Richard Crownshaw

The afterlife of Holocaust memory in contemporary literature and culture

As living memories of the Holocaust die out with the generation that witnessed the event, practitioners of memory work have focused on the transmission of memory to the next generations. Recent Holocaust memorialisation, in the form of literature, museums, memorials and monuments, must make Holocaust memory meaningful for those born after the event. With this in mind, the arts of Holocaust memorialisation often provoke a sense of secondary memory or vicarious witnessing, an attempt to experience Holocaust memory or even trauma by proxy – in short, the remembrance of things not witnessed. Recent academic theories of Holocaust memory and trauma are correspondent with these current memorial practices. The problem with this theoretical paradigm is that it tends to lose sight of the specificity of particular acts of remembering, the identities formed in relation to the remembrance of past events, and the ethical and political questions raised by those acts and identifications. This book identifies the ethical implications of such memory work where it becomes appropriative and universalising by scrutinizing theoretical approaches to the work of W.G. Sebald and Bernhard Schlink, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the museum and memorial architecture of Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman, and generates a series of more self-reflexive readings of such representations of the Holocaust

Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory

There has been a turn toward the figure of the perpetrator in recent historical fiction. More precisely, and as Bernhard Schlink’sDer Vorleser (1995, published asThe Reader, 1996) andDie Heimkehr (2006, published asTheHomecoming, 2008), Jonathan Littell’s LesBienveillantes (2006, publishedasTheKindlyOnes, 2009),KateGrenville’sThe Secret River (2006), Valerie Martin’s Property (2003), Edward Jones’s The Known World (2003), Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), and Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007), amongst others, suggest, that turn has rendered the figure the perpetrator in empathetic terms, or rather raised the possibility, for the reader, of an empathetic or at least an affective relation to the perpetrator. This tendency in fiction is correspondent with recent critiques of memory studies, or rather what might be termed critical memory studies. Those critiques draw attention to the universalization of the victim’s identity in both the theory and practice of cultural memory, and suggest the possibilities of entertaining less palatable forms of identification, with the perpetrator, as a means of stemming such universalizing tendencies. This seems to have been an innovation in memory studies that is Holocaust-related, but it has been exported to other scenarios of cultural remembrance. The first concern of this essay is to question whether, if the universalization of the figure of the victim suggests a form of transculturalmemory that is all too homogeneous, the antidotal use of the perpetrator simply re-inscribes the same problem. Put otherwise, does the recent theory and practice of cultural memory that is perpetrator-centered make the perpetrator an appropriable figure available for facile identification across different cultural memories where once the victim figured such availability? After tracing and accounting for the universalising tendencies and logics that have so far been asserted, this essaywill considerways of reading the fictional perpetrator that reinstall its particularities as a figure around and through which the work of cultural memory can be conducted, and by which transcultural, comparative workmight take place – a node around which productive tensions and asymmetries between the remembrances of past events can be generated. Having done some conceptual groundwork for transcultural remembrance, this essay will turn its attention to one national instantiation of what might be called perpetrator fiction, twenty-firstcenturyNorth-American historical fiction that deals with the practice and institution of slavery, wholly or partly from themaster’s point of view.The reconceptualisation of how the figure of the perpetrator could be read in a particularized manner would not be complete without an assessment as to why he or she figures in the cultural remembrance of the present moment. In other words, memory studies’ foundational

Deterritorializing the “Homeland” in American Studies and American Fiction after 9/11

