This volume brings together Ron Eyerman’s most important interventions in the field of cultural trauma and offers an accessible entry point into the origins and development of this theory and a framework of an analysis that has now achieved the status of a research paradigm. This collection of disparate essays, published between 2004 and 2018, coheres around an original introduction that not only provides a historical overview of cultural trauma, but is also an important theoretical contribution to cultural trauma and collective identity in its own right. The Afterword from esteemed sociologist Eric Woods connects the essays and explores their significance for the broader fields of sociology, behavioral science, and trauma studies..

In this book, Ron Eyerman explores the formation of the African-American identity through the theory of cultural trauma. The trauma in question is slavery, not as an institution or as personal experience, but as collective memory: a pervasive remembrance that grounded a people's sense of itself. Combining a broad narrative sweep with more detailed studies of important events and individuals, Eyerman reaches from Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, the New Deal and the Second World War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond. He offers insights into the intellectual and generational conflicts of identity-formation which have a truly universal significance, as well as providing a compelling account of the birth of African-American identity. Anyone interested in questions of assimilation, multiculturalism and postcolonialism will find this book indispensable.

Five sociologists develop a theoretical model of 'cultural trauma' & build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new & binding understandings of social responsibility.

Forgetting Futures reignites the debate about the crisis of memory and the search to understand the relationship between past and present, remembering and forgetting. In the book Petar Ramadanovic presents an elegant critique of the most significant concepts of memory, from Plato to Nietzsche, as he challenges the prevalent, Aristotelain understanding of memory as mere repeated presentation of the past in the present. Ramadanovic skillfully examines the power of traumatic memory in history. Through an analysis of Cathy Caruth and a ground breaking revisionist interpretation of Toni Morrison's Beloved he shows how the memory of the Holocaust and slavery has shaped American identity. This unique study of memory places trauma, identity, and race under the intellectual microscope resulting in a book of great use for literary and cultural studies scholars, and educated readers seeking to learn more about the relationship between history and memory.

Holocaust Narratives: Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations analyzes individual multi-generational frameworks of Holocaust trauma to answer one essential question: How do these narratives change to not only transmit the trauma of the Holocaust – and in the process add meaning to what is inherently an event that annihilates meaning – but also construct the trauma as a connector to a past that needs to be continued in the present? Meaningless or not, unspeakable or not, unknowable or not, the trauma, in all its impossibilities and intractabilities, spawns literary and scholarly engagement on a large scale. Narrative is the key connector that structures trauma for both individual and collective.

The Jewish presence in Latin America has produced a remarkable body of literature that gives voice to the fascinating experience of Jews in Latin American lands. This book explores how trauma and memory influence the formation of Jewish identity for the fictional Jewish characters of five novels written by Jewish authors born in the Southern Cone.