ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

The past in translation

chapter 1|17 pages

Intimate interrogations

The literary grammar of communal violence

chapter 2|15 pages

Oral performers and memory of mass violence

Dynamics of collective and individual remembering

chapter 3|15 pages

Parallel readings

Narratives of violence

chapter 4|18 pages

Genocide in translation

On memory, remembrance, and politics of the future

chapter 5|16 pages

Remembering the poison gas attack on Halabja

Questions of representations in the emergence of memory on genocide

chapter 6|16 pages

Afterlives of genocide

Return of human bodies from Berlin to Windhoek, 2011

chapter 7|15 pages

Communicating the unthinkable

A psychodynamic perspective

chapter 8|16 pages

Between Nakba, Shoah, and apartheid

Notes on a film from the interstices

chapter 9|13 pages

The rethinking of remembering

Who lays claim to speech in the wake of catastrophe?

chapter 10|14 pages

Field, forum, and vilified art

Recent developments in the representation of mass violence and its remembrance

chapter |10 pages

Afterword

Wonder Woman, the gutter, and critical genocide studies