TY - CHAP

T1 - Alternative Histories of Resilience

T2 - After and Before PTSD

AU - Leese, Peter

PY - 2022/11/22

Y1 - 2022/11/22

N2 - This chapter takes the prescriptive and instrumentalizing version of resilience promoted by the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program as the starting point for a wider investigation into the histories of resistance to traumatic memory. Three phases are traced: the twenty-first-century formulation of the ‘PTSD-resilience nexus’; the mid-twentieth century, when ‘shock’ was superseded by ‘stress’; and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideal of ‘scientific management’. Resilience, it becomes clear, may be manufactured institutionally by procedures of coercion and non-recognition, but also exists communally in the making of life stories, collective telling and acknowledgement within society as a whole. A case study of Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) suggests how alternative histories of resilience might be written.

AB - This chapter takes the prescriptive and instrumentalizing version of resilience promoted by the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program as the starting point for a wider investigation into the histories of resistance to traumatic memory. Three phases are traced: the twenty-first-century formulation of the ‘PTSD-resilience nexus’; the mid-twentieth century, when ‘shock’ was superseded by ‘stress’; and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideal of ‘scientific management’. Resilience, it becomes clear, may be manufactured institutionally by procedures of coercion and non-recognition, but also exists communally in the making of life stories, collective telling and acknowledgement within society as a whole. A case study of Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) suggests how alternative histories of resilience might be written.

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-3-031-13366-4

SP - 75

EP - 98

BT - Resilience

PB - Palgrave Macmillan, Springer

CY - Cham

ER -