Resonant Violence: Affect, Memory, and Activism in Post-Genocide Societies 9781978825598
From the Holocaust in Europe to the military dictatorships of Latin America to the enduring violence of settler colonial
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Resonant Violence
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF
GENOCIDE
& HUMAN RIGHTS
Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights Series Edited by Alexander Laban Hinton and Nela Navarro Nanci Adler, ed., Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture omen’s Protagonism Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes, Beyond Repair? Mayan W in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society u nder the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas Joseph P. Feldman, Memories before the State: Postwar Peru and the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory Douglas A. Kammen, Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor Eyal Mayroz, Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur Pyong Gap Min, Korean “Comfort W omen”: Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide S. Garnett Russell, Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-G enocide Citizen Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, and Cecilia M. Salvi, eds., Gender Violence in Peace and War: States of Complicity Irina Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador Samuel Totten and Rafiki Ubaldo, eds., We Cannot Forget: Interviews with Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda Eva van Roekel, Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina Anton Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War Kerry Whigham, Resonant Violence: Affect, Memory, and Activism in Post-G enocide Societies Timothy Williams, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide Ronnie Yimsut, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey Natasha Zaretsky, Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina
Resonant Violence Affect, Memory, and Activism in Po st-G e nocide Societ ie s
K e r ry Wh igh a m
Rutg e r s Unive r sity P re s s New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-P ublication Data Names: Whigham, Kerry, author. Title: Resonant violence: affect, memory, and activism in post-g enocide societies / Kerry Whigham. Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Series: Genocide, political violence, human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021016529 | ISBN 9781978825550 (paperback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978825567 (hardback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978825574 (epub) | ISBN 9781978825581 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978825598 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Genocide—Social aspects. | Genocide—Political aspects. | Violence. | Collective memory. Classification: LCC HV6322.7 .W495 2022 | DDC 304.6/63—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.g ov/2 021016529 A British Cataloging-in-P ublication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2022 by Kerry Whigham All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.r utgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of Amer ica
Pentru Tibi, sufletul meu
Conte nt s
Introduction: “The Abuse Lives in Our Blood”
1
1
Resonant Violence: The Felt Unfelt of Genocide and Its Aftermath
25
2
Building Memory: Practices of Memorialization in Post-Holocaust Berlin
43
3
Filling the Absence: Embodied Engagements with Former Sites of Atrocity
83
4
Embodied Justice: H.I.J.O.S., Practices of Trans-Action, and Biopoetics in Post-Dictatorship Argentina
5
Occupying Space, Amplifying Affect: The American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island
Conclusion: Out of the Desert
151 188
Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
203 207 231 245
122
vii
Resonant Violence
Introduction “t h e a bu s e l i v e s i n ou r bl o od” Late in the evening of Sunday, November 10, 2016, amidst freezing temperatures, police officers from the Morton County Sheriff’s Department in North Dakota shot water cannons at the activists gathering on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. This group of demonstrators, who referred to themselves as “water protectors,” had grown in numbers over several months since the demonstrations began in August 2016. The water protectors— comprising Native Americans from the Standing Rock Sioux, members of other Native tribes, and a number of non-Native allies—occupied the land to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the 1,170-mile conduit meant to carry crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. DAPL passes directly north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, through unceded Sioux territory. The w ater protectors asserted that they w ere protecting not only themselves, but millions of non-Indigenous people whose water supply would be affected by DAPL. Their claims are supported by the fact that the original plans for DAPL to pass just north of Bismarck, North Dakota, were scrapped out of fear that the capital city’s w ater supply would be contaminated. Aside from potentially polluting local waters for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, construction of DAPL also disrupted traditional burial grounds of the Sioux, destroying this sacred land in September 2016. Throughout the pro cess, both the federal government and Energy Transfer Partners, the Fortune 500 energy company behind the construction of DAPL, failed in their responsibility to obtain “free, prior, and informed consent,” as mandated by an array of international mechanisms.1 The activists were met with extreme force by local police, who used a range of ruthless tactics to break up the demonstrations, including attack dogs, tear gas, w ater cannons, and rubber bullets. One video posted on the New York Times’s website shows police firing water cannons at the demonstrators on November 20, 2016. The police are dressed in full riot gear. As the w ater cannons fire, a w oman screams over the torrent: “We’re not animals! W e’re not animals! W e’re human beings! We have honor and we have courage!” 2 The temperature outside was reported to be around 23 degrees Fahrenheit (–5 degrees Celsius). A medical official on the scene 1
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reported that the water protectors w ere exhibiting signs of hypothermia. Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, said of the attack, “The use of water in freezing temperatures just goes to show that t hey’re being more aggressive and they’re actually trying to hurt people. This is far more threatening to human life than any other time of confrontation with law enforcement.” 3 In a cruelly ironic twist, this violence toward the water protectors came just four days before Thanksgiving, the U.S. national holiday that celebrates the settler colonists of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and their plentiful harvest of 1621—a feat they could only accomplish with the help of the local Indigenous population, who taught them how to cultivate crops in the new, unfamiliar environment. This kindness was reciprocated with centuries of genocidal policies and practices that would decimate Native populations across the country. T hose Indigenous Peoples who were not killed went on to face the seemingly insurmountable odds of forced removal, involuntary assimilation, and endless discriminatory policies that would make Native life a nightmare. The enduring reality of that violence is evident in the construction of DAPL, along with the police and governmental response to t hose activists working to stop it. And yet, the visibility of the #NoDAPL demonstrations at Standing Rock is an exception to the usual invisibility of Native American groups and their politi cal interests in the public sphere. The violence against American Indians4 in the United States is usually perceived by non-Indigenous people as history, not as current events. In 2009, for example, President Barack Obama signed Public Law 111–118, the 2009 Defense Appropriations Act, which also included an official apology to Native Americans. The apology “recognizes that there have been years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes.” It goes on to state that the United States “apologizes on behalf of the p eople of the United States to all Native P eoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.” The apology ends with an official disclaimer stating that nothing in the apology “authorizes or supports any claim against the United States.” 5 In other words, the apology is not an admission of guilt worthy of legal suit and formal reparations. The law frames the violence against Native Peoples squarely in the past, just as it bars against claims for restitution in the present. Upon signing the apology, Obama reiterated the pastness of the violence in his public remarks: hese cases serve as a reminder, passed by both parties in Congress, fin ally T recognizing the sad and painful chapters in our shared history—a history too often marred by broken promises and grave injustices against the First Americans. It’s a resolution I fully supported—recognizing that no statement can undo the damage that was done; what it can do is help reaffirm the principles that should guide our future. It’s only by heeding the lessons of our history that we can move forward.6
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3
This 2009 statement, which was the first time a U.S. president apologized to all Native P eoples for the violence they experienced, was a meaningful step in the process of the United States dealing with its own genocidal past. Still, Obama’s statement places the violence against Native Peoples wholly within the past, obscuring all the ways this violence continues today, including the issues surrounding the anti-pipeline demonstrations at Standing Rock. I begin with the story of Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline to introduce a central argument of this book: genocidal violence entails a force that far exceeds the horror of mass killing. It also manifests in any number of other forms of violence that continue long a fter mass killing comes to an end. This durable, affective force is all the more dangerous because of its relative invisibility, and it must be negotiated and transformed for a society to have truly confronted the systematic degradation of a group’s h uman rights— and to prevent the abrogation of those rights in the future. In this book, I argue for a new way of thinking about the impact of genocidal violence and how it shapes physical bodies and interpersonal relationships. By connecting the physical and psychological language of trauma, the social concept of collective memory, the embodied transmission of knowledge and power explained through perform ance studies theory, and the field of affect theory, this book develops a concept of violence that understands it as a phenomenon that is both physical and affective. It articulates a way of thinking about the violence of genocidal regimes, frames that violence as a process rather than as an event, characterizes the damage caused by this violence as affective rather than merely physical or psychological, and analyzes the various ways this vio lence performs upon a population, as well as how populations “perform upon” this violence. It undertakes this project to provide a broader framework for those working on the frontlines of developing policy (in governmental settings) and activist practices (in civil society settings) that aim to prevent the recurrence of genocide and other mass atrocities in the present and future. To do so, I propose a theory of resonant violence. “Resonant violence” is the term I use to describe the affective energy of large-scale violence that both predicates the mass killing of groups and continues to resonate within individuals and communities even a fter that killing stops. This force undergoes various stages of amplification and intensification, u ntil or u nless it is transformed, or, to continue the sonic metaphor, transduced through acts that allow this energy to resonate differently. Although genocide is traditionally understood, especially to the layperson, as the attempted physical annihilation of a targeted identity group, this conception highlights only the most visible aspects of genocide. In fact, the murder of a group is only part of the violence of genocide. This physical component is both preceded and succeeded by an affective violence, which pervades an entire society and has any number of effects, including but not l imited to the physical act of murder. In actuality, the attempt to destroy an entire group physically through mass
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murder cannot occur u ntil and u nless this affective violence is firmly established within a society. Both the appropriation of Native land and the police response to activist dissent at Standing Rock are concrete examples of resonant violence in action. Concomitant to the tendency for politicians to frame identity-based violence toward Indigenous communities as history, as demonstrated in Obama’s apology and accompanying statement, there may be a tendency to view the construction of DAPL and the targeting of water protectors as an ad hoc occurrence. In reality, it is a clear example of what perform ance studies scholar Diana Taylor calls a scenario: a “paradigmatic setup” that plays itself out again and again through history—a script with the same players reenacting the same encounter, and all too often with the same results.7 Standing Rock is nothing new. It is the scenario of conquest and colonization replaying itself once again. The colonizer takes the land of the Indigenous group. The Indigenous group resists. And the colonizer rains down on them with the full force of law and arms to tamper that resistance. The echoes of past genocidal violence ring clearly. It re-sounds. It resonates. To illustrate further what I mean by resonant violence, I offer another example from perhaps the most widely known of the cases with which this book engages. Although Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party rose to power in 1933, it was not u ntil nine years later that the first death camps began to operate. Today, many historians agree that when Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933, he was not yet conceiving of the total annihilation of European Jewry, but at most their removal from the country.8 Had Hitler tried to completely destroy all German Jews from the beginning, in all likelihood he would have faced much greater resistance. We can assume this b ecause Hitler’s f irst major anti-Jewish act as chancellor took place in April 1933, when he announced a national boycott of Jewish businesses. Both international and domestic resist ance to the boycott was so strong that it was cancelled a fter just one day.9 Bit by bit, however, the Nazis began to chip away at public attitudes toward Jews, using the power of affect. First, Nazis built upon histories of antisemitism that already existed.10 Because antisemitic feelings w ere often latent in Germany, a country where Jews w ere well assimilated into the general population, especially in urban settings,11 Nazis instrumentalized fear and insecurity, taking special advantage of the fact that Germany was facing a continued economic depression a fter the First World War, in order to displace emotions of dissatisfaction and social instability on the Jewish population. Through political discourse, Nazi leaders scapegoated Jews for past defeats, blaming enlisted Jews for betraying their fellow soldiers in combat and for orchestrating the catastrophic framework for the Treaty of Versailles.12 Slowly, the Nazis began to introduce legislation targeting Jews. First, they withdrew Jewish employment opportunities, excluding Jews from the civil ser v ice, prohibiting Jewish editors of German newspapers, and disallowing
