Trauma Culture Book

Kaplan's work focuses on collective trauma and individual trauma, built on memories mixed with fantasies of prior catastrophes, on the particular cultural and political context within which a catastrophe takes place, and especially how it is "managed" by institutional forces. The divergence of European and American perspectives on 9/11 attacks underpin the real psychological trauma of a terror attack and processes of signification by exposure. The same argument could be extended in the consumption of media within the Palestinian Territories, Israel, and internationally. Leaders have now become risk managers for populations in an increasingly pictorial discourse; they have the ultimate symbolic power.