The Famine Projects and Digital Trauma Studies in India

Abstract

In this essay, I examine two aspects of the twin projects’ foregrounding of trauma: the modes of representing trauma in the digital and the consequent construction of a trauma globalectic. Preserving, and in many cases, retrieving, cultural trauma in the digital age as Famine and Dearth and Famine Tales demonstrate, will mean a media archaeology that merges different forms and genres of/in media. Conjoining instances of social injustice and suffering, as these projects do across spatial and temporal spaces ensures that we see historical trauma in multiple sites and stemming from different forces and causes and yet following certain patterns – social hierarchies, unequal legislation, administrative inefficiency/indifference, all of which conspire to produce food scarcity and famine.