Introduction
5
Jewish doctors and dentists from receiving public insurance funds. T hese measures were easier to sell to the German public b ecause unemployment was high, and they allowed for the appearance of more job opportunities for non-Jewish Germans. I say “the appearance” of more opportunities because, in reality, less than 1 percent of the German population was Jewish, even if Nazi rhetoric depicted Jewish p eople as ubiquitous. Bit by bit, the Nazis unveiled more insidious legislation, including the Nuremberg laws of 1935, which further restricted the daily lives of German Jews and prohibited marriages between Jews and non-Jews. According to historian Marion A. Kaplan, the incremental nature of all these changes allowed both Jews and non-Jews to adapt “to their roles by showing how abuse, insidiously and incrementally, became ‘normal’ to some and familiar to all.” 13 In the Nazis’ ideal scenario, this legislation was intended to make Jews emigrate en masse. But as Germany invaded and annexed surrounding countries, including Poland, which had a population of around three million Jews, its Jewish population grew along with its borders, and the Nazis had to come up with another solution. Even then, they did not plan on the physical annihilation of Jews. Instead, they sought other modes of “relocation,” including one plan to send all Jews to Madagascar. Only when these plans became infeasible did the Nazis develop their “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem”—the group’s complete destruction. Reaching this decision, however, was a gradual process that required years of policies and actions to shape a society that would accept genocide as a v iable option. When World War II ended and the Nazis were defeated by Allied forces, the systematic physical killing of Jewish victims in Nazi death camps and on the Eastern Front ended. The affective violence and antisemitism that allowed for that killing to occur in the first place, however, did not disappear. Survivors were not only forced to deal with the enduring trauma of the harms they and their loved ones experienced; they also confronted economic and social v iolence as they worked to rebuild their lives, along with the continued threat of physical violence for some, as pogroms and other forms of identity-based violence continued in places like Poland even decades after WWII ended. Indeed, this affective violence is still present, as is evident in the recent growth of far-right nationalist groups in Europe and around the world who invoke antisemitic tropes to champion their pol itical agendas. As I w ill explain, affect has a long half-l ife. It can resonate across time and bodies, continuing its work for many years, decades, or even centuries. Resonant violence, then, is not only the affective energy that justifies genocidal violence, but is also this residual, felt aspect of violence, which continues to perform long a fter the initial genocide or physically violent act. In her influential treatise on the connection between trauma and affect, An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich writes about “the force field around trauma, the low- level ‘insidious’ way that it continues to make itself felt even at a remove from the experience itself.” 14 Cvetkovich’s description of a force field paints the
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picture of some sort of affective membrane that separates the individual from experiencing the world b ecause of a past traumatic event. This may be a good meta phor for thinking about individual trauma and how that trauma can exclude the traumatized individual from fully experiencing the world around them. Resonant violence, however, is the cause and product of a social vio lence, experienced by society as a whole. It suffuses an entire space, moving within and among bodies, continuing to perform. It does not limit experience with the world; it mediates it. Although resonant violence most directly and negatively impacts victimized groups, it mediates the experience of all other groups of a society as well—perpetrators, bystanders, resisters, and collaborators alike. To be clear, this is not to equate the way that each of these groups encounters resonant violence, as the experience of the victim and the perpetrator are not at all analogous. For resonant violence to be transformed, however, all those within a community must confront how they are impacted by resonant violence, w hether as its beneficiary or its target. In this way we can think of resonant violence as what Raymond Williams calls a structure of feeling. Williams develops the concept of structures of feeling to describe the “pre- emergent and emergent” social forms and structures that, even when they are not fully understood or recognized, “exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action.” 15 Resonant violence is a structure of feeling; it is the affective force that circulates within a society, motivating and allowing for the perpetration of identity-based violence. It is also the felt “social experience” of that vio lence— the aspect of identity- based vio lence that extends beyond physical harm and death, manifesting in other, more obscured forms, which are, as Williams says, often “not yet recognized as social, but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating.” 16 Many existing frameworks for genocide prevention acknowledge the existence of some force like resonant violence, though without codifying it in the way I do here. As genocide studies scholar and social psychologist James Waller points out in his book, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide,17 a number of thorough and credible risk assessment models exist for predicting when a society is at risk for mass atrocity,18 including the United Nation’s Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes,19 the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project,20 and Australia National University’s Atrocity Forecasting Project,21 to name a few. T hese models compile predominantly quantitative data from past instances of mass violence to articulate an array of specific factors that put a society at risk for genocide and mass killing. These f actors involve analyses of government type, strength of institutions, economic conditions, and levels of social fragmentation. B ecause of these risk assessment models, the international community has a fairly clear view of when a society is at risk for atrocity. The problem, of course, is that preventing atrocity also requires political w ill, and that is much harder to develop. Furthermore, many people still see mass atrocity prevention as synonymous with
Introduction
7
military intervention in the midst of crisis. In fact, long-term atrocity prevention does not involve military intervention, at all. Rather, it focuses on assessing the structural risk factors that exist within a society and mitigating those risks through social and political action, thus preventing a situation from escalating to the point of mass killing. Risk assessment models vary to some degree on what risk f actors are most predictive of risk for genocide, but there is one risk factor that appears in a number of these models. One strong indicator that a society is at risk for atrocity is if it has a history of genocide or atrocity in its recent past. Political scientist Barbara Harff goes as far as to say that prior genocide or politicide makes a country three times more likely to experience another episode of mass atrocity.22 If there is general agreement on genocidal history as a risk factor for future genocides, this raises one big question: is a country with a history of genocide somehow doomed to repeat the violence of the past? The answer, of course, is no. T here are many instances where societ ies with a history of genocide have avoided its recurrence. Consequently, conflict history alone is not a sufficient variable for measuring the risk of atrocity in a society. In truth, countries with a history of atrocity are at risk especially when they do not take measures to confront the underlying structural issues that allowed such violence to occur in the first place.23 It is not, then, the past genocide that puts a society at risk, but its refusal to confront the initial c auses and enduring effects of that violence. In other words, when a society does not face the resonant violence that led to and was generated by genocide, then that society remains at risk for the return of such violence in the f uture. If a society only sees genocidal violence as the mass killing of groups, it appears to have been “dealt with” when that killing stops. But genocidal violence also has an affective force, which not only shapes interpersonal relationships within a society, but also leads to the institutionalization of societal structures that can perpetuate or lead to new forms of social, institutional, or economic violence. T hese structures signify risk for mass atrocity; they debilitate a society’s capacity to manage difference and weaken the structures or institutions that may be in place to protect the rights of vulnerable groups. Without engaging with all forms that large-scale identity-based violence can take, along with the affective forces that allowed for it in the first place, the structures remain in place for the return of the more visible, physical violence that one typically associates with genocide. Resonant violence is a detrimental and damaging force. If not dealt with, it w ill continue to perform its work, often in subtle and insidious ways. The resonant violence of the Holocaust, for instance, contributed to insufficient efforts to punish Nazi war criminals in post-war Germany. It led to the mischaracterization of Jewish victims as “anti-fascist fighters” b ehind the Iron Curtain. It allowed for further pogroms in the late 1940s and the 1950s in Poland against Jewish p eople who survived the Holocaust. Survivors who
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ere forced to emigrate with only a few suitcases had to start over in new w countries, often without knowing the local language and with little financial means. This is also resonant violence: the initial affective violence that continues to resonate far into the future through its ability to impact action and the ways people engage with the world. This book seeks to clarify the ways this violence functions, but it more crucially illuminates the ways that individuals come together to respond to and transform resonant violence. There are many fields that provide a framework for explaining resonant violence, but I argue that any examination of the lasting impacts of genocidal violence that does not consider the role of affect falls short of fully comprehending the way genocide operates. A Missing Ap p roac h To understand what affect theory has to offer for understanding genocidal violence, let us return to the story of the water protectors at Standing Rock. Several fields provide a lens through which we can view this story. Within the framework of genocide studies, for example, we could analyze the activism of the water protectors and the state resist ance they faced as part and parcel of the continuing project of settler colonial genocide. For many years, the definition of genocide was perhaps the most debated question in the field of genocide studies, 24 so it seems necessary that, before moving forward, I explicate the definition I use for the purposes of this book. I take my definition of “genocide” from Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944 in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. He defines genocide as a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the pol itical and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.25 I use Lemkin’s definition, rather than the legal definition established in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, for several reasons. First, due to an array of political and historical obstacles, the UN definition fails to recognize certain identity groups, including political groups, as an entity that can experience genocidal violence. 26 By using Lemkin’s def inition, the ideas of this book also apply to the violence of perpetrator regimes in places like Latin America and Cambodia, for example, where a large proportion of state violence was directed
Introduction
9
against “pol itical subversives,” as defined by the perpetrator regimes. Furthermore, Lemkin’s definition highlights the numerous ways in which a group can be destroyed that do not involve killing or other physical violence at all; for instance, he cites the prohibition of cultural practices and language, as well as economic restrictions, as potentially genocidal. Today, genocide is one of three international crimes that comprise the larger category of mass atrocity. The three legally defined atrocity crimes are genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. “Ethnic cleansing” is often included u nder this umbrella, although t here is no official, legal definition for this term. In recent years, the broader term “mass atrocity” is often used to describe t hese crimes that involve large-scale human rights violations for a number of reasons.27 For now, I w ill say that I alternate between the two terms throughout the book, and, in my view, all the cases I detail meet both definitions, though they may not meet the legal definition for genocide. Related to Standing Rock, a broader definition of genocide is key to examining the genocidal characteristics of settler colonialism. The United States—l ike Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa, among others—is a settler colonial society, meaning that the European colonists and their descendants who currently reside in t hese states do so because they have taken the land and resources of its former inhabitants. Whereas most genocides are perceived as having a beginning and an end, settler colonialism represents an ongoing act of violence against Indigenous populations, as its victims continue to be dispossessed of their lands.28 Given that Indigeneity, by definition, refers to a certain connectedness to land, this perpetual dispossession represents a permanent effort to sever Indigenous p eople from their lands, thus destroying the connection between Native people and their ancestral territory and, consequently, disrupting the princi ple relationship that defines an Indigenous identity. As genocide studies scholar Patrick Wolfe explains, the settler colonial project is motivated by a “logic of elimination” that, in fact, has no end point, as settler colonists have no intent to return the land they have taken.29 Within this framework, the construction of DAPL through Indigenous land and the (ultimately unsuccessful) Native resistance to stop it are just another example of Taylor’s scenario of conquest—an illustration of a settler colonial logic of elimination in action. 30 Even outside of a settler colonial frame, current thinking in the field of genocide studies emphasizes genocide as a process, rather than as an event. Beginning with Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism 31 and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews,32 scholars increasingly have articulated the processual nature of genocide.33 One of the most influential con temporary models of this process comes from genocide studies scholar Gregory Stanton in his “Eight Stages of Genocide,” first presented as a briefing paper to the U.S. State Department in 1996, before being published as a book twelve years l ater.34 In 2013, Stanton expanded his model to include ten stages of
