5 . Holocaust studies have been particularly present in research on the transmission of trauma across generations . Do you think this has affected the study of other cases of memory transmission , leaving aside memories of resistance , militancy and activism ? Has it overshadowed other types of response to historical traumas ?
Thank you for this challenging question . This is something I ’ ve been thinking about a great deal . Because of the dedicated work Jewish victims did to document and testify about their experiences of persecution and murder , and because of the urgency descendants and scholars of the Holocaust began to feel in the 1980 ’ s and 1990 ’ s about the impending death of survivors and eyewitnesses , this event has spawned a vast array of historical and theoretical work on memory and trauma . That remarkable and authoritative work has informed analyses of other instances of historical trauma , for the most part in helpful ways that show structural connections and interrelations as well as divergences and specificities that resist any possible conflation of`` these histories . Certain kinds of racialized persecution – against Jews , Blacks , indigenous peoples – can fruitfully be connected by studying the structures of Euro-American imperialism and colonialism and the internal and external “ others ” they have created . Responses by those suffering resulting ethnocentrisms and racisms also follow some connected strategies – assimilation and aspired integration , on the one hand , resistance , refusal , and celebration of difference , on the other .
The Holocaust itself is not a uniform event , of course . It comprises so many different kinds of experiences – ghettoization , deportation to forced labor , concentration or death camps , refugeehood , hiding , passing , murder . Yet in popular discourse , the term has come to mean , simply , Auschwitz and numbers on a forearm . This kind of reduction might be inevitable over decades , but it does not foster a productive kind of memory politics . The real problem arises when one event , like the Holocaust conceived in this narrow way , is represented as a limit case and when it becomes a template against which other cases of trauma and survival are measured .
If descendants of persecuted and murdered political activists remember partisans fighting in the Spanish Civil War , anti-apartheid activists in South Africa , victims of forced disappearance in Latin America , Turkey and elsewhere , dissidents in Soviet bloc regimes , to name just a few examples , refer to the Holocaust as a paradigmatic case of persecution and murder , the political work and the passions , hopes and aspirations that made their ancestors vulnerable would indeed be obscured . I have found that looking at memory connectivity , across these histories , is especially helpful in moving beyond the focus on traumatic recall and return , to the memory of activism , resistance and hope . What future were our subjects envisioning ? How can we avoid backshadowing , that is , seeing them only through the knowledge of what later happened , rather than granting them the future they were imagining in the past ?
I have been very interested in thinking about how the memory of violent pasts can be mobilized in the interest of a better future , and thus the memory of activism and activist movements is especially important . I ’ m inspired by my colleagues who participated in the project on Women Mobilizing Memory , and by the work that Ann Rigney and her group , as well as Yifat Guttman and Jenny Wüstenberg and their collaborators are doing on memory activism .
6 . In recent years the feminist movement has gained ground , flexing its muscles every 8th of March in the form of mass demonstrations in capital cities across the world , campaigns against violence against women and girls , protest initiatives like the Me Too Movement and public performance pieces like “ The rapist is you ”. What role has memory played in advancing the movement ? What role can it play ?
Memory is crucial in these movements . The memory of gender violence and women ’ s and gender nonconforming people ’ s vulnerability to gendered
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Observing Memories ISSUE 4