Remembering Histories of Trauma: North American Genocide and the Holocaust in Public Memory

Description

Remembering Histories of Trauma compares and links Native American, First Nation and Jewish histories of traumatic memory. Using source material from both sides of the Atlantic, it examines the differences between ancestral experiences of genocide and the representation of those histories in public sites in the United States, Canada and Europe. Challenging the ways public bodies have used those histories to frame the cultural and political identity of regions, states, and nations, it considers the effects of those representations on internal group memory, external public memory and cultural assimilation. Offering new ways to understand the Native-Jewish encounter by highlighting shared critiques of public historical representation, Mailer seeks to transcend historical tensions between Native American studies and Holocaust studies. In linking and comparing European and American contexts of historical trauma and their representation in public memory, this book brings Native American studies, Jewish studies, early American history, Holocaust studies, and museum studies into conversation with each other. In revealing similarities in the public representation of Indigenous genocide and the Holocaust it offers common ground for Jewish and Indigenous histories, and provides a new framework to better understand the divergence between traumatic histories and the ways they are memorialized. Cover Halftitle page Title page Copyright page CONTENTS FIGURES PREFACE Introduction Indigenous and Jewish Worlds of Trauma PART ONE Theory CHAPTER ONE “Humanitarian feelings . . . crystallized in formulae of international law.” Biological Determinism and the
Problem of Perpetrator Intent Biological determinism and the break down of the Indigenous–Jewish alliance The local and oral context for comparative genocide Representing strict genocidal intent Towards consensus on structural intent, disease, and contingency Toward consensus on the representation of cultural genocide CHAPTER TWO “Metaphysical Jew Hatred” and the “Metaphysics of Indian-hating.” Public Memory and the Problem of Imperial Power The Nazi East and the American West Subaltern genocide, Indigenous history, and Holocaust memory PART TWO North America CHAPTER THREE “We are waiting for the construction of our museum.” Indigenous People, Jews, and the North Americanization of the Holocaust The foundation of the USHMM and the problem of universalism Indigenous memory and the problem of universalism The Problem of Multicultural Memory in Canada and the United States CHAPTER FOUR “The shrines of the soulof a nation.” Traumatic Memory, Assimilation, and Vanishing in North America The Vanishing American Jew Traumatic history as cultural form in Indigenous America Plastic shamans and lucky Jews PART THREE Europe CHAPTER FIVE “A permanent statement of our values.” Indigenous Genocide, the Holocaust, and European Public Memory Germany: Ethnography and universalism France: Republican universalism and the abstraction of trauma Britain: The values of Holocaust memory and the occlusion of Empire Indigenous history, the Holocaust, and the material of European integration CHAPTER SIX “The void has made itself apparent as such.” Placing Group Memoryin Public History The dialectical turn in European Holocaust memory Indigenous counter-memory and the reconfiguration of European ethnography An Indigenous-Jewish template for public memory work Conclusion NOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX