ABSTRACT
Foundational literary trauma studies, developed primarily in North America, emerged as a belated turn to the Holocaust – in the aftermath of Vietnam – and to the victims and their memories. Needless to say, the forms of cultural trauma – and the literature representing them – are too many to include in a single entry. In late 20th and 21st century, Latin and North American literature highlighted many representative forms of collective trauma that have unfolded in the inter-American context: political repression, dictatorship, and genocide in Latin America, and the complicity of the United States in these. Central American literature from the 1990s on has also born witness through narrative to society’s failure to address atrocities from the past in the present. In inter-American literature of trauma, exile and diaspora continue to entangle the Americas as traumatic injury leads to movement through space, yet flight and migration offer little escape.
