2.19. The Sound of Silence: Literature, Film and Traumatic Embodiment

This paper conducts a textual and visual analysis of The Giver (2014, dir. Phillip Noyce), a film adaptation of Lois Lowry’s novel of the same name, to investigate how it presents the erasure of collective memory as a catalyst for the breakdown of democratic values and rights. The Giver portrays a seemingly perfect futuristic society, created in response to a catastrophic event known as “The Ruin”. The community’s survival and apparent harmony are sustained through a strict system of rules that govern every aspect of life – what individuals think, say, feel, and even how they dress. While rules are essential for protecting rights and maintaining order and security, in the film they serve primarily as instruments of collective control, oppression, and silencing. Deprived of memories, the community loses both historical awareness and the moral compass necessary to question authority and resist threats to freedom. The sole exception is the “Receiver of Memory”, the only member of the community entrusted with the knowledge of long-forgotten events, experiences, and emotions. Drawing on Aleida Assmann’s (2008) theory of cultural memory and Zygmunt Bauman’s (2006) reflections on gated communities, this paper explores the role of memory in sustaining democracy and considers what is lost through active forgetting. It focuses particularly on the “Receiver of Memory” as an archive of collective experience, examining how ignorance ensures absolute compliance, whereas remembrance opens the possibility for critical thought and dissent.

Since 2011, the memory of the January Revolution in Egypt has been a site of contestation, with competing factions redefining its objectives and manipulating its meaning to suit their agendas, framing the narrative to assert authority and secure control. Collective remembrance of the period has often been shaped by simplified, conventional narrative schemes that reinforced reductive interpretations of the past and even fueled social polarization. This conference paper considers literature as a medium that offers a more nuanced reflection on the past and opens a space for slow memory. Literary works address gaps, indeterminacies, and inconsistencies while also serving as a source of oppositional memory against oversimplified and politically motivated hegemonic narratives. The paper focuses on contemporary Egyptian novels by ‘Alā' al-Aswānī, Nā'il al-Ṭūkhī, and Yasmine El Rashidi, showing how literary strategies provide alternatives to dominant portrayals of the revolutionary period and reshape how it is remembered. Through techniques such as polyphonic voices, attention to the quotidian aspects of everyday life, and silence, these works complicate and subvert official narratives, shifting attention away from the spectacle of the historical event toward less obvious, subtler changes and transformations. By resisting instant interpretation, they foster slower, more reflective forms of remembrance and cultivate a layered engagement with the past. Contemporary Egyptian fiction thus preserves the democratization efforts embodied in the January Revolution—even in the face of state attempts to reframe, minimize, or erase them—while resisting simplification and binary visions of the past, foregrounding a plurality of voices, and fostering empathy.

This paper examines how literary representations of the Bangladesh Liberation War foreground non-spectacular trauma, challenging dominant narratives that focus primarily on visible acts of violence. While national memory and official archives tend to represent spectacular violence, the subtle, continuous, and socially embedded forms of violence—particularly those experienced by women during and after the war—remain unexplored. How can the framework of slow memory and everyday trauma reshape our understanding of war memory? In what ways do literary narratives redirect our critical gaze from event driven violence to the everyday suffering that often eludes historical documentation? The paper employs close textual analysis informed by memory studies, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Jenny Wüstenberg’s slow memory, Rob Nixon’s slow violence and Gyanendra Pandey’s routine violence. The research investigates how contemporary Bangladeshi novels such as Shaheen Akhtar’s The Search, Shahidul Zahir’s I See the Face and Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age and The Good Muslim unsettle dominant frameworks that depict visible violence. These texts are read alongside ethnographic insights from Nayanika Mookherjee’s The Spectral Wound, which reveals the persistent silences surrounding sexual violence and the long afterlife of wartime trauma. The paper suggests that these literary works function as alternative archives, preserving experiences excluded from state narratives and institutional histories. They highlight how everyday violence continues long after the war ends, shaping lives in ways that spectacular violence narratives often obscure. By foregrounding silence and absence, these texts enact slow memory, enabling a sustained and ethically attuned engagement with the past. The paper argues that literature provides a crucial space for recognizing everyday trauma and for recovering silenced narratives. By theorizing silence, absence, and everyday suffering as significant forms of memory, the paper demonstrates how literature fosters empathy, promotes historical accountability, and enriches understanding of slow violence and everyday trauma.

Throughout the twentieth century, successive Argentine military dictatorships (1930–1983) implemented censorship strategies aimed at preserving a moral, nationalist ideal, with music as one of its central targets. This article examines how censorship shaped and delimited musical expression in Argentina. Drawing on scholarship by Mara Favoretto and Timothy Wilson, Pablo Vila, Juan Carlos Biglia and David Lifschitz, Ángel Cabaña, and others, it explores the often-elusive logic underlying structures of musical repression. Through a comparative case study, the article analyzes the banning of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine"; Alberto Ginastera's opera Bomarzo; María Elena Walsh's children's song "El twist del Mono Liso"; and Manuel Ortiz Ayala's cueca "Pa'l Comisario." While some prohibitions appear self-evident—such as that of "Pa'l Comisario," which ridicules social hierarchies and authority—others, including the censorship of the children's twist, reveal subtler anxieties surrounding foreign cultural influence. Similarly, Bomarzo and "Cocaine" were condemned for their representations of decadence and moral opacity, considered incompatible with the regime's ultraconservative worldview. A government document listing some of these censored works refers to them as cantables (singables) rather than canciones (songs). I argue that this linguistic choice—cantable being a neologism—signals something deeper: the silencing of the human voice itself, and not only musical sound or textual content. Situating these examples within broader frameworks of cultural policy and self-censorship, the article shows that musical control in Argentina was constitutive of the state's ideological project. By foregrounding both overt bans and implicit constraints, it highlights the negotiations between repression and creativity.

"How do you give words to experiences stored not as logically coherent narratives, but as ‘fragmented, sensory and emotional traces: images, sounds and physical sensations’"? (Bessel van der Kolk, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma", 2014) This question is a recurring theme in the magnificent novel "A Girls’ Story" (2016) by the French Nobel Prize winning author Annie Ernaux. The book is an ultimate attempt to come to grips with a traumatizing experience in her teenage years. The author doesn’t want to pin the experience down to a single word that allows communication with others. Indeed, nowhere in the little novel does the writer use the word ‘rape’, even though it is abundantly clear to the reader. Ernaux tries to describe the event as she experienced it at the time, without letting it be infected by the reflective gaze from the now. An exercise that is, of course, doomed to ‘fail’, for this former girl is no longer there, changed as she is precisely because of what she has experienced. Like the writer herself, this leaves the reader with no solid ground underfoot. Ernaux describes a void, the black hole of remembered trauma over which she ultimately has nothing to say. * Research question: To what extent affect collective remembrance practices the representation of individual trauma (i.c.: sexual violence) in literature? * Methodology & Key findings: Through close reading I will show that in Ernaux’s novel "A Girls’ Story" we see the moral imperative to represent trauma primarily through ‘emptiness’ and ‘nothingness’ – as we so often see in the many memorial sites and museums about (for instance) the Holocaust. This silencing affects heavily the way this individual trauma story is ‘told’.