Trauma and the Memory of Politics

Jenny Edkins is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. Her publications include Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (2000), Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (1999) and, with Nalini Persram and Veronique Pin-Fat, Sovereignty and Subjectivity (1999).

'This is a path-breaking work. It moves the discussion of traumatic memory away from a concentration on paralysis and towards political action. It offers a theoretically sophisticated and powerful reading of the repercussions of traumatic events, as fields of force in which memories of catastrophe are rewritten as forms of resistance. Narratives which encircle terrible events like wars and terrorism can and do challenge political and social conventions in such a way as to create a space in which political commitments can be renegotiated and reconstructed. Essential reading for all students of history and memory.' Jay Winter, Yale University

• List of illustrations; Preface; 1. Introduction: trauma, violence and political community; 2. Survivor memories and the diagnosis of trauma: the Great War and Vietnam; 3. War memorials and remembrance: the London Cenotaph and the Vietnam Wall; 4. Concentration camp memorials and museums: Dachau and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum; 5. Testimony and sovereign power after Auschwitz: Holocaust witness and Kosovo refugees; 6. Conclusion: the return of the political - the memory of politics; Bibliography; Index.