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.

A traumatic event, as Edkins defines it, usually involves force, although this is not enough; trauma also “has to involve a betrayal of trust…. What we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a site of refuge but of danger” (p. 4). As such, traumatic events obliterate our previously held assumptions about the world and our place in it; they often “reveal the contingency of the social order” (p. 5). In disrupting our understanding of community, trauma also diminishes our capacity for language, our ability to speak coherently about “what happened” (p. 37). Trauma is, in some fundamental sense, beyond language, beyond meaning, “unsayable in the vocabulary of the powerful” (p. 7).

This inability to speak about trauma is closely linked to our temporal experience of it. Traumatic events do not exist in normal, linear time where the past stays past; rather, our response to trauma is often belated, suffered through again and again in dreams and flashbacks, and through reenactments of the experience. Traumatized persons, then, “‘live in two different worlds: the realm of trauma and the realm of their current ordinary life’” (Cathy Caruth quoted in Edkins, p. 40).

Sustaining our belief in the security of the state (and in our own coherent identity), Edkins argues, requires us to forget the traumas that brought us into being. Having faith in democratic rule of law necessitates that we forget the wars in which rule of law was suspended and arbitrary exercises of power produced a permanent state of “exception.” Submitting to sovereign power for the sake of security requires us to ignore the times when that power has been deployed against citizens, when the state uses “security” as justification for unspeakable violations of body and spirit. Thus, disciplining trauma time—by forcing the events into neat, historical narrative, by carefully policing who is permitted to speak and what stories they are allowed to tell—is crucial to the maintenance of sovereign power; it is “the time that must be forgotten if the … modern state is to remain unchallenged” (p. 230). Our most common ways of “remembering” trauma, therefore, are often the most conducive to forgetting, as we try to ignore the event's inherent meaninglessness, its power as an “‘affront to understanding’” (Caruth quoted in Edkins, p. 41, italics in original). Survivors and witnesses thus often find their experiences medicalized (post-traumatic stress syndrome), narrativized (into the symbology of heroes, villains, sacrifice, and redemption), and otherwise normalized—or erased completely.

Some forms of remembering, however, do not rewrite survivors' experiences into an official, nationalist history. While these sites and practices vary widely, they have in common spontaneous, unscripted responses from the public (the objects brought to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the entries that become entire conversations in the visitors' books at Dachau) and the refusal to see the past as something static, where our interpretations of events are somehow settled. These sites acknowledge the existence of trauma time; rather than channeling or masking the horror of the event, they make use of traumatic memory to unsettle the foundations of sovereign power.

Trauma and the Memory of Politics is gracefully written, weaving together nuanced theoretical observations with rich historical and ethnographic detail. Rather than awkwardly imposing a single theoretical framework (or even multiple frameworks) on the cases she studies, Edkins lets the theory emerge almost organically from the cases themselves. Theory happens here in the interstices between events and interpretations. This is significant because her method reflects her intellectual and ethical concerns with bearing witness; “[w]ith a traumatic event,” she argues, “we are not able, even in a preliminary way, to say ‘what happened’” (p. 39). To impose a clear theoretical narrative on memory would be to ignore the unique dimensions of trauma time, and the difficulty inherent in describing events that are beyond words. Yet, as Edkins asserts, the impossibility of saying does not absolve us from the responsibility of trying. Thus, her method, like the more “successful” memorial experiences she describes, must “‘encircle again and again the site’ of the trauma,” rather than fix it in time and space with a definitive account of its truth (Slavoj Žižek quoted in Edkins, p. 15).

In part because of its scope and the complexity of the issues it addresses, the book does suggest more than it delivers in certain places. For example, Edkins relies heavily on Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer (sacred man, “a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed” [p. 181]) to elucidate the relationship between trauma, power, and subjectivity in the West. She acknowledges that homo sacer is gendered male, and that this might limit (or at least complicate) its explanatory power. Indeed, Edkins discusses the dissonance between homo sacer and the female figure at the center of contemporary political discourse (e.g., the media's focus on rape as an atrocity in Kosovo). “It is surely not accidental,” she writes, “that the figure that appears as the victim … is the female Muslim, the figure that on two counts is included in western power by virtue of its exclusion from it” (p. 213). She does not follow up on the intriguing set of questions this raises: Is the feminization of trauma a new development, or has trauma always had gendered dimensions? Similarly, her treatment of September 11, 2001, is provocative but abbreviated; I would like to have seen more on how discourse about the planned memorial site attempts (or does not attempt) to co-opt traumatic experience. These points only indicate, however, how very rich the material is that Edkins has chosen for her subject matter, and I hope that her book prompts further discussion regarding memory, power, and resistance.