On the Exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba from the “Trauma Genre”

The extensive literature on trauma, social suffering, memory and loss has so far excluded consideration of the Palestinian Nakba, in spite of its place in world politics, its many similarities to other cases of social suffering, and the unusual feature of its continuation and escalation more than sixty years after the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. This paper examines this exclusion through reviewing the genealogy, theoretical orientations, and institutional supports of the 'trauma genre,' from its crystallization in the early 1990s, through its expansion up to today. The idea of the way the communication of suffering is facilitated within 'moral communities' is invoked as one kind of explanation of the trauma genre's failure to consider the Nakba. Adapted from the source document.