There have been many studies applying the literary trauma theory to the writings of survivors of events such as the African American Slave Trade and the Holocaust; however, the trauma writings of the survivors of a non-Western event have often been neglected. Even when discussing socialist revolutions, the works of Chinese writers, such as Wang Wenshi and Sun Li, are seldom referred to, and the works of Russian greats often supersede.
Much of the history surrounding cultural and literary trauma theories have been studied with a western audience in mind as if an entire genre was not borne out of the Cultural Revolution’s tragedy (1966-1976) in China. The scar literature movement (1977-1983) occurred due to people’s trauma during and after the Cultural Revolution. The “scar” served as a metaphor for the sort of “emotional catharsis (qian shi) and the “bright tails (guanming weiba)[2]. While working to confront trauma, in this case, revolutionary trauma, those that participated in the scar literature movement worked to simultaneously tackle yet repudiate the trauma that the Cultural Revolution had caused. In turn, this led scar literature to become representative of how the repudiation of such traumatic memories becomes the rudiment that allows for the interpretation of personal and national trauma and goes even further to demonstrate how the denial of this trauma fundamentally reconstructed Chinese cultural identities well into the present. In my research, I set out to examine the relationship between the trauma writings of the survivors of China’s Cultural Revolution and South Korea’s Gwangju Uprising in order to comparatively analyze the similarities and differences in East Asia’s responses to a significant, cultural trauma without referring back to a Western event. I firmly believe that to understand the sort of underpinnings of a collective (cultural) unconscious; we need to analyze how the societies’ responses were interceded, understood, and reconstructed into a collective voice.
[1]Balaev, Michelle. 1 Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered. In: Michelle Balaev, ed. Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory. Pallgrave MacMillan, Pg. 10
[2] King, Richard. “”Wounds” and “Exposure”: Chinese Literature after the Gang of Four.” Pacific Affairs 54, no. 1 (1981): 82-99.. Pg 3