ABSTRACT
In the growing corpus of works of fiction showing a political and ethical concern with the environment, the American-Japanese writer and film-maker Ruth Ozeki occupies a specific place as her ecological awareness also ties in with a concern for identity and gender politics. In her 1995 film Halving the Bones, Ruth Ozeki already experimented with the reconstruction of fractured memory by piecing together the story of her Japanese grandmother's life. In her second novel, All Over Creation, she once again straddled the border between private and collective memory by setting the intersecting narratives of her characters' lives against the background of intensive farming and the development of GMOs' industry. Ozeki acknowledges the pathological turn of our collective life, along with many other observers of what Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman have defined as the "empire of trauma", that "commonplace of the contemporary world, a shared truth".
