This FWO-funded postdoctoral research project examines how trauma theory can break with Eurocentrism and thus realize its self-declared ethical potential. It consists of a theoretical part in which the possibility and point of “postcolonializing” trauma theory are investigated, and a practical part made up of three case studies of postcolonial literary oeuvres that bear witness to the suffering engendered by colonial oppression (J. M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, and Eavan Boland).