The Trauma of Empire

As Rebecca Saunders points out, “while trauma theory has primarily been produced in Europe and the United States, trauma itself has, with equal if not greater regularity and urgency, been experienced elsewhere” (15). However, most attention within trauma theory has been devoted to events that took place in Europe or the United States, especially the Holocaust and, more recently, 9/11. In fact, the impetus for much of the current theorization about trauma and representation was provided by the Nazi genocide of the European Jews (Kacandes 99; Kaplan, Trauma Culture 1; Bennett and Kennedy 3; Douglas and Whitlock 1). Indeed, trauma theory as a field of cultural scholarship developed out of an engagement with Holocaust testimony, literature, and history. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Archaeology · Criminology · Empire · Genocide · German · Nazism · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Representation (politics) · Scholarship · The Holocaust · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology