This book is a dialectic and multi-perspective examination of classed
traumas in late modernity. The primary anchoring question is whether and
how class becomes a condition of possibility for coping with traumas.
What does it mean to experience deindustrialization, crises, or domestic
violence from a specific class position? Do the coping mechanisms differ
along the lines of class, gender, race, age, or ethnicity?
The text negotiates such questions, travelling back and forth from
psychoanalysis to sociology and from the global to the local, while
critically engaging with memories, narratives, and myths engraved into
social and personal histories. Through a dialogic quest for what is
silenced, and what is salient within oral, written, and visual
testimonies, it foregrounds what the upper classes prefer to neglect:
the traumatizing core of the new class divide. Rather than idealizing or
vilifying the dominated, this study calls for an exploration of
practices, narrations, and spaces whereby alienation and integration
co-exist antagonistically, producing hybrid and fragmented, but also
potentially transformative, subjectivities.
This book will be of interest to scholars of humanities and social
sciences, primarily for those studying social stratification and
inequalities, sociology of emotions, identity theory, trauma and memory,
political psychoanalysis, labour history, and ethnography.