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genocide.35 Through his model, Stanton argues that the actual killing of individuals is only one step in a much larger process that begins with much less extraordinary stages—for instance, the classification of individuals into specific social groups and the marking of those groups through processes of symbolization.36 When they go unaddressed, these earlier stages can continue to escalate gradually t oward mass killing. Not only do Stanton’s ten stages not begin with the a ctual killing of populations, but they also do not end with it; Stanton’s cesses of denial final stage in the ten stages of genocide describes the pro whereby perpetrators refute their actions, demonstrating how the covering up of genocidal acts and h uman rights abuses is an equally import ant f actor in the conception of genocide.37 Even if this understanding of genocide highlights the ways that genocidal violence continues through denial, however, it does not represent fully the ways that genocidal violence continues to play out through structural violences initiated during the initial period of genocide. Although settler colonialism provides the clearest instance of how these structural violences continue to be experienced by target populations, each case of genocide provides some example of this more insidious form of violence that persists long a fter the physical targeting of an identity group comes to an end. Just as genocide itself is a process, recovery in the aftermath of genocide is also a process. Both scholars and pract it ioners have focused substantial energy on the periods of transition a fter atrocity violence comes to an end. A principal focus of these scholars and practitioners is the socio-political process of transitional justice, a broad term that refers to any number of measures taken by a society to deal with and make amends for past h uman rights abuses committed by or within a state. 38 While the term itself seems to refer solely to judicial modes of dealing with the past, transitional justice can include both juridical and nonjuridical components. Transitional justice (TJ) is a recent field that perhaps began with the post-W WII prosecution of Nazis by the Allies. It blossomed, however, in the post-d ictatorship countries of Latin America and the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In the last several decades, TJ has become such a defining feature of post-atrocity societ ies that t here is a normative understanding of what TJ entails. This normative understanding is clearly articulated by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), which breaks TJ strategies into four different categories: 1) the criminal prosecution of perpetrators, 2) material and symbolic reparations for victims, 3) institutional reforms, and 4) truth-seeking pro cesses. 39 This approach to transitional justice was further institutionalized in 2011, when the United Nations’ Human Rights Council appointed its first special rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence, Pablo de Greiff, who was commissioned with a mandate to evaluate and promote TJ mechanisms around the world. Experience has shown that the implementation of only one of t hese strategies is usually insufficient for addressing past abuses; rather, like genocide
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itself, TJ is a process with multiple stages and multiple levels of implementation. It is largely a political process, however, and while civil society has been essential in demanding TJ measures around the world, the actual mechanisms of TJ are left mainly to the state to execute—an ironic twist given that it is usually the state itself that has perpetrated the crimes it addresses through TJ. TJ may contribute to healing and reconciliation, as many often argue, but its central purpose is often the consolidation of a more durable and (typically) more democratic regime.40 Although it can serve to stabilize a government, it can only do so much to ameliorate the emotional and social trauma experienced by a post-genocide society on an individual or collective basis (as its main purpose is not necessarily to address this sort of trauma). Societal transitions, then, certainly require state-led action through an array of mechanisms like t hose articulated in this normative TJ model. As I w ill demonstrate, however, histories of large-scale violence also require action beyond the level of the state—or rather, they require action outside of the state to influence and guide state action. This need becomes even more pronounced in the case of societ ies that may not necessarily be in a state of “transition.” Despite the fact that the mechanisms of TJ have now been implemented in non-transitioning societies, there is still active debate regarding how recent an atrocity must have been to justify TJ measures. Although consensus has developed around the use of t hese tools in the immediate years and even decades following mass atrocity, there is more resistance to calls for TJ in cases where the violence appears to be much more historic in nature. In the United States, for instance, those who view the country’s history of slavery and Indigenous genocide as squarely within the past see calls for a reckoning with that past as a distraction. They view Standing Rock, for instance, as an ad hoc situation, rather than as a page in a much longer story of genocidal violence. This tendency to delimit genocide only to its most physical and visible components, along with a propensity to constrain temporally the effects of genocide to such an arbitrarily short period of time, reveals one of the key reasons the concept of resonant violence can prove useful. It builds upon the work of genocide studies, which already acknowledges the processual nature of genocidal violence, by widening the frame outward, pushing us to make connections between violence that may seem past and the very present structural realities that continue to disadvantage certain groups over others. A second lens we could use to view the events at Standing Rock comes from the field of perform ance studies. Perform ance studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores the effects of not only traditional perform ances like theater or dance, but sociopolitical processes, religious rituals, and everyday life. Taking its cue from sociologist Erving Goffman, who defines perfor mance as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants,” perform ance studies focuses not on what perform ances are, but what they do.41 Within this
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framework, a perform ance occurs anytime one person or thing interacts with any other person or t hing. Perform ance studies, then, provides a lens for viewing a vast array of social interactions, processes, and products as perfor mances, thus highlighting their constructed and contextually situated nature and the role of the various actors involved in their production. At the center of perform ance studies are the dual concepts of the body and embodiment. For the perform ance studies scholar, the body does not refer only to the biological body. Rather, it is a “new body”—t he medium through which the world is experienced and acted upon. Anthropologist Thomas Csordas explains this distinction: The kind of body to which we have been accustomed in scholarly and popular thought alike is typically assumed to be a fixed, material entity subject to the empirical rules of biological science, existing prior to the mutability and flux of cultural change and diversity and characterized by unchangeable inner necessities. The new body that has begun to be identified can no longer be considered as a brute fact of nature.42 The body of perform ance studies is agential. It is a body that is affected by the actions of others, but also a body that affects the world around it. Through practices of the body, we respond to objects, events, and other people in a way that has an impact. We assert ourselves in the world through the body. Relatedly, “embodiment” is a term that describes the way we perceive and experience the world through the body, as well as the way our agency is made manifest through practices of the body. Embodiment is “an indeterminate methodological field defined by perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world.” 43 Embodied practices, then, are the actions of the body through which knowledge and affect are transmitted between bodies— the way bodies engage with others and with the world around them. But embodiment is also the process through which our bodies become “historically, socially, gendered, racially codified bodies.” 44 According to Richard Schechner, one of the founders of the field, perfor mance is “twice-behaved beh avior” or “restored beh avior”: “Restored beh av ior is living beh avior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. T hese strips of beh avior can be rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of causal systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence. They have a life of their own.” 45 Each time we greet someone with a handshake, for instance, we are restoring the beh avior of those before us, re-presenting actions that have become customary over time. Despite the fact that we may not know the original source of this action, restoring it has become essential to being legible and accepted in U.S. culture, just as a bow or a kiss on the cheek are in other cultural traditions. Perform ance studies focuses on reading embodied actions as a means of communication at least as important as spoken language and discourse. It argues that, to understand
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social relationships and political processes fully, one must study how they are embodied—that is, how they are given form through the human body interacting with other bodies. Genocide and transitional justice are also examples of restored beh avior. As Stanton’s ten stages propose, although each genocide has its unique qualities, they often play out in similar ways, even if perpetrators may string together their “strips of behavior” in a different order. Likewise, in post-atrocity contexts, the “script” for dealing with the past has been written and rewritten by each society that has undergone such a process, although the sequencing of events differs in every case, and some mechanisms may be excluded altogether. Analyzing these processes as perform ances opens the door for understanding the conscious and unconscious ways important actors embody a politics of violence or of healing. Furthermore, as Taylor describes in her keystone text The Archive and the Repertoire, perform ance studies is predominantly concerned with embodied practice as a central means of knowledge transmission and pol itical subjectivation.46 As such, it shines light on the embodied actions of individuals and groups as a central means of sharing knowledge and building relationships. Using a perform ance studies lens, then, one can view genocide not only as a sociopolitical process, but also as an embodied perform ance that is enacted through the activities of individuals and groups. Within this context, all individuals within a society take on or (in the case of victims) are forced to take on certain roles, and these roles shape all social interactions, from t hose that take place in the halls of government to the day-to-d ay encounters that occur on public streets. Genocide does not just happen. It is embodied. And it is through its embodied perform ance that identity groups are first ostracized and later killed. A fter all, while genocide is often recognizable through its scale—for instance, six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust— that inconceivably large statistic is representative of six million individual instances in which one person murdered another person in an effort to destroy a group altogether—six million embodied actions that, together, constitute our understanding of genocide. The focus of perform ance studies, then, is on the embodied realities and interactions of individuals and groups, but a perform ance studies analysis does not only intend to describe t hese embodied interactions. Perform ance studies draws directly from linguist J. L. Austin’s concept of the performative utterance,47 which Austin defines as an utterance that does not merely state something but does something through its utterance. For instance, when a judge says, “I sentence you to five years in prison,” they are actually doing the t hing they are saying. It is through this utterance itself that the person is sentenced. Something is performative, then, when it does something specific. Based on this understanding of performativity, perform ance studies as a field asks what its object of analysis does or enacts in the world. Rather than evaluating any given perform ance as a success or failure, a perform ance studies scholar asks
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what an action or perform ance does, assessing its intended and unintended consequences. Perform ance studies opens doors for evaluating genocide and collective responses to genocide not only for what they are, but also for what they do. Perform ance studies allows us to think of Standing Rock as restored beh avior. It is not “out of nowhere.” Rather, the activism at Standing Rock recalls centuries of Native activism against the settler colonial project, from Native wars with colonizing powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Wounded Knee in 1890 to the countless occupations of the Red Power Movement in the 1960s and ’70s, including the occupation of Alcatraz Island, which is the focus of the fifth chapter of this book. It also utilizes embodied tactics developed in other non-Indigenous global activist movements. Likewise, the repressive violence of the police in the face of peaceful activism mirrors countless instances of police violence. Perform ance studies asks us to see the acts of political repression against the water protectors as another example of state actors working to control the bodies of others. The use of water cannons, for instance, immediately evokes images of police using water hoses to dispel demonstrators in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Through political violence, the body is transformed into object to mitigate that body’s abilities to perform, to impact and change the world.48 Per form ance theory helps us understand Standing Rock as a series of embodied acts that enact something. It is a perform ance of both state power and resis tance to it. When we view it as the restoration of beh avior, it becomes a re-performance of the same dispossession that has occurred for centuries: the settler colonial project embodied, made flesh. Standing Rock can also be viewed through the lens of memory studies, an interdisciplinary field that approaches memory not only as a cognitive phenomenon but also as a social one, framing memory as an individual and collective process through which the past influences the present and shapes visions for the future. While genocide studies scholars are interested in the sociopolitical processes of genocide and its aftermath, and perform ance studies provides a lens for viewing t hese processes as performed and performative, memory studies has always been deeply connected with genocide as a limit case for the production of traumatic memory at the individual and social level. Many of the concepts in the f ield of memory studies do not purely relate to traumatic memory in the aftermath of mass violence—for instance, Halbwachs’s foundational notion of collective memory49 or Connerton’s concept of “acts of remembrance.” 50 Nevertheless, an impressive range of the theories that undergird the field are directly related to genocide and mass atrocities. Concepts of multidirectional memory51 and cosmopolitan memory52 detail the ways that memories of mass violence circulate on a global scale. Theories of the texture of memory,53 postmemory,54 and prosthetic memory55 explain the ways that traumatic memory is transmitted across groups and generations.
