Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America

Edited by Andrea Espinoza Carvajal, University of Exeter and Luis A. Medina Cordova, University of Birmingham

'Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America' sheds light on how, as Covid-19 spread, infecting and killing millions across the world, life not only continued to be experienced but also continued to be narrated. By putting together this volume, we help understand what happened in the region from a perspective in which, unlike most of what we saw during the health emergency, numbers, statistics and percentages are not at the centre of the analysis. The essays gathered here foreground something else: the manifold ways Covid-19 was subjectively and collectively narrated in the news, government reports, political speeches, NGO communications, social media, literature, songs and many other media. From a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this edition pay attention to how fictional and non-fictional stories, official discourses, as well as personal and political accounts, documented, represented and shaped the health crisis, laying bare how —in Latin American countries— the spread of the virus intersected with corruption, gender-based violence, inequality and exclusion, as with community, solidarity and hope. Readers will find that the focus on narrative provides an alternative source of knowledge on Latin America’s Covid-19 experience. Our perspective contrasts with the usual emphasis on death tolls, infection rates, weekly cases, vaccination counts, and the plethora of statistics that illustrated the gravity of the situation in the build-up to, during, and after the peak of the crisis. While extremely important to understand the situation, numbers do not tell the whole story. A comprehensive picture of the pandemic can only be achieved when the stories of the virus are accounted for. Health, after all, is no stranger to narrative. And neither is Latin America.

Narrative Medicine: Trauma and Ethics

Edited by Anders Juhl Rasmussen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Morten Sodemann, University Hospital Odense and University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

This new volume repositions narrative medicine and trauma studies in a global context with a particular focus on ethics. Trauma is a rapidly growing field of especially literary and cultural studies, and the ways in which trauma has asserted its relevance across disciplines, which intersect with narrative medicine, and how it has come to widen the scope of narrative research and medical practice constitute the principal concerns of this volume. This collection brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars coming from a wide range of academic fields within the faculty of humanities that include literary and media studies, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology as well as medical education and health care studies. This crossing of disciplines is also represented by the collaboration between the two editors. Most of the authors in the volume use narrative medicine to refer to the methodology pioneered by Rita Charon and her colleagues at Columbia University, but in some chapters, the authors use it to refer to other methodologies and pedagogies utilizing that descriptor. Trauma is today understood both in the restricted sense in which it is used in the mental health field and in its more widespread, popular usage in literature. This collection aspires to prolong, deepen, and advance the field of narrative medicine in two important aspects: by bringing together both the cultural and the clinical side of trauma and by opening the investigation to a truly global horizon.

Embodied Testimonies, Gendered Memories, and the Poetics of Trauma

Exploring the Intersection of Deconstructionist and Postcolonial Trauma Theory

Edited by Maryam Ghodrati, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Rachel Dale, Brandeis University

"Embodied Testimonies, Gendered Memories, and the Poetics of Trauma" is a collection of academic essays that uses mainstream and postcolonial trauma theory in the analysis of literary and artistic representations of traumatic history. This collection prioritizes historical and personal accounts from the perspectives of Iranian, Arab, Jewish, and Black women to highlight the ways in which gender, race, and religion shape experiences of trauma. By drawing attention to individual experiences of suffering — both visible and invisible — the authors reconsider the basis for collective and socio-political engagement. The book re-examines established postcolonial trauma theory, which can occasionally overemphasize the collectivity of traumatic experience and subsume individual stories under ideological nationalism. Each chapter in this collection explores methods of balancing the pain of the individual and the community through analyses of art, literature, and film. Together, these chapters demonstrate the importance of embracing a dynamic and diverse approach to the representation of trauma that makes marginalized survivors visible while also recognizing the complexities of gendered and racialized experiences of trauma.

Fix-It Fics: Challenging the Status Quo through Fan Fiction

Edited by Kaitlin Tonti, Albright College

Over the past ten years, fan fiction has outgrown its perceived taboo, as made by the public, and has evolved into a legitimate form of writing and self-expression. Academics, too, have recognized the potential for fan fiction studies through the lens of the humanities, psychology, sociology, and gender and queer studies. What makes 'Fix-It Fics: Challenging the Status Quo through Fanfiction' unique is in its specific focus on the fan fiction subgenre: fix-it fics. Also known in fan fiction communities as the fix-it, fans writing in this subgenre are motivated by fixing what they believe the original creators did not get right the first time. More significantly, fix-it fic writers generally use their prose to fix the unaddressed biases that are perpetuated on their favorite character, or plot lines, by either the original creator or other fans. The fix-it fic has existed for some time; however, it was after J.K. Rowling’s degrading remarks about the transgender community that fix-it fic writers clearly saw themselves as the only ones who could challenge the prejudices associated with their fandoms. The essay featured in this book reflects on the fix-it fic as an outlet for self-advocacy and community activism through the written word. Chapters in this book focus on fandoms including but not limited to Supernatural, Harry Potter, Wentworth, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, Hannibal, Star Trek, and Batman, while also addressing topics such as the Omegaverse, healing trauma, and creating community archives. 'Fix-It Fics: Challenging the Status Quo through Fanfiction' will appeal to popular culture, sociology, and gender and queer studies scholars who are invested in the larger academic conversation and offers an array of essays that any college professor teaching popular culture will surely benefit from including in their courses.

Heritage as an action word: Uses beyond communal memory

Edited by Susan Shay, Heritage Research Centre, University of Cambridge and Kelly M. Britt, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, United States

There is no limit to what constitutes heritage. By definition, heritage is the use of the past for present purposes. Yet, to any given group or population, heritage can be a multitude of things and can serve a variety of purposes. Based on shared memory, heritage can be tangible or intangible, boundless in variety and scope: it can be, for example, objects, landscapes, food or clothing, music or dance, sites or statues, monuments or buildings. Importantly, however, heritage also has many and varied uses and powers. It can be used to control, to unite, to engage, and to empower people, communities, and nations. In this interdisciplinary volume, authors from around the world explore how different communities, nations, and groups intentionally and creatively use heritage, both tangible and intangible, in a wide variety of ways to positively address social and environmental issues. Significantly, these studies demonstrate how heritage can be an exceptionally valuable tool for political, economic, and social change. Insightful studies are presented pertaining to heritage as social memory, including the nationalistic political use of heritage, heritage as resistance to political powers, traditional knowledge as environmental science, heritage for legal and community action, heritage for building peace, heritage for Indigenous and minority empowerment, and heritage for exploring the past through phenomenological methods. The goal of this volume is to move beyond seeing heritage as only social memory, a mere interpretation of static past events, people or places, and instead explores critically the variety of ways heritage is engaged in the present and can be in the future.