Unwanted Beauty

Controversial questions about beauty in artistic depictions of the Holocaust

Distance from the Belsen Heap examines the experiences of hundreds of British and Canadian eyewitnesses to atrocity, including war artists, photographers, medical personnel, and chaplains.

This book explores the diverse ways in which Holocaust representations have influenced and structured how other genocides are understood and represented in the West. Rebecca Jinks focuses in particular on the canonical 20th century cases of genocide: Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Using literature, film, photography, and memorialisation, she demonstrates that we can only understand the Holocaust's status as a 'benchmark' for other genocides if we look at the deeper, structural resonances which subtly shape many representations of genocide. Representing Genocide pursues five thematic areas in turn: how genocides are recognised as such by western publics; the representation of the origins and perpetrators of genocide; how western witnesses represent genocide; representations of the aftermath of genocide; and western responses to genocide. Throughout, the book distinguishes between 'mainstream' and other, more nuanced and engaged, representations of genocide. It shows how these mainstream representations – the majority – largely replicate the representational framework of the Holocaust, including the way in which mainstream Holocaust representations resist recognising the rationality, instrumentality and normality of genocide, preferring instead to present it as an aberrant, exceptional event in human society. By contrast, the more engaged representations – often, but not always, originating from those who experienced genocide – tend to revolve around precisely genocide's ordinariness, and the structures and situations common to human society which contribute to and become involved in the violence.

In Disappearing Traces, Dorota Glowacka examines the tensions between the ethical and aesthetic imperatives in literary, artistic, and philosophical works about the Holocaust, in a search for new ways to understand the traumatic past and its impact on the present. She engages with the work of leading 20th-century philosophers and theorists, including Levinas, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Derrida, to consider the role of language in the construction and transmission of traumatic memories; the relation between self-identity and the act of bearing witness; and the ethical implications of representing trauma. Glowacka's work draws on a wide range of discourses and disciplines, bringing into conversation various genres of writing and artistic production. It reveals the need to find innovative idioms and new means of engaging with the past, and to create alliances between different disciplines and modes of representing the past that transform and transcend existing paradigms of representation.

As the first NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, Medgar Wiley Evers put his life on the line to investigate racial crimes (including Emmett Till's murder) and to organize boycotts and voter registration drives. On June 12, 1963, he was shot in the back by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith as the civil rights leader unloaded a stack of "Jim Crow Must Go" T-shirts in his own driveway. His was the first assassination of a high-ranking public figure in the civil rights movement. While Evers's death ushered in a decade of political assassinations and ignited a powder keg of racial unrest nationwide, his life of service and courage has largely been consigned to the periphery of U.S. and civil rights history. In her compelling study of collective memory and artistic production, Remembering Medgar Evers, Minrose Gwin engages the powerful body of work that has emerged in response to Evers's life and death--fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and songs from James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, Lucille Clifton, Bob Dylan, and Willie Morris, among others. Gwin examines local news accounts about Evers, 1960s gospel and protest music as well as contemporary hip-hop, the haunting poems of Frank X Walker, and contemporary fiction such as The Help and Gwin's own novel, The Queen of Palmyra. In this study, Evers springs to life as a leader of "plural singularity," who modeled for southern African Americans a new form of cultural identity that both drew from the past and broke from it; to quote Gwendolyn Brooks, "He leaned across tomorrow." Fifty years after his untimely death, Evers still casts a long shadow. In her examination of the body of work he has inspired, Gwin probes wide-ranging questions about collective memory and art as instruments of social justice. "Remembered, Evers's life's legacy pivots to the future," she writes, "linking us to other human rights struggles, both local and global." A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

Many books focus on issues of Holocaust representation, but few address why the Holocaust in particular poses such a representational problem. David Patterson draws from Emmanuel Levinas's contention that the Good cannot be represented. He argues that the assault on the Good is equally nonrepresentable and this nonrepresentable aspect of the Holocaust is its distinguishing feature. Utilizing Jewish religious thought, Patterson examines how the literary word expresses the ineffable and how the photographic image manifests the invisible. Where the Holocaust is concerned, representation is a matter not of imagination but of ethical implication, not of what it was like but of what must be done. Ultimately Patterson provides a deeper understanding of why the Holocaust itself is indefinable—not only as an evil but also as a fundamental assault on the very categories of good and evil affirmed over centuries of Jewish teaching and testimony.

This innovative collection demonstrates the profound effects of feeling on our experiences and understanding of photography. It includes essays on the tactile nature of photos, the relation of photography to sentiment and intimacy, and the ways that affect pervades the photographic archive. Concerns associated with the affective turn—intimacy, alterity, and ephemerality, as well as queerness, modernity, and loss—run through the essays. At the same time, the contributions are informed by developments in critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. As the contributors bring affect theory to bear on photography, some interpret the work of contemporary artists, such as Catherine Opie, Tammy Rae Carland, Christian Boltanski, Marcelo Brodsky, Zoe Leonard, and Rea Tajiri. Others look back, whether to the work of the American Pictorialist F. Holland Day or to the discontent masked by the smiles of black families posing for cartes de visite in a Kodak marketing campaign. With more than sixty photographs, including twenty in color, this collection changes how we see, think about, and feel photography, past and present. Contributors. Elizabeth Abel, Elspeth H. Brown, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Lisa Cartwright, Lily Cho, Ann Cvetkovich, David L. Eng, Marianne Hirsch, Thy Phu, Christopher Pinney, Marlis Schweitzer, Dana Seitler, Tanya Sheehan, Shawn Michelle Smith, Leo Spitzer, Diana Taylor

This book mobilises the concept of kitsch to investigate the tensions around the representation of genocide in international graphic novels that focus on the Holocaust and the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. In response to the predominantly negative readings of kitsch as meaningless or inappropriate, this book offers a fresh approach that considers how some of the kitsch strategies employed in these works facilitate an affective interaction with the genocide narrative. These productive strategies include the use of the visual metaphors of the animal and the doll figure and the explicit and excessive depictions of mass violence. The book also analyses where kitsch still produces problems as it critically examines depictions of perpetrators and the visual and verbal representations of sexual violence. Furthermore, it explores how graphic novels employ anti-kitsch strategies to avoid the dangers of excess in dealing with genocide. The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels will appeal to those working in comics-graphic novel studies, popular culture studies, and Holocaust and genocide studies.