Trauma and the Memory of Politics
Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print book or eBook. Available online with institutional access.
Edkins explores the way in which people and groups remember traumatic events, calling into question official modes of memorialization. She offers a thorough analysis of the political value of bearing witness to injustices, despite the difficulty of this for survivors. Ultimately, Edkins argues that national narratives of traumatic history only serve to reinscribe those events into the existing symbolic order that generated or allowed for the trauma to occur in the first place. For Edkins, the memory of trauma, insofar as it disrupts this historical-temporal order, is in itself a potent site of resistance.