Traumatic Pasts in Asia

<p> In the early twenty-first century trauma is seemingly everywhere whether as experience diagnosis concept or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases such as World War I or the Holocaust in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in <em>Traumatic Pasts in Asia</em> make just such an intervention extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and in the process exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.</p>