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Other ideas, like Gutman’s framing of memory activism 56 and Taylor’s description of traumatic memes57 demonstrate ways that memory is activated to respond to political violence and provoke social transformation. In the case of Standing Rock, the series of political actions undertaken by the w ater protectors can all be viewed within the framework of memory activism. Gutman writes, “Memory activists use memory practices and cultural repertoires as means for political ends, often (but not always) in the serv ice of reconciliation and democratic politics.” 58 The occupation of Standing Rock to block the construction of DAPL began with a group of Indigenous teenagers who were seeking a way to build community and provoke public engagement in the face of a rapid increase in Indigenous teenage suicide. Many of the varied practices they developed during the occupation directly evoked the past as a means of transforming the present. For instance, in the early days of the occupation, the teenagers org an ized a 500-m ile relay run between the reservation and the office of the Army Corps of Engineers to submit an official plea that the pipeline not be approved. Through this act, participants re-embodied the precolonial r unning messengers who delivered missives between “the scattered tribes of Oceti Sakowin.” 59 Each runner covered a short distance before passing off the heavy staff they w ere carrying to another runner, who continued the journey. The staff represented their ancestors, whom they carried with them.60 Like many instances of memory activism, the water protectors framed their actions as a response to intergenerational trauma. Eryn Wise, a twenty- six-year-old activist, described this historical trauma in these terms: “No one realizes what the repercussions of colonization have been, the repercussions of forced removal. [. . .] The abuse lives in our blood.” 61 Applying a memory studies lens to Standing Rock draws direct connections between the past and the present through the conduit of trauma. In fact, much of the literature in memory studies borrows directly from psychoanalytic theories of trauma to frame the ways that the past continues to present itself at the individual and societal levels in the aftermath of large-scale vio lence. In this way, memory studies mobilizes theories of trauma as a meta phorical framing of how atrocity violence impacts individuals and entire populations. At times, this framing of traumatic memory can be incredibly useful; it is certainly summoned to g reat effect by Wise above. But there are also some limits that come from marrying theories of memory and trauma too tightly together. When it comes to the theories of traumatic memory and collective trauma that marshal psychoanalytic theory, all roads eventually lead back to Freud, who first articulates his theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.62 For Freud, the psyche of the “normal” individual is protected from external stimuli by a figurative membrane, which “makes it impossible for the energies of the outer world to act with more than a fragment of their intensity on the layers immediately below.” 63 Freud’s model depicts this external energy as
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extremely dangerous to the delicate psyche, so much so that, when too much of that energy pierces the protective membrane of the psyche through a traumatic event, it disrupts the internal world of the individual in a way that, in the moment of the disruption, at least, cannot be fully experienced and/or understood. Therefore, the individual is forced to re-experience and re-enact that intrusion u ntil it is adequately incorporated within the individual psyche. Traditional Freudian interpretations of trauma thus characterize the phenomenon as the persistent return of some external disruptive force, which the victim experiences repeatedly. Theorists who apply this model of trauma to memory do so to frame the way that past trauma continues to impact the pre sent. Often, however, this model, which Freud always intended to describe an individual experience of trauma, is expanded to explain how entire societies that have undergone traumatic violence continue to experience its effects. Although this Freudian understanding of trauma can be useful at the level of metaphor to explain how memory of past violence continues to impact individuals and societies, there are limits to this framing—places where the metaphor falls apart. First, this psychoanalytic model of trauma, like most psychoanalytic theory, is focused primarily on the individual. Freud’s model depicts the individual psyche as insulated and fragile. External forces are dangerous and potentially disruptive, and must therefore be protected against. When too much of the “exterior” does penetrate the psyche, the repercussions can be devastating if the individual does not go through an adequate process of repair or “working through.” This model, then, sets up a binary world of the delicate internal and the threatening external, the individual psyche and the rest of the world. Genocidal violence, on the other hand, is by its very nature social. The purpose of genocide is to destroy an entire group, not a single individual. As such, the violence of genocide—both its perpetration and its effects—is a shared experience. Psychoanalytic models of trauma are helpful in considering the traumatized individual psyche but begin to break down when those theories are extended to a collective that has experienced large-scale violence. There have been several important attempts to develop theories of collective trauma, but most of these boil down to depicting a population of similarly traumatized individuals, rather than conceptualizing a framework for understanding a collective social body as traumatized.64 There have also been attempts to conceive of certain traumas as “psychosocial,” emphasizing that addressing trauma experienced on a large scale requires a focus on the social context in which that trauma occurred.65 Still, even this theory ultimately goes back to the individual, as Martín-Baró argues that “trauma must be understood in terms of the relationship between the individual and society.” 66 Similarly, the subfield of psychoanalytic sociology has borrowed from psychoanalytic discourse to analyze large collectives.67 Such models mainly exist on the level of metaphor, however, and, while metaphor
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can provide a useful way of understanding social phenomena, it remains a controversial and contested move. When it comes to theories of collective trauma, one model that offers a different and provocative perspective is that of Jeffrey Alexander, who conceives of cultural trauma not as any natur al or inherent reality, but rather as a constructed one.68 Cultural trauma, in this instance, is a choice in the way that a group frames its own suffering and understanding of past violence. Alexander writes: For traumas to emerge at the level of the collectivity, social crises must become cultural crises. Events are one thing, representations of t hese events quite another. Trauma is not the result of a group experiencing pain. It is the result of this acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity. Collective actors “decide” to represent social pain as a fundamental threat to their sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go.69 In other words, certain groups decide to frame their identities around past instances of shared suffering, and these groups may even include individuals who experienced no direct violence themselves. Of course, Alexander’s model of cultural trauma does not assert that individual trauma is not real. His argument is that, when many instances of individual trauma lead to the codification of a group identity around that trauma, it constructs the edifice of a shared trauma through which these diverse individuals can identify themselves and identify with o thers. This form of “collective trauma,” however, is totally different from the psychoanalytic model of trauma, which requires some real initial act of violence to initiate. No such direct violence is inherently necessary for one to identify with a traumatized collective. Another reason the model of traumatic memory is insufficient for fully understanding the way genocidal violence operates is that it only provides a framework for thinking about the “a fter” of a violent act. It is incredibly useful for understanding some of the ways that violence repeats or re-presents itself in the aftermath of an initial violent act. As a theory, however, it is not equipped to help us understand the “before”—the social circumstances that led to and allowed for the perpetration of that traumatizing, violent act. As such, it is not the best tool for understanding the violence of genocide b ecause, as genocide studies as a field emphasizes, genocide is a process, not an event. While recovering from trauma is also a process, it is a process that begins with the very clear event of the traumatic wound. The process of genocide does not have such a clear starting point. It is complex—a lways the result of an array of social and political circumstances and choices. Indeed, to understand it fully, it is essential to look beyond conceptions that try to simplify genocide by finding a single event that provokes it.
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Finally, psychoanalytic theories of trauma emphasize victims—a nd rightly so. Although victims are often the focus in cases of genocide, however, they are not the only actors in a genocidal scenario. Significant work has been done on the trauma experienced by victims who have survived genocide, most especially the Holocaust.70 And certainly, those who fall into the category of victim are the ones who experience the most direct and visible effects of genocidal violence. A society that perpetrates and experiences genocide, however, is not only composed of victims. Furthermore, the way many understand the concepts of “victim” and “perpetrator” are often oversimplified. In cases of genocide, there exists a universal tendency to compartmentalize as a means of understanding the seemingly inconceivable levels of violence that a society perpetrates. It is easier to break the world down into tiny boxes and put each person into one (and only one) of those categories. The two most readily available categories are victims and perpetrators, each of which is presented as the opposite side of a binary and mutually constitutive relationship. Following a traditional psychoanalytic model, the perpetrator represents a whole or part of the external force that traumatizes the victim. Likewise, the victim is the individual who is traumatized by the perpetrator or the outside force. There is work on what has come to be called “perpetration-induced traumatic stress” (PITS)—a term developed to describe perpetrators of vio lence who experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).71 This framework, however, still reinforces the victim-perpetrator binary, only in this case perpetrators are the victims of their own violence. Not everyone within a society experiencing genocide fits so neatly within one of these two categories; there are also other categories of individuals. T here are bystanders (always the largest group), who watch violence take place against certain groups and do nothing to stop it for any number of reasons, including self-preservation or sympathy with the perpetrators. T here are collaborators, who do not necessarily org an ize the genocidal violence but aid and abet in its perpetration in some way. Oftentimes, collaborators are first victims who are given the choice to collaborate against other victims as a means of receiving privileges or preserving their own lives. And so, as Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian survivor of Auschwitz, writes, even these categories are too clean-cut. In fact, genocide creates what Levi calls a gray zone, from which no one can emerge unscathed.72 In his famed essay, Levi details how no survivor of the Holocaust survived without perpetrating some act of violence themselves, without collaborating with the Nazi project in some way that wronged a fellow prisoner. He writes, “It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” 73 According to Levi, it is counterproductive to see victims as pure and holy beings. Part of the logic of National Socialism was to take away the “goodness” from everyone—to make everyone share in the violence of destruction.
