Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (original) (raw)
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Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice.
Tracing the politics of aesthetics: From imposing, via counter to affirmative memorials to violence
Memory Studies, 2021
Memorials have become increasingly relevant in societies seeking to come to terms with the past of mass violence, and there is a growing body of academic scholarship that scrutinises the politics of memory in divided societies. This article takes a different approach to the politics of memorials: it does not focus on what is remembered, i.e. to what a memorial testifies, but how memory at a memorial (supposedly) takes place through the aesthetic strategies put to work. It contributes to emerging literature which explores aspects of performativity and the politics of affect The objective is, however, to take it one step further by not only shifting attention to studying the engagement with, experience and performance at these sites but also to the politics of the aesthetics choice that promote this engagement. To do so it differentiates between three aesthetic styles of memorials: imposing, counter and affirmative memorials, that were all developed at a particular time in order to pursue particular political and social objectives. The current phenomenon, affirmative memorials, holds that there is a duty to remember and is firmly embedded in efforts to build peace, advance liberal norms and contribute to transitional justice. Pursuing this strategy is however ad odds with the aesthetic style of these affirmative memorials that is derived from counter memorials and celebrates plurality and openness rather than wanting to affirm one message.
Death Within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019
This article investigates the impossibility of bearing witness. It exposes a negative dialectics that dwells on the lacuna at the heart of every act of witnessing, an act that is made possible by its own limitation which revolves around the death of the other. One cannot bear witness to death from inside death. One can only bear witness having escaped death. Dwelling on Agamben’s concept of the impossibility to bear witness, we concentrated on a few of Lanzmann’s interviews in the documentary film Shoah and interrogated such issues as memory, solitude, death, both as they are at work in the narratives of the survivors and how they are dealt with by the art that comes in the aftermath of the Holocaust. We explored what art tells us about the meaning of solitude and how it speaks (and to what extent that speech is possible) on behalf of the other. We were interested in how art grasps the narratives of absence and death and how it interrogates and builds on the lacuna of memory and of witnessing at the same time.
This article focuses on the solo exhibitions of Larissa Sansour entitled “In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain” and “Archeology: In Abstentia” (2016), along with Wael Shawky’s “Cabaret Crusades” trilogy (2010-2014). Their exhibitions offer fascinating reflections on the archive as construction and on the articulation of memory in traumatic contexts, whether these are the Nakba and the on-going colonisation of Palestine by Israel or the Christian Crusades to regain Jerusalem. In their films and their creations of breakable objects, such as the porcelain plate and the glass puppet, they open up new possibilities to think and write about the past in modes that take ambivalence and subjectivity at face value. Furthermore, by articulating chronotopes that are fundamentally disjunctive, not only do the artists suggest alternative and counter-modes of remembering the past, they also draw our attention on the act of narrating the past as political process. Thus, not only do they create alternative narratives drawn from other perspectives – here the Arab one –, but they also debunk the myth of the archive as a factual and objective piece of literature and foreground perspectivism and precariousness instead. In other words, Sansour and Shawky's artistic projects do not just aim at developing an Eastern historiography of traumatic times only, and certainly do not participate in a simplistic clash of civilisations narrative. Their works are eminently contextualised, but they also resonate well beyond the Middle-East and show what art can do with/to the archives, escaping adversarial narratives and using them to create dissonance, critical distance, personal and social transformations
CLCWeb, 2023
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
On the Heroisms of Today Experience, Memory and Risk as Anti-fascist Politics in Contemporary Art
Third Text
Since around 2000, the strategies of participation and compromise in socially engaged art have contributed to modest victories providing at the same time an excuse to left-wing intellectuals to work with institutions of power. While these strategies allude to the redundancy of gestures of negation, the rise of explicitly far-right or neo-fascist tendencies in today’s world can challenge their efficacy from an emancipatory point of view. This article draws on recent art practices to think through modalities of oppositional intransigence and disaffirmation as means to achieve political ends, including negation, zealotry, heroism and sacrifice. At least since the early 1990s, these modalities have been largely viewed with distrust in cultural and critical theory for allegedly reproducing epic, pure and fixed identities, certainties or grand narratives Yet, as this article discusses, intransigence and the construction of sacrificial lifestyles or heroic representations was and will be part of any struggle for social equality in which individuals or collectives put their lives and well-being at risk so as to construct a better future.
Between Documentality and Imagination: Five Theses on Curating the Violent Past
This article considers the notion that to document or inscribe our lives not only leaves a trace of our creaturely presence, but may also become a form of juris-writing, a writing that concerns and aims at Justice. Employing an expanded notion of Justice that takes it beyond the institutions of law, therefore, it asks about forms of documentality (Ferraris) that put us 'before memory' in Derrida's sense. How is it possible to think curation in relation to a violent past in such a way that neither attempts to deny the lacunae nor surrender in the face of the difficulties of such attempts? How should we consider the relation between the delimited encounter with an ‘invitation to imagine’ (Didi-Huberman) and processes of institutionalization that build a society? What about those things that it is not possible to show, including relations of power, that arise analytically? Reflecting on current memory spaces, especially within ex-clandestine centres for detention, torture and extermination (ex-ccdtyes) in Argentina, the article offers five theses in order to consider what is at stake in the encounters staged at these sites.