Synopses & Reviews
This volume offers a variety of perspectives on the relation between violence, memory and space. Focusing on enforced disappearances and genocide as violent practices aimed at destroying and erasing the traces of the 'enemy', the contributions gathered inquire about the manifold spatial strategies of domination and violence, but also about the powers of memory, resistance and transformation. The originality and core contribution of this book lies in the dialogue it establishes between memory studies, on the one hand, and critical studies of space on the other. The bridging of these academic fields opens up a fertile and, to a large extent, unexplored research area. The volume brings together young academics and prominent international scholars from a variety of disciplinary fields, including Geography, Sociology, Political Science, Philosophy, Literature, Cultural Studies, Architecture and Theatre Studies. The authors engage with the spatial deployment of past and present violence in Argentina, Cambodia, Germany, Greece, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the United States. The chapters include original contributions by renowned authors Aleida Assmann and Jay Winter, transcripts of an interview with the eminent geographer David Harvey and fragments of the
play The Cartographer. Warsaw, 1:400,000, by the acclaimed Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga, in its first English translation.
Review
"This ground-breaking book has an impressive sweep of theoretical, geographical and historical engagement with totalitarian state violence, space and memory. It will be an important source for those working with power, space, violence, geography and memory across a range of arts, humanities and social science subjects." - Owain Jones, Professor of Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University, UK
Synopsis
Authors from a variety of disciplines dealing with diverse historical cases engage with the spatial deployment of violence and the possibilities for memory and resistance in contexts of state sponsored violence, enforced disappearances and regimes of exception. Contributors include Aleida Assmann, Jay Winter and David Harvey.
About the Author
Estela Schindel has a PhD in Sociology from the Free University Berlin, Germany. She has taught graduate courses at German and Argentinean universities and published on the figure of Argentina's disappeared as well as on the relation between art, memory and the urban space. She is currently a researcher at the Center of Excellence Cultural Foundations of Social Integration of the University of Konstanz, Germany, with a project about the entanglements of violence, nature and technology in the EU border regime.
Pamela Colombo has a PhD in Sociology from the University of the Basque Country (UPV), Spain. Her research focuses on the social production of space, and particularly on the constitution of imaginary geographies in contexts of political violence. She is currently a Fyssen Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France, and a researcher at the ERC programme 'Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide' with a project about geographies of death and politics of counterinsurgency.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Preface
Introduction: The Multi-Layered Memories of Space; Pamela Colombo and Estela Schindel
PART I: SPATIAL INSCRIPTIONS OF ANNIHILATION
1. Violent Erasures and Erasing Violence: Contesting Cambodia's Landscapes of Violence; James A. Tyner
2. Polish landscapes of Memory at the Sites of Extermination: The Politics of Framing; Zuzanna Dziuban
3. Spaces of Confrontation and Defeat: the Spatial Dispossession of the Revolution in Tucumán, Argentina; Pamela Colombo
4. Subterranean Autopsies: Exhumations of Mass Graves in Contemporary Spain; Francisco Ferrándiz
PART II: THE REPRESENTATION OF VIOLENCE: SPATIAL STRATEGIES
5. Faces, Voices, and the Shadow of Catastrophe; Jay Winter
6. Theatrical Cartography of a Space of Exception; Juan Mayorga
7. The Cartographer. Warsaw, 1:400.000 By Juan Mayorga. In its first English translation by Sarah Maitland
8. 'All Limits Were Exceeded Over There': The Chronotope of Terror in Modern Warfare and Testimony; Kirsten Mahlke
9. The Concentration Camp and the 'Unhomely Home': The Disappearance of Children in Post-Dicatorship Argentine Theatre; Mariana Eva Perez
PART III: HAUNTED SPACES, IRRUPTING MEMORIES
10. 'The Whole Country is a Monument': Framing Places of Terror in Postwar Germany; Aleida Assmann
11. Haunted Houses, Horror Literature and the Space of Memory in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Literature; Silvana Mandolessi
12. Counter-Movement, Space, and Politics: How the Saturday Mothers of Turkey make the Enforced Disappearances Visible; Meltem Ahiska
13. An Orderly Landscape of Remnants: Notes for Reflecting on the Spatiality of the Disappeared; Gabriel Gatti
14. A Boundless Grave: Memory and Abjection of the Río de la Plata; Estela Schindel
PART IV: SPACES OF EXCEPTION, POWER AND RESISTANCE
15. Spatialities of Exception; Pilar Calveiro
16. Imaginary Cities, Violence and Memory: A Literary Mapping; Gudrun Rath
17. Occupied Squares and the Urban 'State of Exception': In, Against and Beyond the City of Enclaves; Stavros Stavrides
18. 'Memory, that Powerful Political Force': An Interview with David Harvey