In a globalized world that ostensibly annihilates social, political, and economic boundaries and proposes a post/colonialism of liberation and equality, the two male protagonists John Smith and David Lurie show what interracial conflicts can be attended by and result in. They remind us of the insecurities of Western cultures that have sought to manifest their right to exist in cultural supremacy and a mas-culine preponderance of power, which now rapidly erodes and leaves behind a web of perpetrators and victims, continuously entangled in cross-cultural violence and hatred.
When looking at the studies on men and masculinities, two keywords frequently reappear: crisis and hegemony. In his introduction to chapter 4 entitled “Masculin-ities and the Notion of «Crisis»,” John Beynon recalls a visit to a major company bookstore in Kansas City where a display stand was entitled “the crisis of our boys and young men.” He found that “half an hour spent dipping into the books at the stand convinced me that the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world was in an advanced state of trauma when it came to its young males.”6 Although this comes as an ironic and rather light note on the subject, the use of the term “trauma” speaks for itself. Who are the young males in question? With regard to trauma studies, Craps and Buelens emphasize that the academic beginnings, si-milarly to gender studies, have had a strong white Western background.7 Attempts to give the suffering engendered by colonial oppression its context-sensitive dues have begun to be made in various disciplines in recent years. Postcolonial critics and theorists such as Sam Durrant, Linda Hutcheon and David Lloyd “have lately suggested theorizing colonization in terms of the infliction of a collective trauma and reconceptualizing postcolonialism as a post-traumatic cultural formation.”8
These thoughts reverberate in examples from social work research on trauma-tization among American Indian groups9 in the United States. Social work re-searchers have generally found group models to be highly effective in trauma thera-py, though diagnostic categories for non-indigenous populations have been shown to be only partially applicable to American Indian people. For example, traditional activities associated with spiritualism are incorrectly diagnosed as hallucinations ac-companying post-traumatic stress disorder. A combination of debriefing as a
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10 Cf. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, “Wakiksuyapi: Carrying the Historical Trauma of the Lakota,” Tulane Studies in Social Welfare, 21–22, 2000, pp. 245–266.
11 Nancy Van Styvendale, “The Trans/Historicity of Trauma in Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer,” Studies in the Novel, 40.1–2, (Spring-Summer) 2008, p. 203.
12 Van Styvendale, op. cit., pp. 204f.
13 Van Styvendale, op. cit., p. 205.
ma therapy tool and traditional healing approaches seems to provide for the most improvement of individuals suffering from long-term traumatic stress.10
In light of this development, Nancy Van Styvendale identifies Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer as a postcolonial trauma novel and examines whether and how trau-ma studies can break with Eurocentrism through the analysis of the novel as bear-ing witness to the sufferbear-ing of American Indian men and women generated by colo-nial oppression across generations. Following Jeffrey Alexander’s approach to trauma as performative reality and “a socially mediated attribution” rather than a natural occurrence, Van Styvendale inserts the idea of trans/historicity, which ques-tions the notion of trauma as rooted in a singular, recognizable event. “Cumulative, collective, intergenerational, and intersubjective, the trauma of Native peoples, when understood as trans/historical, exceeds any attempt to fix its location or de-fine its event, even as it demands our attention to historically specific atrocities.”11 Critically examining the shortcomings of the term “trans/historical” and of the term “trauma” with regard to the reification of American Indian victimhood and the pathologizing of American Indian communities, Van Styvendale finds valuable potential in both concepts when discussing American Indian literatures. She sees the lexicon of trauma fit to “make sense of the constructions of history, wounded-ness, recovery, and temporality” that are expressed in Native literary works and points out, while “words like «oppression», «colonization», «subjugation», and
«violation» are commonly used to explain the post-contact experiences of Native peoples in North America (and elsewhere), «trauma» is not.”12 From a medical perspective, the reasons for this lie partly in the lack of context-specific and cul-turally sensitive treatment but also in the lack of a designated representation of American Indian people in systematic studies of trauma. Simultaneously, the in-creasingly popular use of trauma language resonates with American Indian peoples and in their communities. There is hope to give expression to collective and indi-vidual pain through linguistic and diagnostic categories that are sanctioned in a dominant culture, which thus could be held responsible of having this pain recog-nized, legitimated, and compensated for. Moreover, the lack of scientific research on American Indian trauma along with the scarcity of the term in other fields re-lated to American Indian lifeworlds (like American Indian literary criticism, for ex-ample) uncovers an institutional complicity in larger trans-regional attempts to forget the trauma of American Indian as well as other indigenous peoples. “This repression,” as Van Styvendale observes “ameliorates «white guilt» for the theft of the North American land base and obfuscates the need for Euroamericans to take responsibility for privileges that continue to accrue from this theft – and its denial.”13
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14 Connell, op. cit., p. XVIII.
