Proposing solutions to shared precarity cultivates empathy that link-turns their impact.

Cogent though these various critiques are in their own terms, it seems to me that they unduly homogenize and simplify different forms of interest in and inquiry into trauma. While it is true, of course, that trauma research does not in and of itself lead to political transformation, I would argue that a trauma theory revised along the lines I have suggested is not destined to serve as the handmaiden of the status quo or a mere academic alibi for the indulgence of voyeuristic inclinations. On the contrary, it can help identify and understand situations of exploitation and abuse, and act as an incentive for the kind of sustained and systemic critique of societal conditions called for by Berlant and Brown. In fact, the expanded model of trauma I have proposed, based on the work of Laura Brown, Frantz Fanon, and others, bears a close resemblance to the model of suffering that Berlant puts forward as an alternative to the (traditional) trauma model, which she finds inadequate: "a model of suffering, whose etymological articulation of pain and patience draws its subject less as an effect of an act of violence and more as an effect of a general atmosphere of it, peppered by acts, to be sure, but not contained by the presumption that trauma carries, that it is an effect of a single scene of violence or toxic taxonomy" (338). Berlant's observation that "the pain and suffering of subordinated subjects in everyday life is an ordinary and ongoing thing that is underdescribed by the (traumatic) identity form and its circulation in the state and the law" (344) is perfectly in line with the argument I have presented in this book.

That trauma research can act as a catalyst for astute political analysis and meaningful activism would seem to be borne out by the [END PAGE 126] development in Fanon's writing, from Black Skin, White Masks, which describes the psychological impact of racial and colonial oppression, to the overtly political The Wretched of the Earth, which confronts the source of the mental strife he saw in the clinic.3 Since Douglas Crimp's plea for "[m]ilitancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy" (18) in relation to the AIDS movement back in 1989, several scholars have argued that an interest in issues of trauma, loss, and mourning is in fact compatible with a commitment to radical activism. A desire to make visible the creative and political-rather than pathological and negative-aspects of an attachment to loss is the thread that binds together the essays gathered in David Eng and David Kazanjian's volume Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003), which seeks to "extend[] recent scholarship in trauma studies by insisting that ruptures of experience, witnessing, history, and truth are, indeed, a starting point for political activism and transformation" (10). Eng and Kazanjian see their collection as moving "from trauma to prophecy, and from epistemological structures of unknowability to the politics of mourning" (10). As one of the contributors, Ann Cvetkovich, puts it, trauma can be "the provocation to create alternative lifeworld’s" ("Legacies of Trauma" 453).

Recognition of suffering serves as a necessary first step towards the amelioration of that suffering. In Judith Butler's words, "The recognition of shared precariousness introduces strong normative commitments of equality and invites a more robust universalizing of rights that seeks to address basic human needs for food, shelter, and other conditions for persisting and flourishing" (28-29). Without wishing to overstate its likely impact, I believe that rethinking trauma studies from a postcolonial perspective and providing nuanced readings of a wide variety of narratives of trauma and witnessing from around the world can help us understand that shared precariousness. By fostering attunement to previously unheard suffering and putting into global circulation memories of a broad range of traumatic histories, an inclusive and culturally sensitive trauma theory can assist in raising awareness of injustice both past and present and opening up the possibility of a more just global future-and, in so doing, remain faithful to the ethical foundations of the field.5