Overview

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors. In so doing, she demonstrates that the Holocaust has been understood not only through the documentary realism and postmodern fragmentation familiar to scholars but also through a surreal mode of meaning making. From an otherworldly “Planet Auschwitz” to the spare, intimate spaces of documentary interviews, Brackney shows that the humanity of victims has been produced, undermined, and guaranteed through evolving scripts for acknowledging and mourning mass violence. Brackney offers a new look at familiar works by authors such as Claude Lanzmann, W. G. Sebald, and Paul Celan, while making surprising connections to contemporary scholars like Timothy Snyder and Donna Haraway, and events such as the Space Race. In the process, she maps out a multi-decade process through which transnational conventions of mourning have emerged in Western Europe, North America, and Israel, functioning to constitute Jewish victimization as “grievable life.” Ultimately, she shows how the Holocaust has developed into a figure for the destabilization and reformulation of the category of humanity and the problem of mourning across difference.

Full Product Details

9780299346003

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""An erudite, beautifully written book that journeys from the Yiddish poetry of Avrom Sutzkever to Donna Haraway's manifesto on the 'Chthulucene.' Brackney shows how artists have not always deemed the Holocaust 'unrepresentable.' Rather, through surrealist articulations including science fiction and abstraction, representations of the Shoah have been unapologetically produced from the very beginning. In this provocative reading, surrealist discourse on the Holocaust becomes the foundation for contemporary engagement with the Anthropocene as we confront an environmental Holocaust in an imagined--or nearly present--future.""--Sheila Jelen, author of Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies"

Author Information

Kathryn L. Brackney is an assistant professor of history at Leiden University. Her research explores how aesthetic norms have developed for remembering the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available