Literary criticism has debated the usefulness of the trauma paradigm found in much post-9/11 fiction. Where critiqued, trauma is sometimes understood as a domesticating concept by which the events of 9/11 are incorporated into sentimental, familial dramas and romances with no purchase on the international significance of the terrorist attacks and the USs response to them; or, the concept of trauma is understood critically as the means by which the boundaries of a nation or “homeland” self-perceived as violated and victimized may be shored up, rendered impermeable – if that were possible. A counterversion of trauma argues its potential as an affective means of bridging the divide between a wounded US and global suffering. Understood in this way, the concept of trauma becomes the means by which the significance of 9/11 could be deterritorialized. While these versions of trauma, found in academic theory and literary practice, invoke the spatial – the domestic sphere, the homeland, the global – they tend to focus on the time of trauma rather than on the imbrication of the temporal and the spatial. If, instead, 9/11 trauma could be more productively defined as the puncturing of national fantasies of an inviolable and innocent homeland, fantasies which themselves rest on the (failed) repression of foundational violence in the colonial and settler creation of that homeland, and on subsequent notions of American exceptionalism at home and, in the exercise of foreign policy, abroad, then the traumatic can be spatialized. In other words, understood in relation to fantasy, trauma illuminates the terroritalization and deterritorialization of American history. After working through various examples of post-9/11 fiction to demonstrate parochial renditions of trauma and traumas unrealized global resonances, this article turns to Cormac McCarthys 9/11 allegory The Road for the way in which its spaces, places and territories are marked by inextricable traumas of the past and present – and therefore for the way in which it models traumas relation to national fantasy.

Performing Memory in Holocaust Museums

British and North American Holocaust museums have been charged in much cultural criticism with effacing the particularity of the Jewish majority who were subject to genocide. They exhibit the Holocaust in a way that reflects an idealized national identity that is the antithesis of a past, aberrant and German nationalism. These museums posit Britain and the USA as redeemed nationstates for their role in liberating western concentration camps and providing a safe haven for those who fled the Holocaust as it unfolded, and in its aftermath. This British and American identity, which redeems the idea of nationalism, is exhibited at the expense of the Jewish identity of those who died, survived and found refuge. At the Imperial War Museum (London), the current exhibition of the liberation of Bergen Belsen, together with a smaller, but less specific, annexed Holocaust exhibit, present the point of view of the (British) liberator over that of the victim, so the criticism states (Kushner 1996: 18-32). This privileged point of view subsumes the Jewish specificity of the identities of Holocaust victims. Whether dead or alive, victims are mostly pictured in de-humanized terms, and testimony is provided mostly by liberators. This reconfiguration of Jewish identity is, arguably, the logical extension of an exclusive idea of Englishness. This idea or template for a national identity marginalizes Jewish histories and memories whether or not they migrated to Britain with Holocaust refugees. It remains to be seen whether the Imperial War Museums new Holocaust exhiRichard Crownshaw

Speculative memory, the planetary and genre fiction

ABSTRACT Our new geological epoch of the Anthropocene is characterised by the primacy of humanity’s catastrophic agency in shaping the planet and is evident in the record left behind by that agency’s inscriptions in the Earth’s strata. Recent literary criticism and theory, its sense of temporality and spatiality recalibrated, has sought an interpretive methodology for reading the planetary and the geological in literature. Of particular issue is scale and whether the humanist imaginaries of the literary are sufficiently multi-scalar to apprehend the unfolding Anthropocene. This essay argues that in the emphasis on scale, issues of mediation are overlooked. Turning to genre fiction, particularly that of Paulo Bacigalupi, this essay argues that its future scenarios of climate change, ecological collapse, and near-extinction – a more fully realised Anthropocene – stage cultural memories of the unfolding aetiologies of the conditions imagined in the future but often subject to dissociation in our present. Conceptualising this fiction as the work of speculative memory, this essay finds in such acts of recall a self-reflexiveness as to the mediations of environmental remembrance. That is, in this futural work of cultural memory, the localisation of the planetary particularises the Anthropocene and foregrounds the ways that it is framed.

On reading Sebald criticism: witnessing the text

This article discusses trends in literary theories of trauma and how their influence can be felt in criticism of the work of W. G. Sebald. Such criticism tends to find in the disruptive interplay of verbal and pictorial discourses, typical of Sebald’s work, textual aporias that reflect traumatic interruptions of the cultural remembrance of the extremes of modernity in general and the Holocaust in particular. Tracing literary criticism that focuses on Sebald’s use of photographic images in Austerlitz, this article argues that such criticism veers towards treating the text as the unmediated inscription of a traumatic interruption, and suggests that, rather than finding trauma in the text, Sebald’s work provokes such critical responses in order to revoke them, revealing not trauma but theoretical formulae for trauma. Sebald’s work thereby frustrates attempts to experience vicariously the trauma of Holocaust victims that his novel represents.