Published by De Gruyter

Volume 45 Issue 2 - Performing Cultural trauma in Theatre and Film. Guest-editors: Frederik Le Roy, Christel Stalpaert, Sofie Verdoodt

Issue of arcadia

Contents
Journal Overview

April 6, 2011

Introduction. Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film. Between Representation and Experience

Page range: 249-264

April 6, 2011

Hitchcock, the Holocaust, and the Long Take: Memory of the Camps

Steven Jacobs

Page range: 265-276

Abstract

In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock got involved in the production of a documentary film, which later would be called Memory of the Camps. Although Hitchcock's involvement in the project was rather minimal, his contribution interfered in an interesting way with some of the aesthetic preoccupations that particularly characterized his feature films of the 1940s. How are some of these interests, such as the fascination for morbid details, the use of fetish objects and a preference for long takes, connected to the issues of memory, trauma, and (historical) truth?

April 6, 2011

Playing Soldiers at the Edge of Imagination. Hotel Modern and the Representation of the Unrepresentable

Maaike Bleeker

Page range: 277-296

Abstract

With their performances The Great War (life in the trenches during the First World War), and Kamp (Auschwitz), as well as their short video History of the World Part Eleven , the Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern raises important questions concerning the core of the claims that some events cannot be adequately represented, or should not be represented at all. Hotel Modern uses theatre as a critical vision machine, in order to undermine seemingly self-evident modes of looking; they confront us, their audience, with the way we are implicated in what we believe we see. Hence they suggest that resistance to representation might in fact be a manifestation of what Alain Badiou has called the ‘passion for the real’.

April 6, 2011

On the Charge of Memory. Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation

Maureen Turim

Page range: 297-306

Abstract

What does a field of dogs, arranged like seagulls watching the ocean, suggest about the representation of trauma and Auschwitz? The question, posed in homage to Andrzej Munk's film Pasazerka (The Passenger, 1963) , has a long answer. The answer developed here has philosophical and theoretical implications that take us deep into the structure of trauma as understood in the aesthetics of films of consequence. Munk's film provides a particularly forceful example of what representation might mean, as it links Jewish trauma to that of political resistance, yet tells this tale with consummate and poignant irony through the eyes of a Nazi who reexamines her subjective memory, and the testimony she made in bad faith. This makes the movie into a particularly complex example of Holocaust fiction; as one of the most hauntingly composed films of the twentieth century, it underscores a maxim of progressive modernist art: form embodies meaning.

April 6, 2011

Mediating Memories. The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship

Anneke Smelik

Page range: 307-325

Abstract

What is the notion of ‘mediated memory’ in relation to films and other media about 9/11? Media technologies invariably shape our memories of past and present life. Rather than simply representing the past, even the recent past of an event like the attack on the Twin Towers, television, computers, cinema and other media enable and produce particular memories with the use of specific techniques. Representations of 9/11 constituted a case of ‘real virtuality' that turned the disaster into a media spectacle. The question then becomes how later films can avoid spectacularization; how they can visualize a disaster that is already settled in cultural memory. How can spectators assume an ethical position in a global media culture that promotes a theme park of disaster?

April 6, 2011

The Violin Player, the Soccer Game and the Wall-Graffiti. Rhetorical Strategies in the Border-Regions between Israel and Palestine

Freddie Rokem

Page range: 326-338

Abstract

This contribution examines an incident at a roadblock which took place in November 2004, documented in a short video and was also reproduced as a still in Israeli media. This image immediately became broadly discussed and contested. It shows a young Palestinian man playing a violin at a check point while a group of Israeli soldiers are standing and guarding the place. This image was drawn into larger clusters of signification where the rhetorical strategies employed become both quite complex and ambiguous. The image became contextualized within discourses of conflict, creating what Walter Benjamin in his Passagenwerk termed “constellations.” – Besides presenting this notion and its hermeneutic potentials my article examines the historical associations of the image, arguing that the associations with the Holocaust are actually a way to minimize the pain and suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation rather than highlighting them in a broader universal context. – Another aspect of this image is connected to the technologies of creating and disseminating images of conflict/occupation and how they affect the ethical discussions surrounding this incident. I will argue that historical constellations tend to obscure rather than sharpen the ethical dimensions of images like the Palestinian violin player at the check point. – A number of graffiti paintings on the separation wall, in particular by the British graffiti artist Bansky, as well as a cellphone advertisement featuring the separation wall will be examined in order to contextualize the discourses of conflict and occupation.

