1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910554215903321

Autore

Apel Dora

Titolo

Calling Memory into Place / / Dora Apel

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Brunswick, NJ : , : Rutgers University Press, , [2021]

©2021

ISBN

1-9788-0787-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (238 p.) : 13 b-w illustrations, 62 color photographs

Disciplina

153.1/2

Soggetti

Collective memory

Memory - Political aspects

Memory - Psychological aspects

Memory - Social aspects

ART / General

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I Passages and Streets -- 1 A Memorial for Walter Benjamin -- 2 “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” -- Part II Memorials and Museums -- 3 Why We Need a National Lynching Memorial -- 4 “Let the World See What I’ve Seen” -- Part III Hometowns and Homelands -- 5 Seeing What Can No Longer Be Seen -- 6 Borders and Walls -- Part IV Hospitals and Cemeteries -- 7 Sprung from the Head -- 8 Parallel Universes -- Part V Body and Mind -- 9 Reclaiming the Self -- 10 The Care of Others -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author

Sommario/riassunto

How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forgetting? And how can inherited family and cultural traumas be channeled in productive ways? In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national



lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer. These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations.