Trauma is purely clinical and it detaches itself from any broader conversations about collective responsibility or collective experiences. Today, a lot of work around trauma and war dismisses the possibility of trauma as a language through which one can capture the political stakes of these wars. But scholarly literature misses something really important about that earlier formulation. The war in Vietnam and then the incorporation of the category of PTSD into the DSM-III marks a turning point when trauma becomes both acceptable and a condition of victims. I start with the Vietnam period for a particular reason, which is partly in response to a scholarly literature on the origins of PTSD. And then as the years went on, the figure of the traumatized soldier became so prominent in the press and popular culture that it became a way for me to think about how these wars appear on the American front. And in particular, I knew the writings on the Vietnam War that had a very different understanding of soldier trauma. Having done a post-doc in the history of science, I knew the literature on the history of trauma. Within a year or two, I started encountering articles on soldiers who were traumatized, and the accounts were all of being traumatized by seeing their buddies blown up or something like that. It was so striking to see what it means for a country to have the power and privilege to go to war thousands of miles away in a way in which the costs are just not borne by the American public. So when the post-9/11 wars started, it was unbearable to watch it unfold from here. I had an experience of war and occupation as a civilian in the war zone.
And then I spent some time in Baghdad in the ’80s. I lived in war zones as a child and teenager. So there is an intellectual and methodological thread here.īut it was also very personal. Whether it was archeology or genetics or now psychiatry, I explore disciplines as a way of thinking about broader political and ethical questions of power, colonialism, and imperialism. My two previous books are interested in colonial and imperial formations on the one hand and disciplinary forms of knowledge that give you a heuristic into those formations on the other.
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