Trauma and the Memory of Politics

Trauma and the Memory of Politics. By Jenny Edkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 265p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper. This is an important and innovative book. In it, Jenny Edkins explores the relationship between violence, the traumatic effects of violence, and the foundation and perpetuation of sovereign power. Using historical and field research, Edkins examines sites and practices that commemorate famines, wars, genocides, and terrorist attacks. She describes the evolution of the Cenotaph in Great Britain and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC; Dachau and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the place of the “camp” (concentration camps at midcentury; refugee camps at the millennium) in political discourse. While many of these sites seek to contain and appropriate traumatic experience for the purposes of reproducing sovereign power, she contends, the testimony made possible in part through them has radical potential for helping us to contest nationalism and to rethink our relationship to the state.