Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation(Memory Studies: Global Constellations)

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.

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 Intimate Interrogations: The Literary Grammar of Communal Violence Christi Merill Oral Performers and Memory of Mass Violence: Dynamics of Collective and Individual Remembering Laury Ocen Parallel Readings: Narratives of Violence Éva Kovács Genocide in Translation: On Memory, Remembrance, and Politics of the Future Fazil Moradi Remembering the Poison Gas Attack on Halabja: Questions of Representations in the Emergence of Memory on Genocide Maria Six-Hohenbalken Afterlives of Genocide: Return of Human Bodies from Berlin to Windhoek, 2011 Memory Biwa Communicating the Unthinkable: A Psychodynamic Perspective Ivana Maček Between Nakba, Shoah and Apartheid: Notes on a Film from the Interstices Heidi Grunebaum The Rethinking of Remembering: Who Lays Claim to Speech in the Wake of Catastrophe? Rachmi Diyah Larasati 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

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.

Review :
'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