ABSTRACT
In Laurence Kirmayer's case, the distinctions between 'private space of shame' and 'public space of solidarity', between amnesia and involuntary recall, circumvent the way in which questions of trauma serve to destabilize these very categories. The contributors are for the most part informed by and responding to the work of Ian Hacking, whose book, Rewriting the Soul, is an imaginative attempt to historicize current debates about the therapeutic and political significance of memory and trauma. In an elegant and incisive introduction, the editors establish the parameters through which Hacking's framework will be inflected in the essays that follow. While acknowledging an emphasis on a social production of 'memory', they propose a move away from a macro-historical approach, towards a location of 'memory' in discrete practices of remembrance. In a compelling and incisive analysis, Donna J. Young discusses the uses of memory in production of life stories of three generations of women in an impoverished rural area of New Brunswick, Canada.