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(To be clear, in making this statement, I do not intend to equate victims, who may have acted against their own ethical norms u nder duress, with perpetrators, who did so with much greater frequency and with much less coercion. I only intend to show the horrific logic with which genocide operates—how any person can be made to do appalling things when placed in specific circumstances.) Likewise, as Waller articulates in Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, it is equally unproductive to view perpetrators only as evil monsters, rather than as humans who have been transformed by a number of very clear forces into killers.74 Genocidal violence affects entire societies; no one is immune to it. And whether it transforms us into perpetrators or victims or something in-between, we must all deal with the repercussions of that violence. Herein lie the real limits in the language of trauma when it comes to genocidal violence. It is at worst useless and at best uncomfortable and uncouth as a model for understanding people who would normally fall into the categories of bystanders, collaborators, and, most especially, perpetrators. And yet, genocidal violence has a very real effect on all t hese groups, and that effect needs to be understood and theorized. Relatedly, trauma is a useful framework for understanding the lasting, damaging effects of violence—a fact that is, of course, tied to its relationship with victimhood, as described above. The enduring effects of genocidal vio lence, however, do not only damage. Some people always benefit from the social structures that are put into place by or allowed to endure through resonant violence. Just as some experience resonant violence as a continued affront to their h uman rights or even their very existence, o thers do not experience it as a felt reality, while still others reap the benefits of the social, pol itical, and economic structures it perpetuates. In the case of settler colonialism, for instance, the settler society benefits from resonant violence b ecause it allows them to take and keep the land their expansionist project requires—a reality represented clearly through the construction of DAPL through Standing Rock. Although theories of traumatic memory are incredibly useful for understanding how the w ater protectors of Standing Rock understand their own activism, it does not help us understand how that suffering is deeply connected to the success (or perceived success) of other groups. Furthermore, memory studies generally examines historical narratives that societies are actively engaging. Often, however, the past has an impact even on t hose who have no real awareness of it—t hose who do not remember, per se. Here I have detailed three different lenses for viewing the opening case of this book, but all three leave certain gaps. Genocide studies offers us many ways to understand the process that leads to genocide, but fewer to account for how that violence continues to impact the structures of a society many years a fter killing comes to an end. Perform ance studies helps us understand how change can be enacted through collective, embodied engagement at the interpersonal level, but has fewer tools for charting the impacts of that change at
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the societal scale. Memory studies offers theories of traumatic memory, which demonstrate how the past continues to impact traumatized populations in the present, and how they opt to mobilize that past to create change. The framing of trauma, however, can make it more difficult to evaluate how past violence impacts—both positively and negatively—t hose who have not been so directly targeted. Similarly, a memory studies approach tends to account for publicly circulated memory narratives. Past genocidal violence continues to have an impact, however, even when it is not actively acknowledged and engaged with by all sectors of society. Genocide does not need to be remembered to resonate. In fact, resonant violence may be most present in societies that actively work to “forget” the past and “move on.” How, then, to bridge these gaps between theories of violence, memory, and the body? Filling the spaces that exist among all these useful framings a social phenomenon that exists in the spaces requires a turn to affect— between us all. A focus on affect can help us understand the before and a fter of genocidal violence. It can elucidate how the power of embodied interventions at the micro level amplify to the macro. Affect offers a framework for highlighting the interrelationality between one group’s suffering and another’s thriving. An affective turn can pull these theories together in a way that illuminates the social relationships and possibilities constituted through genocidal violence. Book Out li ne To demonstrate how resonant violence operates and how embodied practices can transduce it, I draw on three different sites of analysis. Each of t hese sites on its own offers more than enough examples to illustrate how t hese pro cesses function, but by drawing on three disparate cases, I w ill show how t hese theories exceed the specific geog raphical, cultural, or temporal contexts of any individual case, and thus reveal how these ideas might also extend to other sites in the present and f uture. As such, t hese practices do not only represent a productive means for processing past genocidal violence, but they have the capacity to prevent such violence in the future. Furthermore, while all three sites demonstrate the possibility to transduce resonant violence, my research has revealed that the specificities of how these practices develop is culturally specific. The more practices respond to the specific cultural realities of their context, the more successful they are in responding to the negative affect of resonant violence. My first site is post-Holocaust Europe, specifically Germany and the formerly German-occupied territory of Poland. By drawing on such an overdetermined historical event like the Holocaust, which has been the subject of an overwhelming amount of research and analysis, I w ill demonstrate how t hese theories of resonant violence have worked in spaces like, as Huyssen calls it,
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the “urban palimpsest” of modern-d ay Berlin,75 as well as the dark touristic site par excellence of Auschwitz. In doing so, I contribute a frame for thinking through the tragedy of the Holocaust and how it continues to perform in various ways in the present. My second site is Argentina, especially Buenos Aires, and its processing of resonant violence perpetrated by the military dictatorship that pulled the country into a totalitarian reign of terror from 1976 to 1983. This site w ill help demonstrate how t hese processes exceed the paradigmatic case of the Holocaust—a nd in circumstances connected to the pre sent through their ties to globalization and neoliberal capitalism. My third site is the United States, its history of forced removal and extermination of American Indian populations, and the continuing impacts of that history today. This site w ill provide an alternative to the other two, given that the genocides or politicides of the Holocaust and the Argentine military dictatorship have both been recognized by their perpetrator states and have undergone (or continue to experience) active processes of transitional justice. As a settler colonial genocide that began many centuries ago and that is still occurring in many ways, the case of the United States demonstrates how resonant violence continues to perform and be performed upon into the present. This book takes examples from all three aforementioned cases to demonstrate the ways that groups of people coming together in co-embodied practices have responded to and transduced the damaging effects of resonant violence. Because the cases themselves have such an array of examples of these practices, I have opted not to org an ize this book by site, but instead to articulate several subsets of co-embodied practices that have emerged across the three cases. A fter f irst outlining the conceptual framework for a theory of resonant violence, each of the following chapters w ill examine one or two of t hese categories of affective practices that arise as a response to resonant violence and ultimately serve to transform it into new grassroots forms of agency and power. In the following chapter, I lay out a theory of resonant violence to stress the central role of affect in connecting and disconnecting populations through violence, but also to frame affect as the tool through which affected populations can respond to that violence and positively transform it. This chapter describes how a theory of resonant violence bridges the gaps between genocide studies, perform ance studies, and memory studies. It draws on the litera ture of affect theory to describe how resonant violence circulates in the aftermath of atrocity, transforming the ways social groups and societal institutions function and relate. Resonant violence does not have to be a never- ending reality for post-genocide societ ies, however. Resonant violence can be and has been transduced through an array of embodied practices that transform the negative effects of resonant violence into new forms of political agency and grassroots power. I introduce the term co-embodied practice to
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describe shared, embodied acts carried out by groups of people in public space. When positively directed, these co-embodied practices can serve as a means of transducing resonant violence. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on specific spaces of memory to explore them as sites within which certain co-embodied practices occur. In the second chapter I examine co-embodied practices of memorialization, whereby societ ies respond to the horrors of a violent past by constructing physical memorial spaces within which people can pay homage to, learn about, and engage with that past. Drawing on the significant body of work that already exists on acts of memorialization, I discuss a place’s memory landscape as a key to understanding how a group of people understand and relate to its past. I also document a marked shift that has occurred since the mid-twentieth century to today, through which the modes in which the past is memorialized and given physical space have evolved significantly. I argue that this shift is characterized by an increasing distrust in traditional monumentality and permanence, a move away from literal represent at ion toward abstraction, and an amplified focus on the subjective, emotional, and embodied experience of the individual visitor. To illustrate this shift and to demonstrate how practices of memorialization have shaped and responded to resonant violence, I focus in this chapter on one specific site: the city of Berlin, Germany, which contains hundreds, if not thousands, of memorials dedicated to the era of WWII and the Holocaust. The third chapter focuses on a different practice of memorialization: the transformation of actual sites of mass atrocity into sites of memory. Specifically, this chapter looks at former concentration, torture, and death camps in Germany, Poland, and Argentina, with a particu lar focus on the Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), formerly the largest clandestine torture and detention center in Argentina. Rather than only analyzing and reading the sites themselves, this chapter expands upon the current literature by highlighting the performativity of these sites, asking what and how they contribute toward transducing the negative, affective force of resonant vio lence. I examine these sites as places that allow for a certain set of shared, embodied practices to be performed both by the curators or organizers of the sites (co-embodied practices of curation), as well as the visitors to the sites (co- embodied practices of visitation). I argue that it is never only the spaces themselves, but rather the practices that transpire within these spaces and the process of transforming the space from a site of atrocity into a site of memory that influence the constructive processing of past violence. The subsequent chapters move away from specific sites that have been created or curated to address past violence to other places in the public sphere that people encounter on a more regular basis. In chapter 4, we stay in Argentina to examine one of the most import ant civil society, h uman rights groups to emerge a fter the last military dictatorship. H.I.J.O.S. was founded in 1995 by a group of young adults whose parents had been disappeared during the
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dictatorship. At the time, the perpetrators of violence during the dictatorship had received full impunity for their actions, and H.I.J.O.S. took it as their goal to bring those criminals to justice. They did so by developing a unique and revolutionary form of street activism, known as the escrache. This chapter analyzes the escrache as a powerful co-embodied practice of trans-action, a term I use to highlight two features of the escrache and other similar forms of memory practice and activism. First, through the ways that they move across, beyond, and through literal and figurative space, t hese practices exemplify all the directionality and intentionality implied through the Latin prefix trans-. Practices of trans-action do not place primary focus on the occupation of a certain, contained space; rather, they are more concerned with migration or with the crossing of large spaces, say a city or even a country. They also cross less- literal spaces, like generations or time. Second, as embodied practices that manifest the full political potentiality of their participants, these practices exemplify the perform ance of action, in the way Hannah Arendt conceptualizes the term in The H uman Condition.76 According to Arendt, it is from the action of a group of beings working in concert that all true power emerges.77 Chapter 5 illustrates and analyzes co-embodied practices of occupation, a set of practices that aim to affect an entire public sphere through the occupation of a single, specific space. This chapter examines one particu lar practice of occupation—t he American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island, which took place from November 1969 u ntil June 1971—as a co-embodied practice of occupation that sought to respond to and transform the affective force of resonant violence, which has continued to present itself through centuries of persecution of Native Peoples by colonial forces and, subsequently, the United States government. The chapter demonstrates how the occupation of Alcatraz Island transformed resonant violence, first by reassembling social groups, then by resignifying the literal and figurative public space they occupied. I show how the effects of the occupation amplified and emanated outward in order to exemplify how co-embodied practices of occupation create a crucible for affective transmission that can have impacts that far exceed the physical bound a ries of the occupied space. In the conclusion of this book, I look back at all these subcategories of co-embodied practices to reiterate their effect in transforming the negative affect of resonant violence. I explore how these practices fit within Arendt’s conception of politics, with a special focus on how t hese practices c ounter the growth of what Arendt refers to as worldlessness or the desert.78 I also offer some empirical tools for evaluating the effectiveness of the transformation of resonant violence. Between 1904 and 1907, the Germans perpetrated what was likely the first genocide of the twentieth c entury when they sought to eliminate the Herero and Nama of German Southwest Africa (present-d ay Namibia). Just a decade later, the Ottoman Empire systematically killed as many as 1.5 million
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Armenians. Sadly, t hese were only the first instances of the genocidal violence that has taken place over the last c entury, and that continues today. The effects of genocide are horrific to witness, and this book w ill reveal how they are, sadly, much more extensive and persistent than most people recognize. But I hope that the pages of this book w ill also show how, in every case of such extreme violence, there are always those who fight against it. Through the collective efforts of t hese individuals, the long-lasting effects of resonant vio lence can be contested and transformed. Such collective action can lead to the creation of novel potentialities and even new worlds that have been theretofore unimaginable.
