Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation

by Fazil Moradi (Editor), Ralph Buchenhorst (Editor), Maria Six-Hohenbalken (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781317097655
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/07/2017
Series:	ISSN
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	198
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Preface, by Günther Schlee

Introduction: The Past in Translation

Fazil Moradi, Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Ralph Buchenhorst

1. Intimate Interrogations: The Literary Grammar of Communal Violence

Christi Merill

2. Oral Performers and Memory of Mass Violence: Dynamics of Collective and Individual Remembering

Laury Ocen

3. Parallel Readings: Narratives of Violence

Éva Kovács

4. Genocide in Translation: On Memory, Remembrance, and Politics of the Future

Fazil Moradi

5. Remembering the Poison Gas Attack on Halabja: Questions of Representations in the Emergence of Memory on Genocide

Maria Six-Hohenbalken

6. Afterlives of Genocide: Return of Human Bodies from Berlin to Windhoek, 2011

Memory Biwa

7. Communicating the Unthinkable: A Psychodynamic Perspective

Ivana Maček

8. Between Nakba, Shoah and Apartheid: Notes on a Film from the Interstices

Heidi Grunebaum

9. The Rethinking of Remembering: Who Lays Claim to Speech in the Wake of Catastrophe?

Rachmi Diyah Larasati

10. Field, Forum, and Vilified Art: Recent Developments in the Representation of Mass Violence and its Remembrance

Ralph Buchenhorst

Afterword: Wonder Woman, the Gutter, and Critical Genocide Studies

Alexander Laban Hinton

Index

Editorial Reviews

'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

From the Publisher