The Violence of Sentimentality in Encounters with Traumatized Others

Abstract

How does trauma enter education? Do students’ and teachers’ emotional responses to trauma constitute moral principles against violence and injustice? How do feelings of injustice morph the rhetoric of trauma narratives that are circulated through curriculum and teaching? Trauma has often been described as a private, psychological experience, as a painful event that an individual goes through but that others cannot feel or fully understand (Herman, 1997; Kaplan, 2005). And yet trauma is continually evoked in public and pedagogical discourses as that which demands collective response (Ahmed, 2004). Deemed otherwise unspeakable, the unrepresentable trauma is translated into narratives and testimonials that are effective in communicating trauma as a painful experience (Berlant, 2001, 2004). Thus, it is argued that introducing students to trauma narratives and testimonies is an important way of approaching controversial issues such as war, cross-cultural conflict, genocide, racism, and terrorism (Bouchard, 2002; Schweber, 2004; Zembylas, 2006b, 2007). For example, feelings of sadness or moral anger about others’ suffering enable students to enter into a relationship with others: “the pain of others becomes ‘ours,’” writes Ahmed, “an appropriation that transforms and perhaps even neutralizes their pain into our sadness” (2004, p. 21). The first chapter of this book is grounded on the notion that teaching about stories of suffering, pain, and trauma allows for learning that is emotionally, politically, and educationally significant; yet, it is also pointed out that in this process there are several dangers that need to be critically analyzed and dealt with.