American Public Memory and the Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations

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Description

The recent rise of global antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American white nationalism has created a dangerous challenge to Holocaust public memory on an unprecedented scale. This book is a timely exploration of the ways in which next-generation Holocaust survivors combine old and new media to bring newer generations of audiences into active engagement with Holocaust histories. Readers have been socialized to expect memorialization artifacts about the Holocaust to come in the form of diaries, memoirs, photos, or documentaries in which gender is often absent or marginalized. This book shows a complex process of remembering the past that can positively shift our orientations toward others. Using gender, performance, and rhetoric as a frame, Lisa Costello questions public memory as gender neutral while showing how new forms of memorialization like digital archives, YouTube posts, hybrid memoirs, and small films build emotional connections that bring us closer to the past.

Reviews

This book is an insightful analysis directed at Holocaust Studies, but it could also be extended to other fields as a way to widen analysis of how memory and history are made and performed.

Highly recommended for academic libraries.

* Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews *
American Public Memory and the Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations makes an important contribution to Holocaust studies and its intersection with the study of rhetoric and memory: it shows what happens when we take the idea of the body seriously, and how affect, as part of the material experience of the body, plays an important role in complicating certain Holocaust commonplaces. Any serious scholar of public memory should read this book. -- Michael Bernard-Donals, University of Wisconsin-Madison
American Cultural Memory and the Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations takes on the most current scholarship and often difficult debates in the field. A timely exploration of the importance of affect theories of recent years, and how Holocaust studies are definitively moved and shaped by what Lisa Costello calls after-affects. The chilling resurgence of anti-semitism in the U.S. and abroad is palpably pushing and pulling Costello along. She opens up for critical examination the performances of artists, writers, museums, and locations where, as students, teachers, and citizens we are compelled to confront a history that disappears, with actual witnesses ever fewer, and newer voices and generations who will continue to add to the archives of memory and history. Costello shows how the knowledge we already have, and which grows continuously, must stick for the after-affects to hold, for history not to repeat. -- Frances Bartowski, Rutgers University

Author Bio

Lisa A. Costello is associate professor of writing and linguistics and director of the Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Georgia Southern University.