Book Review/Compte Rendu : Casper, Monica J. and Eric Wertheimer, eds. Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict, and Memory in Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press. 2016. 293 pp. $30.00 paper (9781479822515)

[First para.]: "Psychological trauma can be defined, roughly, as the effect of an experience which the mind is unable to process, assimilate, and assign to the past.  A traumatizing experience, therefore, is defined not by its intrinsic properties but by the mind’s response to it (Herman, 2001).  Critical trauma studies takes this anti-essentialist insight one step further by examining how social relations and cultural meanings produce trauma, in two ways. First, relations of denigration and oppression entail traumatizing experiences for individuals and groups — through class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on. Second, the concept of trauma is, itself, socially constructed and performative."