Azadeh Safaeian

“Toward a Minor Theory of Trauma” examines the suppressed traumas of minorities in Iranian literary and cinematic narratives of the Iran-Iraq war, from 1980-1988. It specifically attends to the accounts of ethnic and religious minorities, women, children, and disabled war veterans. Against the ideological erasure of traumas in the official discourse of the war, this project argues that the figure of the minor opens the possibility for the emergence of repressed traumas in at least two ways: through codeswitching and linguistic entanglements when recounting traumatic experiences; and by representing the materiality of pain in ways that resist appropriation by an ideological narrative of war.