Reading Violence and Trauma in Asia and the World

This collection casts the spotlight on Asia and its place in global studies on trauma to explore the ways in which violence and trauma are (re)enacted, (re)presented, (re)imagined, reconciled, and consumed through various mediums in the region. The discussions revolve around the ethics of representing and discussing trauma as we negotiate the tensions between trauma and political, historical, literary, and cultural representations in written, visual, digital, and hybrid forms. It examines how perspectives about trauma are framed, perpetuated, and/or critiqued via theories and research methods, and how a constructive tension between theory, method, and experience is essential for critical discourse on the subject. It will discuss varied ways of understanding violence through multidisciplinary perspectives and comparative literature, explore the "violent psyches" of narratives and writings across different mediums and platforms, and engage with how violence and trauma continue to influence the telling and form of such narratives.

Yiru Lim is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Interdisciplinary and Experiential Learning at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her main research interests include ekphrasis, narrative and the imagination, and stories of illness and pain, and those of vulnerable groups. She has published in the Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE) and was co-author of Coal Mining and Gentrification in Japan published in 2019.

Kit Ying Lye is currently Senior Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her dissertation focuses on the use of magical realism in the representation of Cold War violence in Southeast Asian literature. Her research interests are, mainly, the Cold War in Southeast Asia, history and its remembrance, death in Southeast Asian literature and culture, and Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage. She has published works that discuss the use of literature to represent civil wars in Southeast Asia. She is also the principal investigator of the research project on Singapore Chinese Funerary Practices. She is the co-editor of Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City (Routledge).