University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Doctoral Dissertations University of Connecticut Graduate School 12-15-2016 Cultural Trauma, History Making, and the Politics of Ethnic Identity among Afghan Hazaras Melissa S. Kerr Chiovenda University of Connecticut - Storrs,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Kerr Chiovenda, Melissa S., "Cultural Trauma, History Making, and the Politics of Ethnic Identity among Afghan Hazaras" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 1324. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/1324 Cultural Trauma, History Making, and the Politics of Ethnic Identity among Afghan Hazaras Melissa Kerr Chiovenda, PhD University of Connecticut, 2016 Based on 18 months of fieldwork in Bamyan and West Kabul, Afghanistan among ethnic Hazara civil society activists, I examine civil society groups’ protests and memorialization activities as social and political acts of collective and cultural trauma generation and dissemination. The activists’ protests seek to secure greater rights, security and infrastructural development in Hazara populated areas, and memorialize past rights violations and atrocities against Hazaras. Through protests, literature and social media, the retelling of traumatic events inculcates and spreads collective trauma. And the framing of these past events as a present existential threat merges with a widespread sense that Hazara history and culture have been quietly erased by a Pashtun-dominated Afghan state apparatus. Both the constant recounting of collective traumas and the perception of having been excluded from Afghan history and history-writing confirm a need to write and speak about the Hazara past through frames specific to Hazaras’ victimization., including an ongoing genocide which began over 100 years ago.