Literature

The Missing Picture is filmmaker Rithy Panh’s personal quest to reimagine his childhood memories. From the time when the repressive Khmer Rouge ruled over Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, the only recorded artifacts that remain are propaganda footage. Using beautifully detailed clay figurines and elaborate dioramas, Panh poignantly and poetically recreates the missing images from his past, giving new life to his recollections of his friends and family both before and after the regime’s rule.

A powerfully argued work of intellectual history, Trauma will rewrite the terms of future discussion of its subject.

In From Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt’s replacement by shame.

Witnessing Witnessing focuses critical attention on those who receive the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Questioning the notion that traumatic experience is intrinsically unspeakable and that the Holocaust thus lies in a quasi-sacred realm beyond history, the book asks whether much current theory does not have the effect of silencing the voices of real historical victims. It thereby challenges widely accepted theoretical views about the representation of trauma in general and the Holocaust in particular as set forth by Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Berel Lang, and Dori Laub.

In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century--both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it--we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference. Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding may not. 

This classic work, first published in France in 1955, profoundly influenced the generation of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements and has sold more than 75,000 copies to date.

A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is--decades after its first publication--one of the most important books written about our divided world.

The cloth edition of Assia Djebar's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, her first work to be published in English, was named by the American Literary Translators Association as an ALTA Outstanding Translation of the Year. Now available in paperback, this collection of three long stories, three short ones, and a theoretical postface by one of North Africa's leading writers depicts the plight of urban Algerian women who have thrown off the shackles of colonialism only to face a postcolonial regime that denies and subjugates them even as it celebrates the liberation of men.

A Tempest is Aimé Césaire's anti-colonialist refashioning of Shakespeare. Alongside The Tragedy of King Cristophe and A Season in the Congo, it completes a 'triptych' of plays that examine the effects of colonialism.

W ou Le souvenir d'enfance is a narrative that reflects a great writer's effort to come to terms with his childhood during the Nazi occupation of France.