Ernst van Alphen

Deadly Historians: Boltanski’s Intervention in Holocaust Historiography

The French artist Christian Boltanski’s installations of photographic portraits fail provocatively in re-presenting the Holocaust. They only evoke the idea of plain absence or the projection of lies. His practice can be understood as a critique of the culturally shared idea that only bare realism can provide us a proper access to the Holocaust. But he does more than showing that the realist approach to history does not provide us with a memory of it. Instead of referring to the Holocaust, he evokes the Holocaust as an effect by means of a re-enactment of principles which defined the Holocaust.

Toys and Affect: Identifying with the Perpetrator in Contemporary Holocaust Art

The author comments on the genre of work by artists whose works deals with the Holocaust playfully. These artists are second or third generation descendants from survivors or bystanders who represent the Holocaust in the form of play or toys.

Imagined Homelands: Re-mapping Cultural Identity

In light of the video installation Facing Forward by the artist Fiona Tan, this article discusses the connection between place, history and migrancy. It explores how migrant identity, seen as an imagined, identificatory relation to an originating place (the so-called homeland) is at the same time predicated on time, and hence, on history. The act of imagining homeland identity is always framed by the historical dimensions of that place and of the migration that started from there, but it is also inflected by those acts of imagining that produce the cultural identity in the present. Tan’s Facing Forward is discussed as a theoretical object, which contends that the act of imagining homeland identity is radically framed by the historical dimensions of the place where the imagining act takes place.

Attention for Distraction: Modernity, Modernism and Perception

Particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century sensorial experiences changed at breakneck speed. Social and technological developments of modernity like the industrial revolution, rapid urban expansion, the advance of capitalism and the invention of new technologies transformed the field of the senses. Instead of attentiveness, distraction became prevalent. It is not only Baudelaire who addressed these transformations in his poems, but they can also be recognized in the works of novelist Gustave Flaubert and painter Edward Munch. By means of the work of William James, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Simmel, the repercussions of this crisis of the senses for subjectivity will be discussed.

Literature and Art in History

Abstract One of the most important functions of literature and art lies in their capacities to transform ways in which cultural issues are conceived. In that respect, literature and art can be seen as a kind of laboratory where experiments are conducted that shape thought into visual and imaginative ways of framing the pain points of a culture. This is by no means a novel conception of literature and art. Although the dominant commonsense notions of literature and art are still the expressive and conceptual ones, the importance of art is also quite often seen in terms that assign a much more active function, that is, a performative one. Literature and art are then conceived as the realm where ideas and values, the building stones of culture, are actively created, constituted and mobilized.