April 6, 2011

Mourning as Method. William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noir

Kristina Hagström Ståhl

Page range: 339-352

Abstract

William Kentridge's 2005 work Black Box/Chambre Noire was created as an “afterthought” to his production of Mozart's The Magic Flute . In Black Box/Chambre Noire , Kentridge examines the dark side of the Enlightenment ideals that informed The Magic Flute , as well as early twentieth-century European colonial endeavours. Tracing the history of Germany's genocide of the Herero population in Namibia, Black Box/Chambre Noire posits processes of historiographic erasure as constitutive of Europe's relationship to its own colonial legacy in Southern Africa. Kentridge's strategies for representing trauma, loss, and memory suggest that his incorporation of Trauerarbeit into the artwork shapes not only its content but also its form, technique, and method.

April 6, 2011

“‘It's about us!’. Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theatre

Ilka Saal

Page range: 353-373

Abstract

Trauma work entails not only the mending of physical and psychic wounds, but also the reconstruction of narrative structures. In the wake of September 11, there were, as Don DeLillo put it, “1000, 000 stories […] waiting to be told.” And yet, the nation chose to inscribe only a select few into the nation's collective memory. Ann Nelson's The Guys (2001), Neil LaBute's The Mercy Seat (2002), and Karen Finley's Make Love (2003) are paradigmatic examples of forming narrative memory in the American theater. The article shows how these dramatic narratives interact with their cultural context. It explores the ways in which these plays might speak to Judith Butler's concern for a proper ethical framing of traumatic memory, one that interlinks the mourning for the vulnerability of the self with an awareness of the vulnerability of others. So far, American theater has shown little interest in working out what Butler has called an “ethics of vulnerability.” It has frequently fallen back on either the celebratory affirmation of nationhood (Nelson) or its sarcastic questioning (LaBute). It is only in Finley's performance piece that we begin to see an attempt to move beyond such unilateral accounts of suffering.

April 6, 2011

Beyond Medusa. Recovering History on Stage

Kati Röttger

Page range: 374-386

Abstract

The theatre work of the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek is known for its critique of mythology. In her recent “work in progress”, which closely follows media reports about the Iraq war and the tortures in Abu Ghraib, Jelinek concentrates on the mythologizing effects of a “wartainment” that a supposedly alert, educated population can witness as little more than a spectacular television melodrama. According to Jelinek this rapidly erases the event from public memory. In the second step of her progressing work, “Babel” (2005), she deconstructs these telematic strategies of forgetting, ignoring and blinding traumatic experiences by creating what she in a slightly ironical way calls an “artwork of morality”. Jelinek is pleading with her work for a concept of performing history (on stage) that inscribes what does not let inscribe itself: the contingency of events of terror, war and torture that ruptures continuity and signification.

April 6, 2011

Unclaimed and Unclaimable. Memories of the RAF

Gerald Siegmund

Page range: 387-405

Abstract

This essay deals with the traumatic memory of the RAF, a German terrorist group from the 1970s, as staged by two theatre productions, Klaus Michael Grüber's Winterreise from 1977 and Nicolas Stemann's Ulrike Maria Stuart from 2006. Despite their very different aesthetics, Grüber and Stemann share artistic strategies of dealing with history in the theatre in general and the history of the RAF in particular. Rather than creating a fictional world that remembers and represents past events as completed acts, both directors use metonymic devices to deconstruct space and character, situation and speech. They transpose historic events into a performative play with absences rather than presences, thereby spectralising the past and asking the audience to assume its position in the unfolding spectrum of remaining questions and contradictions. Thus the essay proposes a form of memory specific to the aesthetic experience: ‘aesthetic memory’ is not primarily concerned with creating continuity and stabilizing identities, but with keeping the questions of the past open.

