Catherine Liu took the stage in London on September 21 to talk about trauma. She was there for Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, new from Verso. The book argues that trauma has been commodified into a politics of permanent victimhood, and that its loudest merchants trade in something other than the true suffering of people. Midway through the conversation with Ash Sarkar on Novara Media’s Downstream, Liu, a cultural critic and professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine, swerved into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. She apologized for the tangent, and her interviewer told her to keep going. “What a phenomenal tangent that was,” she said when she surfaced.

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