which t…
Postcolonial Witnessing
Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories
Wor(l)ds of grief
Introduction
Trauma studies, an area of cultural investigation that came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s, prides itself on its explicit commitment to ethics, which sets it apart from the poststructuralist criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s in which it has its roots.Standing accused of irrelevance or indifference to "real-world" issues such as history, politics, and ethics because of its predominantly epistemological focus, this earlier, "textualis…
Conjuring Trauma
The events of 11 September 2001 caused a rupture not only in the normal order of things but also, and perhaps especially, in the signifying systems underwriting that order. The Naudet brothers’ remarkable 9/11 documentary, which aired on CBS on 10 March 2002 and on TV stations around the world on the first anniversary of the attacks, seeks to reinstitute the authority of the conventions and constructions of a culture whose limits the events of 11…
J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and the ethics of testimony
human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman 1 1Agamben, Remnants, 121. The purpose of this article is to analyse the testimonial task assumed by J. M. Coetzee in Waiting for
Postcolonial Witnessing
Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories
Wor(l)ds of grief
Lost Words and Lost Worlds
This essay explores the problem of society’s environmental memory loss and the potential for literary and cultural works to counteract it. It uses the concepts of environmental generational amnesia and shifting baseline syndrome to argue that our connection to the natural world has been eroded by our severely limited experience of it. Each generation’s perception of what is “normal” in nature is shaped by their own experience rather than an objec…
J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and the ethics of testimony
human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman 1 1Agamben, Remnants, 121. The purpose of this article is to analyse the testimonial task assumed by J. M. Coetzee in Waiting for
Conjuring Trauma
The events of 11 September 2001 caused a rupture not only in the normal order of things but also, and perhaps especially, in the signifying systems underwriting that order. The Naudet brothers’ remarkable 9/11 documentary, which aired on CBS on 10 March 2002 and on TV stations around the world on the first anniversary of the attacks, seeks to reinstitute the authority of the conventions and constructions of a culture whose limits the events of 11…
J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and the ethics of testimony
human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman 1 1Agamben, Remnants, 121. The purpose of this article is to analyse the testimonial task assumed by J. M. Coetzee in Waiting for
Introduction
Trauma studies, an area of cultural investigation that came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s, prides itself on its explicit commitment to ethics, which sets it apart from the poststructuralist criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s in which it has its roots.Standing accused of irrelevance or indifference to "real-world" issues such as history, politics, and ethics because of its predominantly epistemological focus, this earlier, "textualis…
Wor(l)ds of grief
Postcolonial Witnessing
Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories
Entangled Memories in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay
This chapter will examine the mnemonic connections established between the Holocaust and histories of (post)colonial suffering in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1998 [1988]), another novel which reflects and elicits a relational understanding of trauma. Baumgartner’s Bombay recounts the tragic life and violent death of Hugo Baumgartner, a Jew who emigrates from Nazi Germany to India in the late 1930s, thus escaping the Holocaust in which his…
Beyond Trauma Aesthetics
I have argued that trauma theory needs to become more inclusive and culturally sensitive by acknowledging the sufferings of non-Western and minority groups more fully, for their own sake, and on their own terms. In this chapter, I will address the textual inscription of such experiences and suggest that certain received ideas and assumptions about how literature bears witness to trauma may need to be revised. The title of this chapter is adapted …
The Trauma of Empire
As Rebecca Saunders points out, “while trauma theory has primarily been produced in Europe and the United States, trauma itself has, with equal if not greater regularity and urgency, been experienced elsewhere” (15). However, most attention within trauma theory has been devoted to events that took place in Europe or the United States, especially the Holocaust and, more recently, 9/11. In fact, the impetus for much of the current theorization abou…
The Empire of Trauma
Today the concept of trauma is widely used to describe responses to extreme events across space and time, as well as to guide their treatment. However, as Allan Young reminds us in The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (1995), it is actually a Western artefact, “invented” in the late nineteenth century: “The disorder is not timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity. Rather, it is glued together by the practices…
Mid-Mourning in David Dabydeen’s “Turner” and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts
Just as Magona’s novel can be read as a critique of the TRC’s tendency—which it shares with trauma theory in its classical formulation—to map Western conceptions of trauma straightforwardly onto an apartheid-colonial situation, so the two literary works that I will look at next can be seen to challenge traditional understandings of trauma, mourning, and recovery that risk obscuring the continuing oppressive effects of racial trauma. David Dabydee…
Conclusion
In this book, I have tried to expose the limitations and blind spots that I think trauma theory will need to confront if it is to deliver on its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. To some extent, this is already happening. Though in the early stages of its development trauma theory focused predominantly on the Holocaust, in recent years the field has begun to diversify. It now also includes a still relatively small but significant amou…
