Calling Memory Into Place - Hardcover

Apel, Dora

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 197880783X ISBN 13: 9781978807839

Verlag: RUTGERS UNIV PR, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forgetting? And how can inherited family and cultural traumas be channeled in productive ways?  
 
In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer.  
 
These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DORA APEL is the W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair Professor Emerita in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her many books include Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob and Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (both Rutgers University Press).
 

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Introduction

Writing eighty years ago, the German philosopher and culture critic Walter Benjamin offered a visionary response to a small ink drawing by Paul Klee that still resonates today:
 

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

 
I think of this while looking at a diptych of photographs titled Bibliography: Memory Effects, which pictures six stacks of books, each one on a subject related to the Holocaust. The stacks in the photographs lean together to form an open cave threatened by burning edges, as if the fiery residue of past incendiary horrors and passions are creeping into the scene. The diptych becomes a visual counterpart to Benjamin’s fiercely imagined prose; it pictures not the angel of history but seems to allude instead to the wreckage piling up at its feet.

The work is by Buzz Spector and the books are all the ones I read in preparation for writing my own first book Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing. As the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland, writing that book allowed me to work through an obsession with the Holocaust that held me in thrall all my life, always burning at the edges, flaring up when my mother or her fellow survivors told their terrifying tales at our kitchen table. These were often stories of burning shame and humiliation, stories always doused in tears. In Memory Effects I began to examine the consequences of those traumatic memories on the second generation, my generation, focusing on the work of postwar artists attempting to come to terms with inherited trauma and its meaning for their own sense of personal and cultural identity.

An artist best known for his work with books, Spector has made other such deftly conceived photographic works as portraits of his friends, just as these messy piles of books on traumatic memory represent something fundamental about me. Spector turns most of the titles away from the viewer, suggesting all the pages once read and now forgotten. They have become an archive of the inexpressible, the silences of those who perished, and the occlusions of the survivors, who may pluck some facts from memory and order events into stories told and retold in hopes they convey something of the complexities of their trauma, the chaos and terror of events, the horrifying “choiceless choices,” in Lawrence Langer’s phrase. Spector also reveals a few carefully selected titles, among them Cynthia Ozick’s Quarrel and Quandary and Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, Sander Gilman’s The Jew’s Body, and John Weiss’s Ideology of Death. All of them rest on a foundation that includes the writings of Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher’s The Non-Jewish Jew, and The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès. The philosophical theories, cultural and political histories, memoirs, novels, and essays on art and literature all stand in danger of succumbing to the flames themselves. But memory effects are not about the past. How do they shape the present and future? Can the way we remember the past play an active role in fighting ongoing forms of oppression and persecution? These are the questions at the center of this book.
I wrote down some of the stories told to me by my mother as an epilogue to Memory Effects and read them to her after the book came out, when she was ninety-three. We sat on a bench in the sunshine outside her assisted living home, some sixty years after she had fled Poland. She burst into tears after my reading, exclaiming, “You remembered the stories!” I wept too, and felt a kind of anguished joy, realizing this had been one of my reasons for writing the book—wanting to make sure her memories were remembered. Though Memory Effects was about inherited trauma, I hoped that my mother’s reconstructed memories, filtered through me, would also help...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: RUTGERS UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 197880783X
• ISBN 13: 9781978807839
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 238
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland