Literature (2016) , is a work of considerable scholarship around the cultural and ethical representation of torture. This gesture is in itself towards that which he argues is unrepresentable, a position consistent with the problematic representation of trauma. Richardson contends that there is 'an urgent need for torture and the war on terror to enter more fully into literature' so that it be known more widely and fully as an event experienced 'with a terrible and traumatic aftermath' (8). In

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... eking how to write torture, Richardson mobilises readings of tortured-prisoner poetry, memoir, legal memoranda, film, photography and fiction; he draws on theories of power, affect, trauma, and testimony to develop in Gestures of Testimony, a critique, and as he suggests, a manifesto of how fiction might be brought into service to achieve justice driven by the 'charge of radical empiricist philosophers to create the new' (10).