"A timely and sophisticated series of studies. Articulating diverse strands of social theory with the historical episodes that have had major affective resonances within national cultures, the volume as a whole contributes significantly to our understanding of relationships between collective affect and social process."--Michael Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii

"The fine and deeply argued essays in this book build a strong case against a naturalistic theory of collective traumas. Traumas are made, not born, claim the authors. And they brilliantly cast a steely gaze on several social nightmares--the Nazi holocaust, slavery in the United States, September 11, 2001--in order to limn the social and cultural processes by which events come to be viewed as threatening to the very identity of collectivities. Ultimately this is a book about the nature of the very normative order that gives meaning to the human condition."--Robin Wagner-Pacifici, author of "Theorizing the Standoff

"With its rich range of empirical cases, this book will inspire new debates across the social sciences about memory, collective suffering, and coping."--Arjun Appadurai, Yale University

"Near the end of the 20th century, scholarly interest in collective memory surged, spurred on both by re-examinations of the Holocaust and other canonical sources of trauma, and by the rise of a new set of institutionalized processes of collective memory-work. It is the great merit of these essays to approach the problems of collective trauma in sociological terms, as theorizable patterns in socially and culturally organized processes. This is a vital corrective to more naturalisticunderstandings and complement to those focused more narrowly on psychology or textual analysis."--Craig Calhoun, President, Social Science Research Council