April 6, 2011

Afterimages. Post-Holocaust, Posttraumatic, and Postcolonial Cinemas

Joshua Hirsch

Page range: 406-427

Abstract

Based on the author's previous work, which posited a posttraumatic form of cinema emerging in France after the Second World War, this article focuses primarily on the representation of the Holocaust in films like Night and Fog, The Pawnbroker , and Shoah . These films not only represented traumatic events, they also developed new aesthetic strategies that encouraged a posttraumatic historical consciousness in the audience. More recent work of the author compares this posttraumatic cinema of the Holocaust with the cinematic responses of filmmakers from other cultures to other historical traumas. To what extent are these cinematic responses to trauma influenced by or similar to the posttraumatic cinema of the Holocaust, and to what extent do they differ? The article summarizes the posttraumatic cinema of the Holocaust, and then compares and contrasts it to two other posttraumatic films: Sankofa (about African-American slavery) and History and Memory (about the Japanese American internment camps). History and Memory – made by Rea Tajiri, a woman – can be used to problematize the relationship between trauma and gender in the other films.

April 6, 2011

Das Warten auf den Herrensignifikanten oder: Die Verhandlung von Zufall, Zeichen und Notwendigkeit in Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 als Kritik des Indizienparadigmas

Lars Koch

Page range: 431-445

Abstract

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), may be read as an implicit exploration of John F. Kennedy's assassination and the investigations of the Warren Commission. By presenting the female protagonist Oedipa Maas as a truth seeker who gradually entangles herself in protoparanoid thinking, the novel discusses the epistemological preconditions of the evidence on which the Warren report is based on. This leads to the question of how the relationship of fact and fiction is filtered through Oedipa's hermeneutics of suspicion.

April 6, 2011

Von der “(Un)Möglichkeit, sich in die Fremde hineinzuleben”. Kulturelle Assimilation als Desintegration am Beispiel von Ilija Trojanows Roman Der Weltensammler

Matthias Rath

Page range: 446-464

Abstract

In Der Weltensammler (2006), the policultural German author Ilija Trojanow assumes a critical perspective towards cultural assimilation. Processes of cultural assimilation in heterogeneous social systems lead to conflicting claims of inclusion. The individual can only evade these contradictory claims by adjusting his role and identity to suit different cultural groups. Trojanow's novel exemplifies that identity-stressing transitions risk the disintegration of the self. Enculturation will fail if either the source or the target society culturally defines itself by hedging off presumed aliens. However, Trojanow also shows how an empathic merger into a foreign culture could lead to a new identity, whatever the assimilation pressure and the risk of becoming a castaway.

April 6, 2011

Rezensionen

Page range: 467-500

April 6, 2011

Liste der Mitarbeiter

Page range: 501-503

About this journal

arcadia is a biannual peer-reviewed international, intercultural and interdisciplinary journal that welcomes reflexive and informed comparative and critical approaches to literary works, films, theatre plays, to social, political, cultural, visual and media phenomena, to translations, literary and cultural migrations and transfers as well as to theoretical, methodological and philosophical questions. It publishes contributions in German, English, and French from all over the world and keeps its pages open to a broad variety of theories and methods. It fosters innovation, recontextualization and reconceptualization derived from a confrontation between different, and often asymmetric, national, cultural, gendered, economic, geopolitical, intellectual, disciplinary and institutional settings. Next to the proposals for thematic clusters and special issues, the journal also invites independent articles by both eminent and emerging scholars. After an initial editorial screening, submissions undergo a blind review process by an international advisory board and other experts in the field.

Submitted papers should not be submitted elsewhere, should not constitute chapters of finished or nearly finished dissertations, and should not have been published in another major language.

Submissions prepared in Word format and MLA Referencing Style should be sent to the editorial office of arcadia, Ivana Perica <ivana.perica@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>. The arcadia Style Sheet is available on the website under Submission of Manuscripts.
Deadlines: 15th October, 15th March

Authors whose articles are not in their native language are strongly advised to have their manuscript checked by a native speaker. Stylistically and grammatically incorrect articles will not be considered.