ASTU has put history and trauma into an academic dance for me, by helping me curate an outlook on literature, its association with history and trauma, and how to analyse it critically. The genres in which we studied acted as the show, or the production; each genre must appeal and excite its own proper audience with its own beat and style. The sounds of trauma, the voices heard create a smooth beat to which hundreds follow and react to, while the silencing of victims is found in the breaks in the music, when no one is dancing, and the audience does not acknowledge its existence. The performance consists of a delicate assembly of individual and shared experiences, the knowledge, trauma and memories that surround events for both a nation and an individual. The dancers move with uncertainty and haze because the events can often be confusing, complex and hard to articulate. They intertwine with one another to create a cluster of individual beings sharing a mutual feeling or memory. The dancers are each in its own, but together they form a whole, like the humans walking this earth, each of us, whether an audience member or a dancer is an individual with its own sentiments and memories. The literature creates an outlet in which humans can express, understand or communicate these traumas, it is also a place in which stories can be told, and some can be forgotten. The entirety of the performance, from its audience, the dancers and to its sound illustrates for me the concepts and analysis that ASTU has covered.
American Sniper is a strong representation of memory, trauma, history and envelops the conversation about trauma. The film illustrates how traumatic events can severely harm mental health and wellbeing. It also reinforces Western representation and the popular distinction seen in media and literature of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. I now understand these distinctions to a further extent due to the critical analysis of literature that we have done in class. It allowed me to question ‘American Sniper’ for its uncommon sense and its addition to the patterns we see in popular culture.