Fragments and intergenerational trauma in (post) postcolonialism

The research takes an intersectional feminist approach and is presented in three chapters and a poetry collection. It emerged from a sense of limitation that is, demonstrably, grounded in the socio-political and cultural frameworks of the West that have informed my experiences and perspectives. Entrenched in behaviours and values, these frameworks appear universal as I look beyond Western parameters and towards the Global South. The research aims begin with the unearthing and deconstruction of unconscious biases that are embedded in socio-linguistic frameworks and perpetuate the marginalisation and precarity of groups in the context of decolonisation and the legacy of empire. And yet, with the white-Western consciousness as the benchmark against which difference is measured this aim fails to recognise the self/other binary. It is this difficulty of challenging the dominant discourse from within that drives the thesis. While the research uses psychoanalytical and trauma theories in its consideration of the unconscious, I look to postcolonial theory to understand whether these Western approaches can be re-thought to acknowledge the variousness of human experience. I trace the phenomenological living of intergenerational trauma and survivals (as ritual) through works by H.D., Hope Mirrlees and Una Marson writing in the inter/post-World War years, alongside poems by Sandeep Parmar and Anthony Capildeo, who are engaging with contemporary intersectional feminism. My own creative practice responds to and impacts the direction of critical thinking through its experimentation with unconscious connections and (un)intelligibility. These ideas are brought into a framework that has the potential to resist the processes of othering and in search of decolonisation through a new dynamic discourse; one with the capacity to be responsive to the plurality of selfhoods and the traumatic legacy of global history.