C hapte r 1
Resonant Violence t h e f e lt u n f e lt of ge noc i de a n d i t s a f t e r m at h Six million; 800,000; 30,000; 8,372. For those in the field of mass atrocity studies and prevention, t hese numbers have come to symbolize entire genocides. And yet, even if these statistics shine a light on those who suffered genocidal violence most directly, they also obscure the full impact that such violence has on a society, for those affected by genocide far exceed the number of t hose who w ere killed. How, then, can we account for the true scale of genocide? The concept of resonant violence bridges the gaps that exist between the fields discussed in the introduction. By centralizing theories of affect and affective transmission, it explains the myriad ways that violence performs upon bodies, just as it highlights the means through which bodies perform upon and in the face of violence. Although resonant violence shares some characteristics with various concepts of trauma, its usefulness as an idea comes from what it brings to the fore of the discussion: resonant violence is primarily affective, and therefore inarguably social, in nature. Whereas t here may continue to be a debate in psychoanalytic fields as to the role of the social in the experience of trauma, a theory of resonant violence can allow scholars to consider trauma, memory, and perform ance, the individual and the social, together, through the lens of affect theory. Affect is, at its core, a social phenomenon. Theories of affect have surged into the spotlight in recent years as a variety of fields have experienced what Patricia Ticineto Clough has called “the affective turn.” 1 Although scholars define affect in a variety of ways, one fact upon which all scholars can agree regarding affect is that it is related to emotions. In what way and to what extent remains in contention. Most theorists of affect acknowledge the origin of the term as it is currently understood as coming from the seventeenth- century work of Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics.2 In that work, Spinoza uses the term affectus, which has since been alternately translated as “affect” and “emotion.” In part III of Ethics, Spinoza offers his definition of affectus: “By emotion [affectus] I mean the modifications of the body, whereby the active power of the said 25
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body is increased or diminished, aided or constrained, and also the ideas of such modif ications.” 3 Through this def inition Spinoza introduces several import ant characteristics of affect that have become essential to the work of cont emporary affect theorists (not to mention the work of this book). One, affect or emotion is tied directly to the body. Cont emporary affect theorists debate the ways in which the body is connected to affect, but most scholars agree on its embodied nature. Two, affect has an effect, meaning that an essential quality of affect is its ability to affect someone or something. Three, Spinoza writes that affect e ither increases or decreases the power of the body. In other words, affect involves intensity, or shifts in energy, force, or power. Some three centuries later, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari took the work of Spinoza and developed it into a major philosophical branch of affect theory. For Deleuze and Guattari, as well as for those scholars who have built on their work, especially Brian Massumi, affect is related to the power to affect and be affected.4 In his translator’s note to A Thousand Plateaus, Massumi offers his own definition of the way Deleuze and Guattari use the term “affect”: affect/affection. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.5 Clearly, this definition of affect owes a g reat deal to Spinoza’s definition in Ethics. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari, through Massumi, highlight one essential difference that Spinoza does not necessarily stress, and this difference is taken up by Massumi and others in their own work as they grow the field of affect studies. This definition notes the “prepersonal” nature of affect. Deleuze and Guattari, and later Massumi, insist on affect as a force or intensity that exists below or beyond the level of cognition and, therefore, of recognition. Massumi describes this characteristic, that is, affect’s existence as a prepersonal force, as “the autonomy of affect.” 6 For Massumi, there are two important categories to recognize when thinking about affect: intensity and quality.7 According to him, affect itself is pure intensity. In one characteristically abstract passage, Massumi attempts to explain what this means: Intensity is beside the loop, a nonconscious, never-to-conscious autonomic remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration, as it is from vital function. It is narratively de-localized, spreading over the generalized body surface, like a lateral backwash from the function-meaning interloops traveling the vertical path between head and heart.8
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Elaborate prose like this is typical of Massumi, and reading his efforts to bring to consciousness the “nonconscious, never- to- conscious” real ity of affect often feels like hacking one’s way through a dense jungle. The essential idea to take from Massumi’s understanding of affect, however, is the very fact that it cannot, in fact, be explained or understood in a cognitive sense. As pure intensity it exists beyond the threshold of understanding. When one tries to explain affect, they are no longer talking about intensity, but quality. As such, it is no longer affect, but “qualified intensity.” 9 For Massumi, affect exists outside of the realm of discourse. Furthermore, affect is pure potential. Through affect, the affected being embodies all possible f utures. Affect is the precognitive moment in which everyt hing is possible. It exists in the virtual.10 As soon as one of those futures is chosen, however, Massumi argues that we can no longer speak of affect, but of cognition or emotion. This is a final import ant point of Massumi’s understanding of affect: that it is not at all the same t hing as emotion. Massumi writes: An emotion is a subjective content, the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action- reaction cir cuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized.11 For Massumi, if affect is intensity, then emotion is quality. Affect is prepersonal; emotion is personal. Affect is nondiscursive and indescribable; emotion is affect converted into discourse and made descriptive. Affect is potential. Emotion is the single choice made out of the infinite possibilities that existed. Massumi writes, “Emotion is the way the depth of that ongoing experience registers personally at a given moment.” 12 Generally, scholars of affect who trace their conceptual genealogy back through Spinoza accept this distinction (or at least some distinction) between affect and emotion. But there is an entirely separate branch of affect theory that does not draw such a clear line between the two concepts. This second branch begins most clearly with Silvan Tomkins,13 whose ideas influenced the research of Paul Ekman,14 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,15 Lauren Berlant,16 and, to an extent, Sara Ahmed,17 among others.18 Tomkins sees a much closer relationship between affect and emotion, using the two terms almost synonymously. For Tomkins, affect describes the biological, emotional responses of the body that are hardwired into each of us. Therefore, Tomkins agrees with Spinoza that affect is embodied, but Tomkins’s understanding of affect is much more concrete. In fact, Tomkins famously articulated his basic emotions theory, which details seven specific positive and negative affects that, he argues, are universal and exist across cultural divides. T hese affects are enjoyment/joy, interest/excitement, surprise/startle, distress/anguish, shame/
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humiliation, anger/rage, and fear/terror. Theorists who draw from Tomkins’s model of affect typically deal with affect as emotion or, perhaps, as the social or shared quality of emotion, which can be transmitted among individuals. T hese scholars also typically do not describe affect as necessarily precognitive or, at least, not only precognitive. Rather, affect is something that can be recognized and identified and, through the act of recognition, it does not cease to exist or transform into something else—a big difference from, for instance, Massumi’s understanding of affect. The disagreements between the many differing definitions of affect do not take away from the productivity of the concept. Indeed, as Ann Pellegrini and Jasbir Puar have written, real potential exists in affect and “the generative and productive multiplicity of its deployment as an analytic and political frame.” 19 When thinking about genocidal violence and responses to it, a hybridized conception of affect is most useful. Spinoza’s basic definition is helpful because it stresses the performativity of affect. Ultimately affect is the possibility for a being to affect and be affected. Both branches of affect theory place a special emphasis on the embodied nature of affect, and this too is essential for a performative understanding of the concept. In Tomkins’s model, affect is, by its very nature, embodied because it is the bodily response to emotion. In the model of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Massumi, affect is the force that has an effect on bodies, opening up the space of pure potential. Although they think about the body in different ways, both lines of thinking place it as central. There are, however, some real limits to each of these ways of thinking about affect. Massumi’s model of affect as pure intensity and completely prepersonal can render the concept too vague to be productive, especially for those trying to bridge a gap between the philosophical and the embodied. Massumi is correct to think about affect as a force or energy that circulates around us and is transmitted among bodies, but the idea that it is wholly autonomous seems to eliminate a key feature of affect as Spinoza understands it. Spinoza argues that affect is the power to affect and be affected. In Massumi’s model, affect only affects people, but it cannot be affected by p eople in a conscious way, since it is a completely preconscious force. In fact, Massumi argues that affect cannot be conceived of or described, b ecause it exists below or beyond the level of discourse. Interestingly, even Massumi seems to move away from the “prepersonal” nature of affect in his more recent work, in which he ceases to use the term “prepersonal,” substituting the term “infrapersonal.” 20 He writes: Affect is the infra-conditioning of every determinate activity, including that of language. The preferred prefix for affect is “infra-”. “Pre-” connotes time sequence. But affect always accompanies, on the parallel track of potential. . . . “Infra-” on the other hand connotes what actively lies below a certain threshold of appearance on an open-ended spectrum (as in “infrared”; from inferus, below).21
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ere Massumi’s understanding of affect appears to be evolving. By switching H prefixes, he also stresses the way that affect is always shaping subjectivity, though still mostly below the level of consciousness. Massumi’s shift toward describing affect as “infrapersonal” rather than “prepersonal” begins to depict affect not only as a force that affects us, but one that can be engaged with and shaped by subjects toward some end. W hether or not this is actually the case, I argue that there is a political stake in believing that affect does not only affect us but can also be consciously affected and manipulated by us. This book, in fact, is about not only how affect affects us, but how we can affect affect. Even if Massumi is correct that affect is completely and only prepersonal, that it cannot be perceived or consciously controlled, I contend that we have a political responsibility to act as if it can be, particularly when confronted with the affective violence of genocide. Genocidal violence has an affective force that both precedes and succeeds the physical violence of killing, torture, and displacement. At times, this force exists below the level of consciousness, but it can also be recognized and manipulated. This affective force creates perpetrators who, first, grow to exclude certain groups from their realm of moral responsibility22 and, next, are willing to destroy them. It is a force that mobilizes and that can be instrumentalized by individuals to carry out certain horrific goals. This force, however, is not autonomous. It can be instrumentalized by certain groups to facilitate and perpetrate the most heinous acts, just as it can also be recognized and altered by other groups through a variety of practices, a number of which I examine in this text. Furthermore, as Margaret Wetherell effectively argues, affect and discourse are not two completely different forces; they are deeply connected, each constituting and constituted by the other. 23 Thus, this book also demonstrates how discourse and affect interact and are influenced by each other to achieve certain political and social goals. There are also limitations to Tomkins’s model of affect theory, which ultimately boils affect down to a few emotional words like hate, fear, love, and joy—words that more clearly describe personal feelings. Although feelings are certainly an aspect of affect, they do not fully encompass the term, b ecause they highlight only the individual experience of affect. Affect is a force that connects individuals through creating certain relationalities, which often manifest and are experienced through feeling. Affect is never purely personal, nor is it prepersonal or infrapersonal, as Massumi argues. It is interpersonal. It is the energy or intensity that describes the way we relate to each other. Ahmed offers a particularly useful way of thinking about this relationality. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed examines affect from what looks like a basic emotions perspective, given that each chapter focuses on a specific feeling (hate, pain, disgust, etc.).24 But Ahmed introduces a phenomenological perspective by highlighting how each of these emotions is associated with a certain directionality among bodies. For instance, hate has a directionality of
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“againstness,” while love would be more associated with “towardness.” This focus on directionality—which she later refers to as orientation 25 —i llustrates that affect is not about emotions that exist in the bubble of the individual mind and body, but feelings or emotions that arise based on relationships with o thers. This view of affect as relational and intersubjective also explains why the language of sound and sound theory provides such a suitable vocabulary for understanding the way affect works. The language of sound theory (generally) and resonance (more specifically) is a natural metaphor for thinking about and understanding affect, because affect is ultimately about how subjectivities are shaped through relationship with o thers. As Deborah Kapchan puts it, “From the beginning, subjectivity emerges from intersubjectivity, the one is born from the many. We resound together.” 26 Kapchan develops the concept of the sound body to highlight the interconnectedness of bodies (human and nonhuman) and their abilities to affect others and effect change. For Kapchan, the world is sound: “Every movement is in fact a vibration, and every vibration has a sound, however inaudible to the h uman ear. What we cannot hear, we can sense.” 27 The literal or figurative movements of one body create vibrations that extend outward and cannot but affect others. According to Kapchan, sound and affect function similarly as vehicles of sound knowledge, the “nondiscursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening.” 28 Listening h ere, however, is not only listening with the ear, though it is certainly that, too. It is listening with the w hole body, being attuned to the vibrations surrounding us and connecting us. Kapchan writes, “The sound body is a material body that resonates (with) its environment, creating and conducting affect.” 29 Every body is at once a producer and a conductor of affect; the vibrations that we receive affect us, just as those we emit affect others, oftentimes below the level of consciousness. For this reason, thinking with the language of sound and with the concept of the sound body is particularly apt in the presence of heightened affect—moments that Ann Pellegrini refers to as “states of affective emergency.” 30 In Listening to War: Sound, M usic, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq, J. Martin Daughtry offers a particularly vivid picture—or, rather, a clarion soundscape— of the ways extreme states of conflict like war or genocide blur the lines between sound and violence, oftentimes eliding the two. 31 His analysis of “the belliphonic,” or “the spectrum of sounds produced by armed combat,” 32 demonstrates the large and under-researched role that sound plays in wart ime. For both soldiers and civilians in a war zone, the sounds of armed conflict are ever present. From the loud hum of army vehicles driving through the streets to the screech of amplified voices barking orders at civilians to the intermittent barrages of gunfire from weapons large and small to the brief moments of silence, which, in times of war, provoke more anxiety than they do relief, Daughtry reveals the impact the belliphonic has both on the individual psyche and on the sociocultural, affective landscape of a warzone.
