Event date: Tuesday 26 April 2011, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room

“Memory Studies and Perpetrator Fictions” given by Dr. Richard Crownshaw (Goldsmiths, University of London)

“In recent years, state-sanctioned memorialization has often taken the form of the public apology for atrocities committed in the name of nation, raising questions about the extent to which the perpetrator’s identity and perspective is scrutinized when adopted in such political performances. This lecture argues that recent, critical interventions in memory studies have produced a similar set of questions. What might be termed critical memory studies has advocated strategic identifications with perpetrators as a means of critiquing the proclivities of certain versions of trauma studies. Those proclivities entail a tendency to over-identify with the victim/witness, producing ethically immaculate versions of the victims remembered and those who would remember them. The critical turn in memory studies was anticipated by Gillian Rose’s critique of a postmodern Holocaust piety that placed the event and victim beyond cognition and naming, for fear of reinscribing a totalizing form of representation (a fascism of representation). (Rose asks, how do we know we are not reproducing a fascism of representation unless we engage strategically with the perpetrator’s perspective – an engagement not possible unless the humanity of the perpetrator is recognized?) Such critiques are of course grounded in Primo Levi’s ‘grey zone’ in which perpetrators and victims cannot be easily separated. However, a strategic implication in or identification with the perpetrator’s perspective – an inhabitation of the grey zone – can become a universalized memorative gesture. There has been a recent proliferation of historical fiction written from that perspective: from, for example, Jonathan Littell’s ventriloquism of Nazism, Bernhard Schlink’s empathetic stance towards the perpetrator generation, and Kate Grenville’s sympathetic portraits of Australian settlers and their atrocious deeds, to Valerie Martin’s, Toni Morrison’s and Edward Jones’s depiction of American slavery from the master’s point of view. This lecture considers the ethical implications of this recent trend in the literature of memory and corresponding memory theory. Where interventions in memory theory had suggested ways of disrupting the appropriation and universalization of the victim’s identity, has this recent literary practice of cultural memory simply reproduced another set of unmediated identifications, leaving bothvictim and perpetrator unexamined? The possibilities of a new direction in memory studies needs to be rethought to contend with the limitations of what might be a new transcultural, transnational formula for remembrance.”

Dr. Rick Crownshaw is a lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches American literature. He is the author of The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and co-editor of The Future of Memory (Berghahn Books, 2010). He has published numerous journal articles on Holocaust literature, museums and memorials.