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.