Missing: Persons and Politics

In this scholarly but deeply affecting analysis, Edkins (Trauma and the Memory of Politics) discusses how societies have responded to people who have disappeared—as a consequence of war, state violence, and natural disaster. She focuses on “the search for those missing in the aftermath” of WWII, Argentina’s “dirty war,” the Sept. 11 attacks, and the 2005 London bombings. While the loss of someone “may appear to be a very private experience” and “outside politics,” Edkins writes that “our fates are intertwined,” and our responses to the loss of even one member of our community tells us what kind of society we are. Most potent is her examination of those missing in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks—for its heartbreaking detail and for the author’s ability to derive larger theories from her observations. She reminisces about how “the cloud of dust that hung over Manhattan for some days would be all that lingered of many of the dead.” She meditates upon the psychology of the searcher hanging photographs of their missing friend or relative, and how those missing persons posters, which remained hanging long after the tragedy, were a “collective scream…a refusal to close over the trauma of a loss” and “a symbolic reminder too that these people are indeed missing…not ‘dead’—the dead have corpses.” A haunting and philosophical elegy. (Nov.)