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Daughtry’s text focuses on the very literal ways that sound and violence are connected in wart ime. Given the complementary modalities of sound and affect, however, Daughtry’s work has many connections to the concept of resonant violence and can, therefore, be useful outside of the realm of pure warfare to provide several useful contributions to thinking through the affective force of other forms of political violence, namely genocide. One of the first theoretical frameworks that Daughtry constructs is a model for the “concentric zones of war t ime (in)audition.” 33 According to Daughtry, four different zones of audition/hearing exist in a state of war, and these zones are most often related to the physical proximity of the subject to the emitted sound. The two m iddles zones—which Daughtry calls the “narrational zone” and the “tactical zone”—a re spaces in which the subject consciously hears the sound and is able to relate to it in a conscientious way. For example, in the narrational zone, the sound is not close enough to be of immediate danger to the auditor, 34 but close enough that they can construct a narrative about the b attle that they are hearing. In the narrational zone, soldiers can tell what weapons are being fired and form a mental image of how this non-v isible event might look. In the tactical zone, on the other hand, the auditor is much closer to the source of sound and must use the sounds they hear to make potentially life-or-death decisions. For instance, if a soldier hears a gun firing in the tactical zone, they may decide to run toward that sound in order to engage with it. A civilian in the tactical zone, however, might hear gunfire, assess the location of its source, and run in the opposite direction in search of protection. Importantly, in both the narrational and the tactical zones, auditors are able to make ethical and conscious choices to respond to the belliphonic sounds around them. This is not the case for the other two zones. The zone that is closest to the auditor is called the trauma zone. In the trauma zone, sound is not just something that can be heard, it is something that physically damages the auditor. When auditors are in the trauma zone, faced with hearing the impact of an improvised explosive device (IED) or even the shot of their own military-g rade rifle, these sounds have physical effects on the body, ranging from tinnitus and hearing loss to long-term brain damage caused by the blast waves of an explosion. In the trauma zone, the auditor has no room for ethical choices; they are only the recipient or the object of sound as violence, nothing more. Conversely, Daughtry’s fourth zone is also an “ethical vacuum” within which auditors cannot make ethical decisions about the violent sounds around them. This zone, within which the auditor and the source of the sound are the most distant, is called the “audible inaudible.” The audible inaudible is the zone in which auditors become so accustomed to the belliphonic sounds around them that they actually cease to register them. The sound of gunfire and bombs in the auditory background of their lives becomes normalized to the point where they are not heard at all.
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Daughtry writes that the audible inaudible is “a conceptual space that housed sounds so distant and/or ubiquitous that they ceased to draw the attention of the experienced auditor. To locate a sound in the audible inaudible is to say that it was no longer fully ‘there,’ no longer available to the auditors whose unconscious or, at most, quasi-conscious alteration of perceptual priorities created the zone in the first place.” 35 Daughtry describes the audible inaudible as a space that is at once constructed and in “a constant state of flux.” 36 When soldiers first arrive to the warzone, the audible inaudible most likely does not exist for them. Each round of gunfire and each distant blast exist in e ither the narrational or tactical zone. As these sounds become normalized, however, the space of the audible inaudible grows, and it serves as both a refuge from the violence that surrounds them and as an anesthetic that prevents the realities of that violence from being fully perceived. Daughtry writes: For those who learned to not hear the distant sounds of war, the audible inaudible amounted to a portable audiotopia, a tantalizing zone of imagined silence where experienced ears could rest and jangled nerves settle. It was also a badge of honor; nearly all of my interlocutors took g reat pride in their ability to desensitize themselves to the belliphonic in this way.37 The audible inaudible is at once a zone that is necessary for the survival and sanity of the auditor and the zone that closes off the portion of the psyche that finds the violence of war to be exceptional. The construction of the zone of the audible inaudible, then, coincides with the normalization of and desensitization to the horrors of war. Like in the trauma zone, there are no ethical choices to be made in this zone. It exists outside of the realm of conscious action. If the connection between Daughtry’s theory of the belliphonic and the affective force of large-scale violence is not clear, one could reread the above description, replacing e very mention of “sound” with “affect.” Just as Kapchan connects the vibrationality of sound and affect in her conception of the sound body, Daughtry’s work focuses on the vibrational force of sound and how it can have physical, psychological, and social effects. Similarly, one can think of the affective force of genocidal vio lence as manifesting within Daughtry’s four zones of audition. In the trauma zone exist t hose most readily labeled “victims.” They are the concentration-camp prisoners, the refugees, the targeted “other.” During instances of genocide, all people within a society exist within the tactical and narrational zones, as they answer the tricky ethical questions of where they w ill align within such a regime—if they have the luxury of making such a choice at all, that is. T hese decisions often require an evaluation of priorities. In such a situation, are ethics or survival more impor tant? But the zone that is most important for the purposes of understanding resonant violence is the zone of the audible inaudible—though, for our purposes, it might be more accurately called the felt unfelt.
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In the long process of genocide, this affective zone exists in two separate ways. During the height of a genocide, when the perpetration of large-scale violence against groups is at its most visible, people enter the zone of the felt unfelt both as a means of survival and avoidance. Throughout the perpetration of all three genocides examined in this book, the violence against targeted groups was not at all invisible. In fact, in each of these cases, large portions of the population were quite aware of the violence being carried out. In each case, those who aligned clearly neither with the perpetrators nor the victims had to decide w hether to become involved in the perpetration of vio lence, to resist actively that perpetration through activism and other forms of resistance, or, as occurred in the majority of the cases, to stand idly by, consciously ignoring the violence that was taking place, convincing themselves that there was nothing they could do to stop it. To be clear, choosing to be a bystander is a logical and rational choice. By opting not to take sides or to ignore the violence, bystanders—at least those who are not at risk of being lumped in with victim groups—a lmost ensure that they w ill never face either the possibility of becoming victims themselves or the potential of retributive justice in the aftermath of the genocide. 38 Instead, bystanders learn or condition themselves to live in the zone of the felt unfelt, in which they know that genocidal violence is taking place around them, but they opt not to sense it or be affected by it. Diana Taylor uses visual language to describe this process when she develops her concept of percepticide, or willful self-blinding. 39 But this process of actively not acknowledging genocidal violence extends far beyond the visual frame, encompassing all senses. For instance, one Polish tour guide at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum whose parents lived near the camps told me that the one thing her father w ill always remember from the years of the war is the smell of burning bodies. Genocides also come with a range of sonic realities that both include and extend beyond the belliphonic and that must also be blocked out by t hose bystanders living in the zone of the felt unfelt. Regardless of how this affective environment manifests, it is never all that long before it becomes normalized, and, through that process of normalization, that which is at first felt so very strongly comes to be felt not at all. But it is not only during this stage of genocidal perpetration that the felt unfelt exists. Just as the affective force of genocidal violence does not cease to circulate when the physical violence stops, this zone of the felt unfelt continues onward into the so-called aftermath of genocide, and it is here that it does potentially even greater damage. As I argue throughout this book, the violence of genocide extends far beyond the number of p eople it kills. Typically, the facts and figures that are most often recalled about past genocides are those that illustrate the number of victims. While these statistics are effective and haunting, they also often obscure other forms of violence that are a product of the process of genocide and that, in fact, may still be present, even after the killing itself has stopped. Genocide involves the construction of an affective environment that
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allows for other forms of violence as well, like social inequality, institutional discrimination, and economic disparity among groups, just to name a few examples. For instance, as I w ill discuss further in the fourth chapter, the military dictatorship in Argentina intended and succeeded in installing a neoliberal economic regime that is, in many ways, still in existence today. The economic disparity within Argentina—one of the only countries in Latin America with an enduring history of a m iddle class—is still very visible, particularly in the villas miserias, or slums, of Buenos Aires. These neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city are in large part a byproduct of the economic policies of the dictatorship. Within them, tens of thousands of Argentinians live in cinder-block housing on dirt roads with no plumbing or electricity. Most of the residents of the villas are immigrants from other Latin American countries who have come to take advantage of Argentina’s open immigration policy, but they live in squalor in these spaces that exist almost completely outside of the public sphere, with little to no government support or interaction.40 The villas have become such an accepted part of life in Argentina, however, that their presence is hardly questioned. They exist within the zone of the felt unfelt. Another instance of the felt unfelt in the aftermath of genocide emerged at the end of World War II when Europe became both literally and figuratively divided between the Allied Powers in a move that marked the beginning of the Cold War. This division was most visible in the city of Berlin, where the Soviet Union–allied German Democratic Republic (GDR) built an actual wall to keep people from fleeing communist East Germany for West Berlin. This binary separation of Germany was visible across the European landscape, where Western European countries opposed the policies and alliances of the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Bloc countries. Interestingly, when it came to memorializing the victims of the human rights violations and genocide of the WWII period, it was the Soviet-a ligned East that first acknowledged the violence of the past through memorials, as the West preferred to “move forward” and not actively address these crimes after the end of the Nuremberg Trials. The way that the Eastern Bloc countries memorialized and discussed the past, however, represented another form of violence against the victims. Eastern Bloc countries refused to acknowledge that the victims of the Holocaust died b ecause they were Jewish (or members of any of the other identity groups that w ere persecuted by the Nazis). Rather, all the victims w ere depicted as anti-fascist resis tance fighters who died solely b ecause they resisted Nazism. Although many of the victims certainly w ere active resisters of Hitler’s regime, this is decidedly not the reason for which most of them were murdered. The erasure of the victims’ identities as Jews, Roma-Sinti, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc., was thus another form of violence that, even after the end of the killing of these groups, served to erase them from the history books and the social fabric of Eastern European society. It was an attempt to place these victims and the vio lence they suffered squarely within the realm of the felt unfelt.
