Stef Crap
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 85818 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Stef Crap |
| PRENOMES | Stef |
| SOBRENOME | Crap |
| ASSINATURA | CRAP S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Ghent University Hospital |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6720-1689 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 174 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
An inconvenient comparison
This article examines how Holocaust memory shapes contemporary representations of climate change. Despite the climate crisis being unprecedented in human history, its cultural imagination often draws on historical calamities such as the Holocaust, nuclear annihilation, and colonial destruction. Employing the concepts of postmemory, multidirectional memory, and anticipatory memory, together with the notion of an ethics of comparison, the article e…
Introduction – Climate Witnessing
This introduction outlines the conceptual framework of climate witnessing, a new approach to memory, testimony and cultural engagement with environmental crisis in the Anthropocene. Building on foundational theories of trauma and testimony developed in Holocaust and memory studies, we trace how witnessing has evolved in response to planetary-scale transformations. Expanding the category of witness to include non-human entities, ecological assembl…
Ecological apologies
Focusing on British artist Marcus Coates’s Apology to the Great Auk, a short film documenting an official apology to an extinct bird, this article explores the possibility and desirability of political apologies for anthropogenic species extinction. While the apology presented in the film fails to meet key criteria, it nonetheless offers something of political value. Coates’s work constitutes an audacious and innovative attempt to leverage ecolog…
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…
The Mnemonics summer school
Mnemonics is an international collaborative initiative to provide doctoral training in memory studies that has been organizing a rotating small-scale summer school since 2012.The network had been launched at a meeting in Brussels 1 year earlier.The first person to float the idea for it was none other than the renowned memory scholar Andreas Huyssen -though when I brought this up in my introduction to a keynote lecture by him a few years ago, he c…
Guilty Grieving in an Age of Ecocide
This essay seeks to demonstrate the value of different guilt-ridden and grief-stricken cultural forms and social practices in helping us develop a new emotional literacy to navigate the challenges of environmental breakdown and collective responsibility. It examines three case studies – Octavia Cade’s novella The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, Chris Jordan’s documentary film Albatross and the self-immolation of David Buckel – that illustrate t…
Memory dynamics in times of crisis
Working at the intersection of political science, ethnographic sociology, and contemporary historiography, Sarah Gensburger specializes in the social dynamics of memory. In this interview, she talks about her book Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood, Paris 2015–2016, which traces the evolving memorialization processes following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, their impact on the local landscape, and the social appr…
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…
Introduction
Introduction:Ecological Grief Stef Craps (bio) Now is a time for grief to persist, to ring throughout the world. —Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature, 2007, p. 185 Marybeth Holleman's poem "How to grieve a glacier," published in ISLE in 2019, starts by noting the difficulty if not absurdity of the process the title promises to guide the reader through. After all, as a non-human entity, a glacier is an unusual object of affection: "It's not som…
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…
Towards an Understanding of Drone Fiction
Since the end of the twentieth century, strike-capable military drones have rapidly evolved from an ominous near-future technology, seldom discussed outside of science fiction or top-secret military contexts, to a burgeoning multi-billion dollar international industry at the centre of public scrutiny and interest. Meanwhile, the figure of the drone has saturated Western public consciousness to the point that it can be described as a trope. Sparki…
Introduction
The call for papers for this collection on “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction” arose from concerns about pessimistic assessments, in recent literary criticism, of the novel’s ability to meet the representational challenges posed by the pressing planetary problem of climate change. The contributions to this volume take issue with that pessimism and take stock of the novel’s capabilities
Memory studies and the Anthropocene
The essays gathered here are slightly revised versions of the position papers presented as part of the roundtable on “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene” at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in January 2017. What sparked this roundtable is the increasing currency of the Anthropocene, on the one hand, and the observation that the field of memory studies has lately begun to grapple with its implications in earnest, on the other. The participants,…
Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory
This essay explores a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies. Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collaps…
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 …
Humanitarianism, Testimony, and the White Savior Industrial Complex
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…
Playing with Trauma
Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so the theme of trauma and its accompanying tropes have been seeping into video games over the last two decades. In spite of the discernible trauma trend within video games, however, and the potential they exhibit for representing trauma in new ways, they have received very little critical notice from trauma theorists. In this article, we argue that a trau…
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…
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
Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory
This essay explores a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies. Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collaps…
Introduction
Introduction:Ecological Grief Stef Craps (bio) Now is a time for grief to persist, to ring throughout the world. —Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature, 2007, p. 185 Marybeth Holleman's poem "How to grieve a glacier," published in ISLE in 2019, starts by noting the difficulty if not absurdity of the process the title promises to guide the reader through. After all, as a non-human entity, a glacier is an unusual object of affection: "It's not som…
Wor(l)ds of grief
Introduction
The call for papers for this collection on “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction” arose from concerns about pessimistic assessments, in recent literary criticism, of the novel’s ability to meet the representational challenges posed by the pressing planetary problem of climate change. The contributions to this volume take issue with that pessimism and take stock of the novel’s capabilities
Dispersal and redemption
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…
Memory studies and the Anthropocene
The essays gathered here are slightly revised versions of the position papers presented as part of the roundtable on “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene” at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in January 2017. What sparked this roundtable is the increasing currency of the Anthropocene, on the one hand, and the observation that the field of memory studies has lately begun to grapple with its implications in earnest, on the other. The participants,…
Towards an Understanding of Drone Fiction
Since the end of the twentieth century, strike-capable military drones have rapidly evolved from an ominous near-future technology, seldom discussed outside of science fiction or top-secret military contexts, to a burgeoning multi-billion dollar international industry at the centre of public scrutiny and interest. Meanwhile, the figure of the drone has saturated Western public consciousness to the point that it can be described as a trope. Sparki…
Learning to Live With Ghosts
The past is never dead.It's not even past
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
Ecological apologies
Focusing on British artist Marcus Coates’s Apology to the Great Auk, a short film documenting an official apology to an extinct bird, this article explores the possibility and desirability of political apologies for anthropogenic species extinction. While the apology presented in the film fails to meet key criteria, it nonetheless offers something of political value. Coates’s work constitutes an audacious and innovative attempt to leverage ecolog…
Humanitarianism, Testimony, and the White Savior Industrial Complex
Playing with Trauma
Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so the theme of trauma and its accompanying tropes have been seeping into video games over the last two decades. In spite of the discernible trauma trend within video games, however, and the potential they exhibit for representing trauma in new ways, they have received very little critical notice from trauma theorists. In this article, we argue that a trau…
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
Learning to Live With Ghosts
The past is never dead.It's not even past
Dispersal and redemption
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…
Playing with Trauma
Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so the theme of trauma and its accompanying tropes have been seeping into video games over the last two decades. In spite of the discernible trauma trend within video games, however, and the potential they exhibit for representing trauma in new ways, they have received very little critical notice from trauma theorists. In this article, we argue that a trau…
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 …
Humanitarianism, Testimony, and the White Savior Industrial Complex
Memory studies and the Anthropocene
The essays gathered here are slightly revised versions of the position papers presented as part of the roundtable on “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene” at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in January 2017. What sparked this roundtable is the increasing currency of the Anthropocene, on the one hand, and the observation that the field of memory studies has lately begun to grapple with its implications in earnest, on the other. The participants,…
Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory
This essay explores a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies. Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collaps…
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…
Art (21 obras) · History (21 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Aesthetics (16 obras) · Literature (15 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration (13 obras) · Philosophy (13 obras) · Political science (13 obras)