ABSTRACT
Chapter 11 examines the role of public narratives in shaping the social memory of trauma. Narratives are the discursive means that people use to make sense of their trauma experiences. This recognition of public narrative as “made” reality reframes the discussion of the impact of historical trauma from a search for historical facts and their interpretation toward examining its representation in the life of contemporary society. As part of a consolidative and reconstructive informational process, historical memory is highly susceptible to cognitive distortions and biases. Due to the social desirability factor and the selectiveness of memory, public narratives can become a powerful tool for manipulating and weaponizing history and can be used for political, social, or monetary gains that plant distrust in what we thought we knew about the past. On the other hand, those who appropriate ancestral trauma and employ themselves to represent the pain of others en masse can be equally biased. Yet no matter how biased the narratives can be, they carry important heuristic value, and when controlled for biases, can meaningfully connect us with the historic traumatic past to establish the continuity of time, context, and meaning for traumatic experiences.
