Trauma, Art and Memory in the Postcolony: Turning Sorrow into Meaning

By: David Corbet

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Synopsis: This wide-ranging book provides a scholarly account of recent and contemporary memorial and counter-memorial practices occurring in the visual arts, across diverse postcolonial topologies and imaginaries. The emphasis is on commemorative creative practices and responses to traumatic events of recent times, within and beyond the Museum. This major survey encompasses discourses on perception, affect and trauma in the visual arts; commissioned civic art and memorial architecture; activist and socially-engaged art projects; creative praxis; and expressions of minority and First Nations cultural resilience. The book offers insights into contemporary exhibitionary practices; decolonial methodologies; and spatial politics, with a significant focus on art’s ability to reveal and reactivate silenced histories, sites and ‘non-places’. It will be of great interest to students, researchers and subject experts alike, across the fields of visual arts, architecture and urban planning; cultural and memory studies; and trauma and affect studies; contextualising the work of artists and curators within some of the most urgent socio-political, environmental and philosophical debates of the twenty-first century.