1st Edition
Articulating Childhood Trauma In the Context of War, Sexual Abuse and Disability
The volume addresses the pertinent need to examine childhood trauma revolving around themes of war, sexual abuse, and disability. Drawing narratives from spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts, the book analyses how conflict, abuse, domestic violence, contours of gender construction, and narratives of ableism affect a child’s transactions with society. While exploring complex manifestations of children’s experience of trauma, the volume seeks to understand the issues related to translatability/representation, of trauma bearing in mind the fact that children often lack the language to express their sense of loss. The book in its study of childhood trauma does a close exegesis of select literary pieces, drawings done by children, memoirs, and graphic narratives.
Academicians and research scholars from the disciplines of childhood studies, trauma studies, resilience studies, visual studies, gender studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and film studies stand to benefit from this volume. The ideas that have been expressed in this volume will richly contribute towards further research and scholarship in this domain.
Introduction-Understanding Childhood and Trauma. 1. (Re)surging the Traumatic Memory: Recovery, Healing and the Therapeutic Reading of the Select Childhood Memoirs - Goutam Karmakar 2. Telling the “untellable”: Mapping trauma through spatial negotiations in Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir- Amrita Das 3. War and Children: A Specific Case of Historical Experience- Sonia Knapcyzk 4. Childhood Trauma and Abelism in Partition Fiction- Nukhbah Taj Langdah and Sobia Kiran 5. Representation of Disability, Memory, and Conflict: Through Sorayya Khan’s Noor (2003)- Ann Susan Abraham 6. Surviving the Body: Narrating Childhood Disability, Disabled Body and Trauma in the Context of Matthew Sanford and Emily Rapp’s Memoirs- Somasree Sarkar 7. Lament Graphically Drawn: Dynamism of Indian Comics in Sensitizing Child-Abuse inside the House- Priyanka Tripathi; Partha Bhattacharjee; Bidisha Pal 8. Reimagi(ni)ng Childhood Traumas: Distorted Perceptions of the Self in Una’s Becoming Unbecoming-Dr. Rupali 9. Childhood Innocence and Vulnerability to Sex Abuse- Rahul Kamble 10. Fatherlessness and Bastardization in the West Indian Novel: The Trauma of Being ‘Outside Children’- Meenakshi Bharat 11. Mothering a Muslim: Shielding, Buffering and Adapting- Sadia Hasan 12. The Trope of the Bastard Child: A Close Study of Children of War (2014)- Sango Bidani 13. Understanding Childhood Gender Nonconformity and Formation of Self: vis-à-vis Hijra Personal Narratives- Shrimi Gupta 14. Love, Longing and Trauma in Children’s and Young Adult Literature in Japan- Suman Sigroha and Arya Priyadarshini 15. Children First, Disabled or Not: A Study of Inclusivity in Twenty-First Century Indian English Children’s Literature- Anurima Chanda
Biography
Kamayani Kumar is Assistant Professor of Literature in the Department of English, Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi, India. She obtained her PhD from IIT Delhi, on the child as a victim of Partition and transgenerational transmission of Partition trauma. She has worked extensively on partition and childhood trauma studies. She is currently authoring a book that focuses on how art as a medium has been used to represent and articulate partition and its violently divisive legacy. Her area of interest includes Partition Studies, Childhood Studies, Film Studies, Trauma Studies, and Visual Narratives on partition.
