Table Of ContentMemory and Genocide
T his book focuses on the ethical, aesthetic, and scholarly dimensions of how
genocide-related works of art, documentary films, poetry and performance, muse-
ums 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 representa-
tion 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 hetero-
geneous 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.
Fazil Moradi has completed his PhD thesis at Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology and the University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany.
Ralph Buchenhorst is currently DAAD Visiting Associated Professor of Phi-
losophy at Emory University, Atlanta. He received his PhD from the University of
Vienna and his habilitation from the University of Potsdam in Germany. Buchen-
horst 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.
Memory Studies: Global Constellations
Series editor : Henri Lustiger-Thaler, Ramapo College
of New Jersey, USA, and Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales, France
The ‘past in the present’ has returned in the early twenty-first century with a ven-
geance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experiences
have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understand-
ings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around
forgetting, ‘useful forgetting’ and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and
globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that ‘migrant memo-
ries’; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven rela-
tion to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of
emotions, embodiment and ritual; and, finally, the mnemonic spatiality of geogra-
phy and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings.
T his transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globaliz-
ing their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of
memory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more
and more publicly accessible and therefore part of a new global public constel-
lation around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an aca-
demic field of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public
debate – buttressed by the fragmentation of national narratives – has accelerated.
Societies today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated
and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We
welcome manuscripts that examine and analyze these profound cultural traces.
Titles in this series :
The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity
Martyn Hudson
War Memory and Commemoration
Brad West
Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia
Peter Manning
Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era
The Ethics of Never Again
Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider
Memory and Genocide
On What Remains and the Possibility
of Representation
Edited by Fazil Moradi,
Ralph Buchenhorst and
Maria Six-Hohenbalken
First published 2017
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Fazil Moradi, Ralph Buchenhorst and
Maria Six-Hohenbalken; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Fazil Moradi, Ralph Buchenhorst and Maria Six-Hohenbalken to
be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: 978-1-4724-8201-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-59489-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To Richard Rottenburg
“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 vio-
lence can be an occasion for socially productive forms of narration and recollec-
tion which resist the utter despair and speechlessness that accompany genocide.”
Arjun Appadurai, New York University, USA
Contents
List of figures ix
Acknowledgments x
Notes on contributors xi
Preface by Günther Schlee xiv
Introduction: the past in translation 1
FAZIL MORADI, MARIA SIX-HOHENBALKEN, RALPH BUCHENHORST
1 Intimate interrogations: the literary grammar of
communal violence 10
CHRISTI MERRILL
2 Oral performers and memory of mass violence:
dynamics of collective and individual remembering 27
LAURY OCEN
3 Parallel readings: narratives of violence 42
ÉVA KOVÁCS
4 Genocide in translation: on memory, remembrance,
and politics of the future 57
FAZIL MORADI
5 Remembering the poison gas attack on Halabja:
questions of representations in the emergence of
memory on genocide 75
MARIA SIX-HOHENBALKEN
6 Afterlives of genocide: return of human bodies
from Berlin to Windhoek, 2011 91
MEMORY BIWA
viii Contents
7 Communicating the unthinkable: a psychodynamic
perspective 107
IVANA MAČEK
8 Between Nakba, Shoah, and apartheid: notes on a film
from the interstices 122
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
9 The rethinking of remembering: who lays claim to
speech in the wake of catastrophe? 138
RACHMI DIYAH LARASATI
10 Field, forum, and vilified art: recent developments
in the representation of mass violence and its
remembrance 151
RALPH BUCHENHORST
Afterword: Wonder Woman, the gutter, and critical
genocide studies 165
ALEXANDER LABAN HINTON
Index 175
Figures
4.1 “Anfal . . . A Nation’s Identity” 62
4.2 “Halabja . . . A Nation’s Identity” 63
8.1 The Village Under the Forest Film Still 128
8.2 The Village Under the Forest Film Still 132
