Trauma Remembered and Forgotten: The Figure of the Hysteric in Kerri Sakamoto's "The Electrical Field"

Kern Sakamoto's novel The Electrical Field successfully resists a new and insidious form of social amnesia surrounding the Japanese-Canadian internment. Perpetuated by the act of collective remembering and reinforced by the teleological structure of social and literary narratives representing the internment, this communal forgetting is resisted through the novel's use of discourses of hysteria.