White Oblivion: Antarctica and the Suspension of Trauma

Abstract

Trauma is often seen as the accumulation of several events incited and experienced generations apart. In Trauma Culture from 2005, E. Ann Kaplan notes, for example, that the shock experience of the twentieth century, with the Holocaust as the crucial event, has prompted a ripple effect of trauma experiences in the personal lives of those born after the fact. The past haunts the present, sometimes as an uncanny repetition, but almost always as a delayed response. At the other end of the temporal spectrum, anticipation of a future trauma in the form, for example, of the aftershocks of a global ecological disaster can have ripple effects in reverse. The all-too-predictable climate catastrophe of the future is already ascertainable in a generation that has not yet fully experienced it. Instead of a delayed response to a past event, we find an advance response to a future event.