15 Connell, op. cit., p. XVI.
16 Cf. Norbert Finzsch, “The Aborigines [...] Were Never Annihilated, and Still They Are Be-coming Extinct”: Settler Imperialism and Genocide in Nineteenth-Century America and Australia, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Re-sistance in World History, New York, Berghahn, 2008, pp. 253–270.
17 Cf. Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen, 6th ed., München, Beck, 2009, pp. 26f.
18 Beynon, op. cit., p. 1.
19 Connell, op. cit., p. 76.
The existential fear that might be connected to a progressional loss of such priv-ileges among white populations is one of the underlying topics in Disgrace. What lets the two novels speak to each other is the fact that trauma is not only an inherited collective experience in many indigenous communities; trauma as an (in-voluntary) oppressive sense of guilt finds its expression in the grandchildren of the colonizers, as well. In that way, we are persistently faced with an ongoing spiral of violent mechanisms that seem deeply ingrained in the groups and individuals in-volved. The question, then, is: how do such effects shape the formation of male identities, masculinities, and the construction of gender relations within and be-tween different groups of society? Focusing on South Africa, studies by Robert Morell (2001), Lisa Lindsay and Stephan Miescher (2003) as well as Graeme Reid and Liz Walker (2005) all emphasize the plurality of old and new masculinities fol-lowing the shift in gender relations and politics in the post-apartheid era to a more egalitarian system, which is inscribed in the Constitution. The question of how masculinities are formed and in what ways this process is firmly locked with ex-ercising or enduring (male) violence is of great relevance to the present situation in South African society.
In her groundbreaking study on Masculinities, Raewyn Connell introduces the concept of a “hegemonic masculinity” as a way of “theorizing gendered power rela-tions among men, and understanding the effectiveness of masculinities in the legit-imation of the gender order.”14 Connell reminds us, “there is a dimension of mas-culinity in the culture of imperialism and in the construction of nationalism and national identities.”15 Although colonialism and imperialism are by no means syn-onymous, these phenomena share a set of characteristics that some scholars have come to identify not only as oppressive and racist, but as inherently genocidal.16 The enforcement of European colonialism and the building of transcolonial em-pires have both left their violent traces in North American and South African his-tory, which continue to be relevant today.17 If we take the concept of masculinity as “always interpolated by cultural, historical and geographical location,” we are able to detect similarities, incongruities, variants, and interconnections of what it means to be a man in different societies around the world.18 Following Connell, the idea of a “hegemonic masculinity” is “not a fixed character type, always and everywhere the same. It is, rather, the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic po-sition in a given pattern of gender relations, a popo-sition always contestable.”19
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20 Connell, op. cit., p. 77.
21 John Maxwell Coetzee, Disgrace, New York, Penguin, 1999, p. 2.
22 Coetzee, op. cit., p. 5.
taining a leading position in social life, hegemony “is the successful claim to authority, more than direct violence.”20 However, violent action often has been and is an integral part in the configuration of masculine identities. It is seen as a warranty of domination. Consequently, a hegemonic masculinity combines colonial practices and gender hierarchies for a continuous re-legitimization. In the two novels under discussion the male protagonists are firmly integrated in the web of race, class, gender, and violence – and they respond very differently to it.