zum Inhalt springen

Philosophische FakultätTraumanet

Michela Borzaga




Short CV

Michela Borzaga studied English and Italian literature at the Universities of Salzburg, Belfast, and Stellenbosch (South Africa). In 2004, she completed her MA thesis on the poetry of Tatamkhulu Afrika. In 2008 she received a PhD grant from the Austrian Science Fund and was part of the research project “Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel”. She is currently completing her PhD thesis provisionally entitled “Temporal Poiesis: New Rubrics of Trauma”. She is working as a lecturer and research assistant in the English department at the University of Vienna. Her areas of teaching and research interests include English literature, literary theory and postcolonial studies, transnational trauma and human rights in Africa.

 

Publications

  • She has co-edited Imagination in a Troubled Space: A Poetry Reader (with Dorothea Steiner, Poetry Salzburg, 2004); 
  • Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews (with Ewald Mengel and Karin Orantes, Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2009); 
  • Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Essays (with Ewald Mengel, Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi, 2012).



Statement concerning my research on trauma

I am interested in keeping critical languages and discourses around trauma diverse and plural and in drawing on multiple, transnational archives of knowledge. Trauma is a complex phenomenon always – like time – ‘on the move’ (Achille Mbembe) so my interest is in forging new rubrics and new critical pedagogies through which we can start re-framing the trauma paradigm which so far has been too pathologising, too much fascinated with diagnoses and empirical collections of data – forgetting that beyond trauma there are always people engaged in ordinary but meaningful acts of living – embedded in particular cultures and historical contexts, forgetting that trauma can take unpredictable and unexpected directions. 

I am interested in de-othering the discourse of trauma and in re-thinking trauma through affinity as part of a larger poetics of life and politics of futurity and potentiality. I am interested in the ways in which people under duress and desperate conditions resiliently survive and creatively invent and re-invent themselves. So, it’s not enough to name symptoms, ‘traumatic events’, and facts as it trauma could be something we could easily grasp and name – like an ontological substance. I find paramount to work with complex models of lived time and to imagine trauma from within the self – a self involved in complex practices and webs of relations (to itself, other people, the polis but also the arché and the sacred).