<p>'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.' - <em>Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Utrecht University, Netherlands, author of Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina</em></p><p>‘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.’<em> - Arjun Appadurai, New York University, USA</em></p>
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.
This book focusses on the ethical, the aesthetic and scholarly dimensions of how genocide-related works of art, documentary and feature films, literary works, museums, music, and law translate and are translated as representative of real acts of genocide – as mediating processes materialized in the aftermath.
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
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Christi Merill
- Oral Performers and Memory of Mass Violence: Dynamics of Collective and Individual Remembering
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Laury Ocen
- Parallel Readings: Narratives of Violence
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Éva Kovács
- Genocide in Translation: On Memory, Remembrance, and Politics of the Future
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Fazil Moradi
- Remembering the Poison Gas Attack on Halabja: Questions of Representations in the Emergence of Memory on Genocide
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Maria Six-Hohenbalken
- Afterlives of Genocide: Return of Human Bodies from Berlin to Windhoek, 2011
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Memory Biwa
- Communicating the Unthinkable: A Psychodynamic Perspective
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Ivana Maček
- Between Nakba, Shoah and Apartheid: Notes on a Film from the Interstices
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Heidi Grunebaum
- The Rethinking of Remembering: Who Lays Claim to Speech in the Wake of Catastrophe?
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Rachmi Diyah Larasati
- Field, Forum, and Vilified Art: Recent Developments in the Representation of Mass Violence and its Remembrance
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Ralph Buchenhorst
Afterword: Wonder Woman, the Gutter, and Critical Genocide Studies
Alexander Laban Hinton
Index