Title: Post-Colonial Trauma in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Later Indian Fiction

Abstract: Trauma studies originate from Freudian trauma theory. Post-colonial scholars including Ashis Nandy, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha apply the method of trauma studies in the field of post-colonial studies. Post-colonial trauma studies examine the damaging effects of colonialism and racism upon both the white perpetrators and the Indian victims. Post-colonial trauma studies transcend traditional trauma studies not only in the sense that they are no longer Eurocentric, but also that they have expanded their research objects from the trauma of individuals to the trauma of an entire race and its culture. This paper examines the psychological damage of Westerners and Indians in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s later Indian fiction from three perspectives: the traumatized body, traumatized history and culture, and the therapy of curing the trauma by telling the stories of traumatic events.

Keywords: racial difference, cultural difference, post-colonial trauma

Author: Ran Huang, Lecturer, The Department of Foreign Languages, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.