Steven Cooke

Tales from the Riverbank: place-marketing and maritime heritages

Although place-marketing and image-enhancement are increasingly common elements of Western urban policy, when applied to specific locales, these abstract theories have to negotiate local conditions and contexts. This paper discusses the ways attempts to place-market the city of Hull, England, prompted debates surrounding questions of place, memory and heritage. Despite being Britains leading fishing port in the 20th century, Hulls place-marketing strategy elided this past in favour of a sanitised vision of a modern, post-industrial city. These debates crystallised around a 1999 planning inquiry over the proposed redevelopment of the erstwhile fishing dock. While the proposals contained some reference to the docks role as a site of place-memory, this was deemed insufficient by local protest groups and politicians who argued for a more appropriate memorial to Hulls fishing community. Eventually, the redevelopment proposals were accepted, but not before attendant debates exposed both the depth of local sentiments over place-memories and fishing heritage, and also the difficulties of negotiating inclusive and plural heritage landscapes.

Picturing the nation: The Celtic periphery as discursive other in the archaeological displays of the museum of Scotland

Abstract Using the archaeological displays at the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, this paper examines the exhibition as a site of identity creation through the negotiations between categories of same and Other. Through an analysis of the poetics of display, the paper argues that the exhibition constructs a particular relationship between the Celtic Fringe and Scottish National identity that draws upon the historical discourses of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland as a place and a time ‘apart’. This will be shown to have implications for the display of archaeological material in museums but also for contemporary understandings of Scottish National identity.

Imagination, performance and affect: a critical pedagogy of the Holocaust?

ABSTRACT Based on video testimony interviews held in the Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History archive and the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre’s archive, this paper examines Holocaust survivor testimony as it relates to their return to the sites of atrocity, particularly Auschwitz-Birkenau. It analyses how survivor’s (re)encounters with material and imaginative landscapes reveals conceptions of, inter alia, agency, community, absence and belonging in the performance of self. It uses these tensions between landscapes of the past and present to develop the theoretical relationship between performativity and ideas of affect. In doing so, it explores how these ideas can be used to engage students in a critical pedagogy of the Holocaust through analysis of survivor video-testimony and in visiting landscapes of the Holocaust.

Beth Shalom: Re-thinking History and Memory

This article explores the meanings generated by and through the establishment of Britain’s first permanent memorial centre to the Holocaust: Beth Shalom near Laxton in Nottinghamshire. The Centre is important in a number of respects. In addition to the Centre being established from outside the Anglo-Jewish community – hitherto the primary instigators of Holocaust memorial projects in Britain – the Centre occupies an important symbolic site, deep within the imagined landscape of England and ‘Englishness’. The article examines the way in which the mnemonic site’s relationship with its surrounding location is crucially important in the making of meaning, both for the Centre itself and for the surrounding landscape. It concludes by arguing that an active engagement with the landscape can be used to reconnect the spatial and temporal histories of particular mnemonic sites to explore the way in which the Holocaust is relevant to past and contemporary British social relations.

‘A modern chamber of horrors’? Temporary Holocaust exhibitions as sites of memory: the 1961 Warsaw Ghetto commemoration exhibition, Melbourne

ABSTRACT This paper examines the 1961 Warsaw Ghetto exhibition in Melbourne, Australia. Within the context of Eichmann’s trial in Israel and fears of rising anti-Semitism in Australia, the exhibition is a site through which debates over Jewish identity, Holocaust memory, and the hitherto marginalised role of temporary exhibitions can be understood. Using archival traces, the paper examines the intentions of the exhibition’s organisers, and its reception by visitors. It shows how representations of the Holocaust were shaped by local concerns, the availability of information from emerging global networks of memorial institutions, and the evolving category of ‘survivor’. It adds to a nuanced reading of Holocaust memorial forms, unsettling established narratives of Holocaust memory in Australia.

Your Story Too

The landscapes of the Holocaust are many and varied. They encompass the sites of camps and killing fields of Europe, but also too the memorial landscapes that reference the myriad ways in which the post-war world has attempted to frame our memory of the events that we call the Holocaust. Discussion surrounding representations of the Holocaust, in a variety of different media, has come to the fore in recent years and has prompted heated and sometimes acrimonious debate.

Discourses of regeneration in early twentieth-century Britain: from Bedlam to the Imperial War Museum

This paper examines the building that presently houses the Imperial War Museum, investigating the transformation of the archetypal ‘mad space’ of the Bethlem Royal Hospital into what has been described as the ‘biggest boy’s bedroom in London’. Following recent concerns in human geography with Imperial cities, it highlights the differing ways in which this transformation embodies a number of themes of degeneration and regeneration in early twentieth-century Britain.