COMPARATIVE TRAUMA NARRATIVES ACROSS SOUTH ASIAN, AFRICAN, AND CARIBBEAN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Abstract

This study examines the decolonization of trauma studies through a comparative analysis of postcolonial literature from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. While foundational trauma theory, grounded in psychoanalysis and Holocaust studies, established an ethical framework for bearing witness to catastrophic injury, its Eurocentric bias has systematically marginalized non-Western traumatic experiences. Drawing on the critical interventions of Stef Craps, Sonya Andermahr, and other decolonial scholars, this paper demonstrates how foundational trauma theory relies on four problematic assumptions: event-based temporal models, individualized psychological frameworks, prescriptive modernist aesthetics, and a monocultural geopolitical scope. Through comparative textual analysis, this review reveals how postcolonial writers across three regions reconfigure trauma representation through culturally grounded aesthetic strategies. South Asian literature, centered on the 1947 Partition and ongoing civil conflicts, employs social realism and political testimony to document cartographic displacement. African narratives connect postcolonial state tyranny with domestic oppression, utilizing oral traditions and communal storytelling as modes of resistance. Caribbean literature transforms the Middle Passage into oceanic archives through syncretic myth-making and multi-temporal fabulation. The paper argues that these diverse narrative strategies collectively challenge Eurocentric paradigms by presenting trauma as chronic, structural, and collective rather than event-based, individual, and privatized. Ultimately, postcolonial trauma narratives establish alternative pathways to healing through communal solidarity, historical justice, and cultural reconnection. This comparative framework advances cross-cultural ethical engagement while demonstrating how postcolonial literature enriches and expands trauma theory beyond its Western origins.