Abstract
In this introduction we present the six case studies that will form the basis of the comparative analysis of the trauma of decolonization (which is summarized in the conclusion). The countries are the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, France, and Japan, and their corresponding chapters are written by experts with a deep knowledge of the respective countries. In these original contributions the authors were asked to apply the framework of cultural trauma theory, thus making them unique as well as innovative case studies. We also outline cultural trauma theory and explain its significance to the study of post-WWII decolonization.
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Notes
- 1.
As his focus was on «whites», Ferenczi did not count in his estimate the sizeable number of Japanese colonists in Asia. His paper just listed the 684 white residents in the Japanese empire (Ferenczi 1938: 230).
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Terminology here is particularly slippery. In many cases, to talk of “return” is appropriate, as large sectors of the “returning” population had been born and educated in the homeland and had spent a relatively limited span of time in the colony. In fact, one of the main paradoxes of decolonization is that the settler populations had generally expanded noticeably on the eve of decolonization, as a consequence of the attempts to “save” the colonies modernizing and developing them (Osterhammel 2005). On the contrary, other sectors of the colonial populations, particularly in some settler colonies, had been there for multiple generations. Already in 1938, as example, 80% of the European residents in French Algeria had been born in the colony. Equally problematic is to classify the “return” of the colonial populations as «coerced/forced» or «voluntary» . On this point, see Smith (2009) and Talbot (2011).
- 5.
The only sizeable antecedent in modern times had been the presence of colonial troops during the two world wars. Besides the war climate, such presence had been surely more strictly regimented, highly controlled and openly temporary. Even so, the presence of «colored» troops had raised across the political spectrum a strong level of anxiety and prejudice, best exemplified by the schwarze Schande (Lebzelter 1985; Wigger 2010).
- 6.
- 7.
For an interesting comparison with the Japanese experience, see Sharpe (2014).
- 8.
For one exception, see Visser (2015).
- 9.
CTP provides consequently some clear definitions of trauma as culturally constructed. See as example the one provided by Neil J. Smelser: «a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is (a) laden with negative affect; (b) represented as indelible; and (c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions» (Smelser 2004: 44)
- 10.
CTP militates against the widespread modern tendency to treat evil cognitively, but also against the widespread view that questioning the self-evident, factual, nature of evil is both an offense to the victims and a possible apology for the perpetrators. In a world where even those who deny the Holocaust or Soviet crimes are increasingly outspoken, to deny the facticity of evil may easily be construed as an irresponsible attitude. Still, CTP is adamant in dismantling what they call the «naturalistic fallacy,» the tendency to attribute cultural traumas to actual events and to evaluate the events only in terms of truth-criteria (Alexander 2004). It does not imply the obvious importance of historical research and forensic science. It means to stress that narrations, not actual events, are the stuff of which cultural traumas are made. In order to become socially shared, events are to be believed and represented. They need names, contexts, and attributions of guilt and presumptions of innocence, heroes and villains. They need symbolic anchors and powerful analogies. The representation of the harmful events requires a specific form of cultural imagination that selects, shapes and condenses any element of actual experience. To acknowledge this cultural imagination does not imply an «anything goes» attitude.
- 11.
Ron Eyerman’s seminal work on the memory of slavery in the US is a good example: without denying that slavery is an obviously traumatic experience , he shows how the claim that the historical experience of slavery is the basis of a collective, unified, identity—something able to transcend all other cleavages within the emerging African-American community—appeared only after the Civil War, when slavery had been abolished. It was a creative action of a large network of intellectuals and professionals, who had never been slaves themselves. It required overcoming the feeling of shame for the degradation endured by ancestors, as well as the resistance of the many people convinced that it was time to forget and «move on.» It required forging a narrative that could challenge the dominant view of slaves as hapless persons who had been «liberated» by magnanimous Northern whites, making them instead part of a heroic tale of resistance. Their narrative achievement was not fixed once and for all. It was reconstructed by subsequent generations, each one appropriating it in its own terms, thus reproducing the feeling of a common past. Although significant within the boundaries of the African-American community for most of its history, such collective memory in recent decades has also acquired a wider audience, and a more inclusive meaning (Eyerman 2001).
- 12.
Decolonization produced such a large volume of international refugees that a new international regime had to be designed for them (Loescher 1996).
- 13.
Although they were usually unsuccessful, settlers could rely on the example of Rhodesia to highlight the potential damages that their action could impart to their homeland prestige.
- 14.
Going back to Ferenczi’s (1938) study, around 1930 «whites» (a category in which Ferenczi included statistically many mixed-race individuals that were not considered white in administrative practice) were only 6.2% of the population of the Dutch colonies and 2% in the Portuguese and Italian ones. In the Belgian Congo, they were only 0.5% of the population. The French empire was the only one having a sizeable colonial population overseas, particularly in Algeria, that his study considered as a colony rather than an overseas department (Ferenczi 1938).
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Sciortino, G., Eyerman, R. (2020). Introduction. In: Eyerman, R., Sciortino, G. (eds) The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_1
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