Cross-Traumatic Affiliation
If, as Cathy Caruth observes in Unclaimed Experience , “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, ... history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24), then traumatic colonial histories not only have to be acknowledged more fully, on their own terms, and in their own terms, but they also have to be considered in relation to traumatic metropolitan or First World histories for trauma studies to have any hope of re…
Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas in the Work of Caryl Phillips
In this chapter, I will investigate the links forged between memories of black and Jewish suffering in the fiction and non-fiction of the British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips, one master of the genre Rebecca Walkowitz has called “comparison literature.” 1 In his novels Higher Ground (1989) and The Nature of Blood (1997), as well as in his travel book The European Tribe (1987), Phillips interweaves stories of anti-Semitic and racist violence se…
Ordinary Trauma in Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother
Considered in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery, the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked shed an interesting light on the debate over the monocultural bias of trauma theory in its “classical,” mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which t…
Nachträglichkeit
The Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit is central to the psychoanalytical understanding of trauma. However, it has not received much attention within the contemporary field of trauma studies. This paper attempts to reconstruct the logic inherent to this concept by examining Freud’s remarks on the case of Emma. Furthermore, it is argued that Nachträglichkeit offers an interesting perspective on both (a) the well-established yet controversial fin…
Badiou’s theory of the event and the politics of trauma recovery
There exists a conceptual parallel between psychological accounts of psychic trauma on the one hand, and French philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of the event on the other: both are defined by a relation of incommensurability or excessiveness with regard to the pre-existent context or system. Further development of this parallel, i.e., viewing trauma as an event in the Badiouian sense, enables us to pinpoint and clarify a logical fallacy at work …
Decolonizing Trauma Studies Round-Table Discussion
This round-table, which featured literary critics Professor Stef Craps, Professor Bryan Cheyette and Dr. Alan Gibbs, was recorded as part of the “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” symposium organized by Dr. Sonya Andermahr and Dr. Larissa Allwork at The School of The Arts, The University of Northampton (15 May 2015). Convened a week after the University of Zaragoza’s “Memory Frictions” conference, where Cheyette, Gibbs, Andermahr and Allwork gave pape…
Humanitarianism, Testimony, and the White Savior Industrial Complex
Humanitarianism, Testimony, and the White Savior Industrial ComplexWhat Is The What versus Kony 2012 Sean Bex (bio) and Stef Craps (bio) This article examines two instances of human rights advocacy—Dave Eggers's What Is the What (2006) and Invisible Children's Kony 2012—that have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. It aims to show how the former exposes and challenges the neocolonial assumptions underlying humanitarian campaigns …
Contemporary Fiction vs. the Challenge of Imagining the Timescale of Climate Change
Fiction writers who try to do justice to the vast temporal and spatial scales and the enormous complexity of climate change are faced with the problem that the phenomenon exceeds human perception and that it is not dramatic in the traditional sense. In this article we explore the formal challenges that arise when fiction takes on the temporality of climate change by examining three very different novels that seek to capture the geological timesca…
Beyond Identification in Human Rights Culture
In this article, we analyse two testimonial narratives written or published by Dave Eggers, an American author, editor, and publisher whose oeuvre shows a marked interest in harnessing the power of narrative to engage in human rights activism. Both narratives focus on the case of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American who suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and at the hands of the state through its response to that natural disaster. Ou…
Flooded cities in Low Countries fiction
In a range of environmentally oriented international novels, future cities in the Low Countries have been flooded, with Dutch populations relocated to higher grounds or to floating cities. In contemporary Dutch and Flemish fiction, however, reflections on cities by the water are few and far between. More conspicuously, in the few literary novels that imagine cities under threat from rising water levels, the cities in question are not located on t…
Grief as a Doorway to Love
Grief as a Doorway to Love:An Interview with Chris Jordan Stef Craps (bio) and Ida Marie Olsen (bio) The renowned American photographer, filmmaker, and artist Chris Jordan is no stranger to ecological grief. His stunning 2017 film Albatross, which tells the story of a gut-wrenching environmental tragedy that is unfolding on Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean, is steeped in it. Today Midway Island is part of the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refu…
Lost Words and Lost Worlds
This essay explores the problem of society’s environmental memory loss and the potential for literary and cultural works to counteract it. It uses the concepts of environmental generational amnesia and shifting baseline syndrome to argue that our connection to the natural world has been eroded by our severely limited experience of it. Each generation’s perception of what is “normal” in nature is shaped by their own experience rather than an objec…
History (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Literature (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Psychoanalysis (9 works)