Articulating Childhood Trauma

The volume addresses the pertinent need to examine childhood trauma revolving around themes of war, sexual abuse, and disability. Drawing narratives from spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts, the book analyses how conflict, abuse, domestic violence, contours of gender construction, and narratives of ableism affect a child’s transactions with society. While exploring complex manifestations of children’s experience of trauma, the volume seeks to understand the issues related to translatability/representation, of trauma bearing in mind the fact that children often lack the language to express their sense of loss. The book in its study of childhood trauma does a close exegesis of select literary pieces, drawings done by children, memoirs, and graphic narratives.

Academicians and research scholars from the disciplines of childhood studies, trauma studies, resilience studies, visual studies, gender studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and film studies stand to benefit from this volume. The ideas that have been expressed in this volume will richly contribute towards further research and scholarship in this domain.

Kamayani Kumar is Assistant Professor of Literature in the Department of English, Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi, India. She obtained her PhD from IIT Delhi, on the child as a victim of Partition and transgenerational transmission of Partition trauma. She has worked extensively on partition and childhood trauma studies. She is currently authoring a book that focuses on how art as a medium has been used to represent and articulate partition and its violently divisive legacy. Her area of interest includes Partition Studies, Childhood Studies, Film Studies, Trauma Studies, and Visual Narratives on partition.