On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence

Description

This book offers to academic and general public readers timely reflections about our relationships to violence. Taking cues from the self-reflexivity, themes, and subject matters of Holocaust, queer, and Black studies, this large group of diverse intellectuals wrestles with questions that connect past, present and future: where do I stand in relation to violence? What is my attitude toward that adjacency? Whose story gets to be told by whom? What story do I take this image to be telling? How do I co-witness to another's suffering? How do I honor the agency and resilience of family members or historical personages? How do past violence and injustice connect to the present? In smart, self-conscious, passionate, and often painfully beautiful prose, cultural practitioners, historians and cultural studies scholars such as Angelika Bammer, Doris Bergen, Ann Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch, Priscilla Layne, Mark Roseman, Leo Spitzer, Susan R. Suleiman and Viktor Witkowski explore such questions, inviting readers to do the same. By making available compelling examples of thinkers performing their own work within the cauldron of crises that came to a boil in 2020 and continued into the next year, this volume proposes strategies for moving forward with hope. Contents On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence: Introduction Part One: Connections Debts Telling Our Own Stories and Speaking on Behalf of Others Suspicious: On Being Policed in an Anti-Black World Hidden Places: The Indigenous Presence in My Affective Turn On Being Adjacent to the Nazi Disability Murder Project Sacrament versus Racism: Converted Jews in Nazi Germany Buried Words, Exposed Connections Affiliative Adjacency and Generational Grief: Ruth Klüger, Ursula Mahlendorf, and the Passing of a Generation Identity Freedom or On Choosing Who We Are Prisoner Experiences in Times of Crisis Borderlands Part Two: Families A Postcard to Zircz (Budapest, 1944) Elsa Lost and Found “Something Dreadful . . .” [Etwas Schreckliches . . .] “Cares of a Family Man”: A Father’s Reflections on Odradek and the Holocaust Residual Remembrance: Family Genealogies and the Return of the Dead The Unconcealed: Family Secrets as Family History The Flesh of the Family Album: Black Pacific Visual Kinship “And what about your mother?” Nelly and Trudie: Deciphering a Transatlantic Family Holocaust Correspondence I Thought She Was Old, But She Was Really My Age: Tracing Desperation and Resilience in My Grandmothers’ Letters from Berlin – Fragments A Father, a Perpetrator, a Son Part Three: Journeys Looking for History, Finding a Life A Journey to Izbica and Sobibor Mrs. Kraus: A Short Story from a Central European Girlhood on the Run In Hopes of Failing Better: An Academic Afterlife; Or, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: On Altered Lives, Refuges, and Refugees “Is this really necessary?”: On Atrocity Images in the Classroom The Affects of Reading Falling Down on the Job/On Revulsion (November 2016–September 2020) Tears and Empathy: Possible Methodologies for Studying Sexual Violence Blood, Boden and Belonging Upended A Conversation (Spring 2021) Notes on Contributors