The dominant approach to trauma in the humanities is known as trauma theory, an area of cultural studies that emerged in the early 1990s. Among the most influential theorists is Cathy Caruth whose research attempts to reconcile understandings of PTSD with Freudian psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. The most enduring aspects of her work include trauma’s belatedness and its unrepresentability. The ubiquity of these ideas has been such that Susannah Radstone (Paragraph, 30. 1 (2007), 10) refers to ‘the rise of what is becoming almost a new theoretical orthodoxy’. More recent scholarship has, however, called in to question many aspects of Caruth’s trauma theory, including its shaky empirical foundations, its narrow understanding of what constitutes ‘traumatic’, its eurocentrism, and its prescriptivism in terms of how trauma should be represented. In Chapter 1, I argue that concepts such as PTSD, belatedness, unknowability and unrepresentability may have limited useful application in post-genocide Rwanda and may in fact be detrimental rather than helpful. Specifically, I contend that trauma theory’s event-based, eurocentrism misunderstands the post-colonial, postgenocide Rwandan context, and its imposition may constitute a continuation of rather than a remedy to trauma. I also show that the idea of unrepresentability is particularly harmful in an environment where survivors are continuously encouraged to ‘move on’ and adopt silent coping.