Practising affect for haunted speakability: Triggering trauma through an interactive art project

ABSTRACT

This article explores how silenc(ed) traces of intergenerational violence manifest themselves as spectral absences/presences in descendants’ lifeworlds, and how descendants in turn attempt to unsettle the unspeakable and unknowable. Focusing on Istori Kita (Our History), a book and set of interactive performances by Dutch memory artist Simone Berger (2016, Istori Kita, Jouw familiegeschiedenis. Ontdek je familiegeschiedenis met je (groot)ouders. Maak Indische, Molukse, Chinees-Indische en Hollandse herinneringen aan Nederlands-Indië weer levend! Volendam: LM Publishers.), I analyse the contradictory dynamics associated with Indisch (Indo-Dutch) zwijgen[i] (silence, silencing) and chart a haunted speakability that harbours gendered, racialised and classed structures of colonial and postcolonial inequality. Haunted speakability reflects affective urgencies to unmask silences, pointing not only to the limitations of speech but also to the possibilities, challenges and limitations of practising affect as a method of unsettling the unconscious and unintentional transfer of intergenerational trauma.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective labour
• triggering
• trauma
• affective tools
• haunting
• intergenerational

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Clarke and Thomas (2006) for a consideration of the African-American context.

2 See Trouillot (1995) for a detailed discussion on how speakability frequently produces the unspeakable.

3 During the production of this article, a new wave of memory activism has emerged. See for example https://historibersama.com/.

4 This is a point that has been extensively discussed by scholars such as Foucault and Derrida, who have argued that silence, rather than being absence, is a multiple and embodied presence that haunts language and is an integral part of discursive formation (Derrida (1993), Foucault (1978)).

5 Repatriates from the Dutch East Indies who started coming to the Netherlands in the late 1940s were subjected to cultural assimilation politics. These politics were framed by the structural racism and discrimination that informed many of the social policies of the time, including social housing, which was not granted to families that appeared to be ‘too Asian’ or ‘too oriented towards the East’ (Mak (2000), 250).

6 For more details, see Dragojlovic 2015a, 2015b, 2018.

7 For a nuanced analysis of Indisch heterogeneity in the Dutch post-colonial society, see Leeuwen (2008).

8 See Eva Hoffman (2010).

9 For an extensive discussion about affective labour, see Hardt (1999).

10 See for example Nijhof and Cousijnsen (2010).

11 See, for example, Massumi (2002), Gregg and Seigworth Intro.

12 For a different take on the contested relationship between children and parents in Indisch engagements with past violence, see Dragojlovic 2018.