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  • Traumatic Futures: A Review Article
  • Jared Stark (bio)
The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. By Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Trans. Rachel Gomme. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. 304 pp. Cloth $67.50, paper $25.95.
The Trauma Question. By Roger Luckhurst. London: Routledge, 2008. 256 pp. Cloth $120.00, paper $35.95.
Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture. By Esther Rashkin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. 260 pp. Cloth $75.00, paper $26.95.
Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture. By Madelaine Hron. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 320 pp. Cloth $60.00, paper $29.95.

If it is indeed the case that trauma, at least over the last several decades, has become a signifier of authenticity that commands moral prestige along with legal, political, and economic recognition, then it is hardly surprising that the notion of trauma marks a site of both intense contestation and continuing insight. Even as it is claimed, with various emphases, that we inhabit a "century of trauma," a "trauma culture," a "trauma paradigm," or an "empire of trauma," the question remains disturbingly—or perhaps promisingly—unresolved of what it means to situate trauma at the heart of modern history and culture.1 Does trauma, as Cathy Caruth suggests in words that continue to provoke her readers, mark "the very possibility of history"? Might it also, consequently, "provide the very link between cultures"?2 Or should the discourse of trauma be understood instead as the effect of a history [End Page 435] that it both masks and exploits, a history whose critical analysis exposes it as the instrument of ideological or cultural forces outside itself? Are the cultural links trauma supposedly creates instead signs of cultural blindness, appropriation, or imperialism?

Those familiar with discussions of trauma theory, particularly in literary and cultural studies, will be sensitive to the charged field in which these admittedly reductive or radicalizing questions emerge. From Dominick LaCapra's persistent investigation of the uses and limits of trauma theory for historical understanding, to Ruth Leys's confessedly "unsympathetic" critique of Caruth and Shoshana Felman's stunning deflation of Leys's work in an eight-page endnote in The Juridical Unconscious, to the painful exchange between Thomas Trezise and Dori Laub in the pages of History and Memory, to mention only a few instances, the links between trauma, history, and culture proposed by Caruth have come to elicit sharp division and have become as much a matter of scholarly inquiry as of moral (and moralistic) positioning.3

The present review of recent work in literary and cultural trauma studies addresses two related, central questions among the myriad issues circulating in these debates. The first concerns the relationship between traumatic experience and the second history of trauma and of its theorization. The second concerns the representation (or representability) of traumatic experience, particularly in literature and film. With respect to the first question, I focus on The Empire of Trauma, coauthored in French in 2007 by social anthropologist and physician Didier Fassin and psychiatrist Richard Rechtman and superbly translated into English by Rachel Gomme in 2009, and The Trauma Question by Roger Luckhurst, a literary scholar teaching at Birbeck College, University of London. The second part of this article turns to Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture by Esther Rashkin, professor of French at the University of Utah and a practicing psychotherapist, and Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture by Madelaine Hron, a comparatist teaching at Wilfred Laurier University.

At the heart of this discussion continue to be questions raised most decisively by Caruth, "one of the central figures who helped foster the boom in cultural trauma theory in the early 1990s," according to Luckhurst (4). This centrality is confirmed by those who draw inspiration from her work (or simply cite its authority) as much as by her critics. Thus of Leys, for instance, Luckhurst notes that "after this mauling, it might be tempting to discard Caruth, were it not that the length of Leys's critique acts as a strange sort of monument to its importance" (13). Rashkin and Hron similarly confirm this centrality in what...

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