1st Edition
Memory and Genocide On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation
This book focuses on the ethical, aesthetic, and scholarly dimensions of how genocide-related works of art, documentary films, poetry and performance, museums and monuments, music, dance, image, law, memory narratives, spiritual bonds, and ruins are translated and take place as translations of acts of genocide. It shows how genocide-related modes of representation are acts of translation which displace and produce memory and acts of remembrance of genocidal violence as inheritance of the past in a future present. Thus, the possibility of representation is examined in light of what remains in the aftermath where the past and the future are inseparable companions and we find the idea of the untranslatability in acts of genocide. By opening up both the past and lived experiences of genocidal violence as and through multiple acts of translation, this volume marks a heterogeneous turn towards the future, and one which will be of interest to all scholars and students of memory and genocide studies, transitional justice, sociology, psychology, and social anthropology.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Preface, by Günther Schlee
Introduction: The Past In Translation
Fazil Moradi, Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Ralph Buchenhorst
- Intimate Interrogations: the Literary Grammar of Communal Violence
- Oral Performers and Memory of Mass Violence: Dynamics of Collective and Individual Remembering
- Parallel Readings: Narratives of Violence
- Genocide in Translation: On Memory, Remembrance, and Politics of the Future
- Remembering the Poison Gas Attack on Halabja:
- Afterlives of Genocide: Return of Human Bodies from Berlin to Windhoek, 2011
- Communicating the Unthinkable: A Psychodynamic Perspective
- Between Nakba, Shoah and Apartheid: Notes on a Film from the Interstices
- The Rethinking of Remembering: Who Lays Claim to Speech in the Wake of Catastrophe?
- Field, Forum, and Vilified Art: Recent Developments in the Representation of Mass Violence and its Remembrance
Christi Merill
Laury Ocen
Éva Kovács
Fazil Moradi
Questions of Representations in the Emergence of Memory on Genocide
Maria Six-Hohenbalken
Memory Biwa
Ivana Maček
Heidi Grunebaum
Rachmi Diyah Larasati
Ralph Buchenhorst
Afterword: Wonder Woman, the Gutter, and Critical Genocide Studies
Alexander Laban Hinton
Index
Biography
Fazil Moradi is finalizing his PhD thesis at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany.
Ralph Buchenhorst is a Senior Researcher at Halle University. He received his PhD from the University of Vienna and his habilitation from the University of Potsdam in Germany. Buchenhorst has been a DAAD Guest Professor at the University of Buenos Aires (2002–2006) and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2013).
Maria Six-Hohenbalken is a Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Lecturer at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna.
'When the survivors of genocide have passed away, their testimonies have aged, and guilty camps have turned into museums, then this superb collection will help us understand the unending attempts to remember and represent the horrendous violence in performances, narratives, and art works.' - Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Utrecht University, Netherlands, author of Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina
‘This remarkable collection engages with the challenging problem of how human beings cope with genocidal violence, through narratives, performances, visual representations and other modes of translation and remembrance. These richly contextualized case studies go a long way towards reminding us that extreme violence can be an occasion for socially productive forms of narration and recollection which resist the utter despair and speechlessness that accompany genocide.’ - Arjun Appadurai, New York University, USA
