Session Abstract

The panel discusses the differences and the possible similarities among representations of traumatic events. The four papers examine images and narratives of the Holocaust, Bosnia and Rwanda genocides, as well as racial segregation in the United States and South Africa. In the first paper, Philipp Ruch develops a comparative analysis of images of the Holocaust and the genocides occurred in Bosnia (1992-1995) and Rwanda (1994), by identifying the main elements that characterize these images. By underscoring that publicly presenting these visual representations of unrepresentable human tragedies did not stop these atrocities, Ruch seeks to develop a political epistemology of genocides. Anna Sheftel, in the second paper, explores the perspectives of Holocaust survivors on recent atrocities. She emphasizes the ethical, philosophical, and political issues involving the attempts to compare the Holocaust to other atrocities, Sheftel discusses how the writings of Holocaust survivals negotiate and combine universal statements on human suffering by at the same time not reducing the singularity of their experiences. In the third paper, Myra Houser examines the letters exchanged by the members of the Hekster family, housed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Houser discusses how the correspondence reveals the ways the same family experienced discrimination and displacement in two very different places at the same time: the Nazi-occupied Holland and South Africa, a country where anti-Semitic radical right was building the foundations of the apartehid regime. In the fourth paper, Brown and Christmas explore the reception of Holocaust visual narratives among urban American racial minorities, through the study of two films: The Pawnbroker (1964) and Freedom Writers (2007). Brown and Christmas argue that the tension between the Jewish specificity and unprecedented nature of the Holocaust, as well as the need to generate Holocaust narratives that intersect with intrinsically racialized American narratives, led these films to have significant implications for how collective memories of suffering are constructed and contested in the United States. By questioning the very possibility of comparing the Holocaust and other atrocities, the four papers shed light on the ways irrepresentable events have been represented through written and visual narratives.