Annotated Bibliography: Have We Become Numb To Suffering And Trauma?

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Nathaniel Champion
Student
ENGL 1102-498
19 November 2017
Annotated Bibliography: Have we become numb to suffering & trauma?
Despite a recent increase in attention within the social sciences, suffering remains for the most part outside of the purview of sociologists and the public alike. Without sympathy for those who are suffering or going through trauma we allow ourselves to become numb to horror and tragedy.

Harvey, Daina Cheyenne. “A Quiet Suffering: Some Notes on the Sociology of Suffering.”
Sociological Forum, vol. 27, no. 2, 2012, pp. 527–534
Daina Harvey in this brief essay reiterates recent call in these pages to document those less well-marked forms of domination—both on the side of those who exercise power and those who experience it—and to move the conversation further along, use this opportunity, via some ethnographic insights from a year-long ethnography of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, to make some remarks on what a sociology of suffering might look like. They also note some of the causes of suffering in the Lower Ninth Ward in order to both familiarize the reader with what is going on there and in an attempt to denaturalize the suffering. After a field note and excerpts from a conversation with Lee, a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, they show …show more content…

The autobiography lies at a crucial nexus in the drift of trauma in narrative, an era during which trauma ceases to adopt pre-historical forms and is officially assembled into terrorist weaponry. Trauma in A Month and a Day results from state terrorism—it is transparently political, and is thereby a link between the archetypes of trauma that precede it and the sub-state terrorism that comes in its wake. The essay concludes that SaroWiwa’s diary is a milestone on the route from personal trauma to the trauma of state terrorism in Nigerian

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