Roger Luckhurst argues that the modern concept of trauma developed in the West through the interlocking areas of ‘law, psychiatry and industrialized warfare’ (2008: 19). However, over the twentieth century, trauma as a concept became increasingly medicalised and simultaneously significantly linked with wider political frameworks: with survivor and testimony narratives, with responses to persecution and prejudice, to the Holocaust, and other acts of mass atrocity and genocide. In such discourses, the concept of trauma is not fully material or bodily, nor simply psychic, nor fully cultural, nor simply historical or structural, but a meeting of all of these. As Luckhurst usefully suggests, it is precisely because it is a knot, or a point of intersection, of turbulence, that ‘trauma’ is such a powerful force and is impossible to define easily....