Empire of Trauma

The contributions to this volume map the surprisingly multifarious circumstances in which trauma is invoked – as an analytical tool, a therapeutic term or as a discursive trope.

Ezra Furman can feel the future barrelling toward the now. Inside the world of her new album, All of Us Flames, the end of the patriarchal capitalist empire seems both imminent and inevitable, a turn down a path we can't see yet but can't avoid, either. The heat of a different world throbs just behind the skin of this one; all around us, openings to it flicker. They vanish almost as soon as they've appeared. But they keep appearing, as if daring us to hold them open, to widen them until they turn into a way.

Celebrated chef Barbara Lynch credits the defiant spirit of her upbringing in tough, poor "Southie", a neighborhood ruled by the notorious Whitey Bulger gang, with helping her bluff her way into her first professional cooking jobs; develop a distinct culinary style through instinct and sheer moxie; then dare to found an empire of restaurants ranging from a casual but elegant "clam shack" to Boston's epitome of modern haute cuisine.