Trafficking trauma
Intellectual property rights and the political economy of traumatic storytelling
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11416850 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C J Colvin (0000-0002-8930-7863, University of Virginia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 171-182 |
| Publication date | 2006-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Arts (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0256-0046 • E-ISSN: 1992-6049 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02560040608557785 |
| OpenAlex | W1995410562 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 8 |
This article begins with a brief look at Khulumani Support Group, a support group for victims of apartheid-era human rights abuses. After apartheid, after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), these victims were still busy producing the stuff of dramatic public and personal memories. Though there were a range of actors involved in soliciting, promoting, circulating and consuming these stories of trauma, it is the global brokers of traumatic memory – the students and professors, the journalists, the documentary filmmakers, the visiting priests, politicians and psychologists – in whom I am most interested. As I worked with Khulumani, a name for this process of painful, repeated narrativisation about the past presented itself – traumatic storytelling – and an image of the routes of these narratives, the transactions involved, the sites and meanings of consumption took shape in the form of the metaphor of political economy. This political economy of traumatic storytelling was a frequent topic of conversation and controversy among group members, who had grown skeptical of the benefits of participating in this global flow of narrative. This article sketches an outline of this political economy of traumatic storytelling, raises questions about intellectual property rights in the circulation and consumption of traumatic narratives, and explores the recent, ambivalent moves by Khulumani to take back some control over these valued, circulating narrative objects
Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Conversation · Human rights · Literature · Media studies · Metaphor · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Storytelling · Traumatic memories · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Legal Issues in South Africa · Psychology · Social Psychology · South African History and Culture
| Citations per year | 0.18 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2026 (12) |
| Highly cited | No |