Alternative Histories of Resilience: After and Before PTSD

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the twenty-first-century formulation of the ‘PTSD-resilience nexus’; the mid-twentieth century, when ‘shock’ was superseded by ‘stress’; and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideal of ‘scientific management’.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.