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hese two examples are both illustrations of resonant violence. They T demonstrate how the affective violence of genocide continued to resonate long a fter the killing itself ended. T hese other forms of violence are decidedly less visible, as they cannot be marked by a tallying of corpses. But the danger of this violence exists in its insidiousness, in the fact that it has become so normalized that it is not necessarily felt as violence, especially as violence that has its roots in the mass atrocity that preceded it. Because this form of enduring violence is denied, it contributes to the continuation of social divisions, not allowing for the repair of the social fabric that was destroyed during the period of killing. Given that social fragmentation is one of the key risk f actors for further mass atrocity violence,41 the perpetuation of this social division, left unchecked, can potentially lead back to more killing and the perpetration of physical violence against groups. For instance, the 1994 Rwanda genocide can be seen as directly related to the unaddressed violence of the Hutu Revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s, during which a new Hutu government displaced some 200,000 Tutsis.42 Likewise, institutionalized police violence against Black Americans across the United States is undoubtedly related to the largely unaddressed history of slavery in the United States, as well as the economic and racial inequality of the Jim Crow South that succeeded its abolition. In both cases the social effects of past violence w ere allowed to continue even a fter physical violence against groups stopped. Left uncontested, this affective violence became so normalized that it was no longer experienced as violence by those who were not a part of the persecuted groups. Instead, it was allocated to the realm of the felt unfelt. T hese examples also illustrate another import ant point regarding Daughtry’s zones of wartime (in)audition: one person’s audible inaudible is always the trauma zone of another person. In a warzone, the distant sound of bombs that one soldier blocks out as the normalized soundscape of war is, for the unfortunate Iraqi civilian at the wrong place at the wrong time, the complete obliteration of life. Likewise, in the case of resonant violence, while most people may have allocated the continued social effects of genocidal violence into the realm of the felt unfelt, it is surely not experienced as such by the groups being oppressed by that violence. Police violence against Black Americans may seem like the unfortunate but necessary byproduct of a “safe” democracy to a middle-class white American in the Midwest, but it is certainly not experienced as such by the Black communities who fall victim to such violence on a daily basis. The squalor of the villas miserias in Buenos Aires may seem like so much background noise to the average porteño, but for the impoverished residents of these slums, the violence of the past is still so very present. Daughtry offers a final concept that is useful for understanding resonant violence and the way it functions. In discussing the power of sound to affect and shape populations during wartime, Daughtry presents the concept of
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auditory regimes, which he defines as “the technologies, regulations, formal and informal training exercises, casual conversations, and shared life histories that help to shape audition for a given population; an auditory habitus.” 43 For Daughtry, audition, which is constructed by an auditory regime, is not just about the listening/hearing body and the sound that is heard. It also involves power relations that are present within the context of that listening body.44 Similarly, resonant violence installs and functions within what we can call an affective regime.45 It creates and promulgates a system of power relations that allows for an affective environment that continues the work of genocide in ways that are potentially less visible or less overtly horrifying than the mass murder of groups. In the case of resonant violence, the affective regime that is established is one that allows for the perpetration of violence against some while dulling the sensitivity to that violence in others. The reverberating nature of resonant violence allows this affective force to amplify and expand outward. Nothing can resonate on its own; it must resonate with something else. This can mean that the violent affect resonates within the individual body, but it can also describe how this affect resonates across bodies. The connection between resonance and the notion of intersubjectivity is reinforced by Veit Erlmann, who writes, “Resonance entails adjacency, sympathy, and the collapse of the boundary between perceiver and perceived.” 46 Resonance breaks down (or, perhaps better, shakes down) bounda ries, causing things to resonate together. And so, when resonant violence acts across bodies, its vibratory power grows. It amplifies. As the destructive affect of resonant violence amplifies, it also spreads to other individuals and structures within a society. It is transmissible exactly because it is affective, and affect is not something that resides solely in one body, but something that travels among bodies. Affect “is precisely the experience of embodied sociality.” 47 In The Transmission of Affect, Teresa Brennan demonstrates that “the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies t hese affects entail, can enter into another.” 48 This phenomenon occurs precisely b ecause affects are energetic in quality. “This is why they can enhance or deplete,” Brennan writes.49 What Brennan calls enhancement and depletion is exactly what I want to evoke through the term “resonance.” It is this transmissible quality of resonant violence that truly sets it apart from current models of trauma. Substantial literat ure exists on the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memory, for instance, from genocide victims to their c hildren.50 There is even a growing field called “epigenetics,” which argues that trauma can alter the genetic constitution of the victim, and these genetic anomalies can be passed biologically to subsequent generations.51 Thinking about genocidal violence as affective in the form of resonant violence, however, explains how the affective force of a trauma extends beyond the direct victim to others who are connected to that victim, biologically and otherw ise, even if they did not
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experience an act of violence themselves. If some thinking on trauma precludes the social, resonant violence requires it. Resonant violence is also performative. As Joseph Roach asserts in Cities of the Dead, “all violence is performative” because it does t hings.52 What makes resonant violence differently performative is, first of all, its persistent perfor mance, in that it does not end with the initial act of physical violence, but continues to perform affectively both inside the body of the victim and through affective transmission to others. Second, it is different because of how exactly it performs. Resonant violence’s most destructive perform ance is its ability to destroy social bonds and atomize individuals and groups. It works specifically through its capacity to break down collectivities, even if the vio lence is experienced collectively. It is most powerful when it is felt by individuals as not having a social component, because resonant violence ultimately works toward complete social atomization. In characterizing the various totalitarian regimes of her time, Hannah Arendt describes “terror” as “the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control.” 53 The supreme consequence of this perpetual reign of violence is the increased atomization of society, brought about mainly by what Arendt describes as “the ubiquity of the informer,” or what could be characterized in more general terms as a belief that the enemy is everywhere. Similarly, when all opposition to resonant violence falls away, society atomizes, and the individual is forced to experience the shared affect of resonant violence alone. This is the terrifying paradox of resonant violence: it works through transmission between individuals exactly by making those individuals feel that they are not connected. Returning to the example of Standing Rock from the introduction, resonant violence is clearly visible in a number of ways. Resonant violence contributed to the creation of the Standing Rock Reservation in the first place, which was instituted through the signing of the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868—a document written to contain the territory of the Indigenous Tribes of the Black Hills of South Dakota and delimit their sovereignty. Resonant violence created an environment in which Energy Transfer Partners saw the desecration of Indigenous territory, including sacred burial grounds, as acceptable collateral damage in their economic project. And resonant violence justified the forms of police repression of the water protectors who stood their ground to block DAPL’s construction. Likewise, t hose w ater protectors occupying unceded Indigenous territory were not only protesting DAPL through their physical presence in that space. They w ere demonstrating against resonant violence itself. Their embodied actions were making the felt unfelt visible. Their message was not merely that DAPL should be constructed elsewhere. Their actions shone a light on the ease with which those in positions of power have disregarded the lives and
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livelihoods of Indigenous Americans, calling for wholesale change. Even as Standing Rock reveals the insidiousness of resonant violence, it represents an active attempt to change the way that violence resonates. And herein lies the hope of seeing genocidal violence as not only physical or psychological, but as affective. Because resonant violence is an affective force that resonates within and among “bodies,” a central way to curtail it is through bodily practices that transform that violence into new modes of power that allow it to resonate differently. Until now, I have focused on affect in the form of resonant violence as a force that acts detrimentally upon bodies, but the reverse is also true. Lyon and Barbalet write, “The body cannot be seen merely as subject to external forces; the emotions which move the person through bodily pro cesses must be understood as a source of agency: social actors are embodied.” 54 In other words, through embodied practice, t hose impacted by resonant violence can also act upon it and, potentially, transform it. In her essay On Violence, Arendt takes on theorists of the early twentieth c entury, most specifically Max Weber,55 their definitions of power, and their overriding tendency to conflate it with violence.56 For Arendt, power is not something endowed on an individual or institution through its ability to exert violent force on others. Instead, power can only exist within the context of a group and that group’s ability to empower an individual or a governing body. It is within this social contract of acting in concert, then, that true power lies. Violence, on the other hand, describes the coercive force used when the consent of the group does not allow for true power. Although violence can indeed destroy power through its ability to atomize society, power can never grow out of violence, because the group is being forced to submit, rather than submitting willingly. In Arendt’s view, then, violence and power are complete opposites. As she writes, “When the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” 57 I take issue with Arendt’s definitions in one key way: it is possible for power to emerge from violence through what I call embodied processes of transduction, like t hose at Standing Rock, whereby resonant violence undergoes a transubstantiation of sorts that transforms it into a new form of affective power. The affective force of this power can then transform others through transmission across new bodies and entities. Transduction is a concept that exists in a number of fields—genetics, biophysics, psychology, and sound theory—but its meaning is similar across its multiple uses. From the Latin trans-, meaning “across or beyond,” and ducere, meaning “to lead,” transduction is the process whereby something is transformed into something else through the process of crossing some medium. In sound theory, transduction describes the process of sound energy moving across a medium—a transducer— that transforms the vibration of sound into another form of energy.58 Sound is transduced when it goes through a microphone, a speaker, or a telephone, for instance. In this case, each of t hese objects is a transducer. The body itself can
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also be a transducer through and upon which sound travels and transforms into new forms of energy.59 The human body is not only a transducer of sound energy, however; it is also a transducer for affective energy. In fact, every act of affective transfer is an example of this transduction, and when this process occurs in the face of resonant violence, it can signify the transubstantiation of negative, violent affect into a new affective energy that can c ounter or even reverse the damaging effects of resonant violence. Of course, resonant vio lence is also perpetuated through pro cesses of transduction. As the negative affect of resonant violence spreads, that energy manifests through practices that serve to oppress victimized groups and to benefit other groups through that oppression. Resonant violence is the collection of (ultimately damaging) affective vibrations that reverberate among the bodies of a given group of p eople. More specifically, it is the vibratory affect that pulls certain groups away from other groups. As Kapchan notes, affect is always intersubjective;60 in the case of resonant violence, certain subjects are formed in complete opposition to other subjects. The vibrations that resonate among bodies serve to repel, to create distance, or, to use the words of Arendt, to atomize. Ultimately, however, this atomization is only illusory. It may be felt as atomization. One subject may feel that they are distant and distinct from the other. But their subjectivity is indeed formed in relation to that other. It is their sound body61—as opposed to the separate and contained juridical body of the Enlightenment—that recognizes that connection on some level, that recognizes the impossibility of complete disconnection. Because of that (potentially unconscious) recognition, they must continue to repel, to push further away. Let us go back to the example of Nazi Germany. During this period both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans were affected by the resonant violence of National Socialist ideology, whether they wanted to be or not. In Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, a seminal text in the field of genocide studies, Waller refutes stereotypes of perpetrators as purely insane sadists or as “mad Nazis” by outlining the processes whereby ordinary individuals are converted into perpetrators of genocide. According to Waller, there are three main influences that contribute to the creation of perpetrators: the cultural construction of a worldview that values things like obedience to authority and strong social hierarchies; the psychological construction of the “other,” whereby modes of us-them thinking and dehumanization set various social groups apart and esteem some groups over others; and the social construction of cruelty, through which professional socialization and other group-binding factors transform the persecution of a victim group into a normalized social ritual.62 I argue that t hese influences are deeply connected to the formation of an affective regime that allows them to develop. Indeed, even though Waller does not himself incorporate theories of affect into his model, which relies largely on social psychological theory, the role of affect is clear.
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For instance, one key component of the cultural construction of a worldview that allows for the perpetration of genocide is a strong system of social dominance, which Waller describes as a set of sustained aggressive-submissive relations among individuals or groups.63 The affective energy generated through models of social dominance can quickly develop into hate, an affective state that serves to push groups further away from each other and ignite a passion to maintain such boundaries through action.64 Of course, it is not only negative affects like hate that motivate genocide. However sordid it may be, perpetrators also receive comfort and pleasure from identifying with and being included within a group. The positive sense of belonging that emerges through the perform ance of group-binding activities and, especially in the case of soldiers, professional socialization does just as much to secure the formation of perpetrator and victim groups as do negative affective states like hatred of the “other.” Furthermore, just as the example of the gradual nature of antisemitic persecution in 1930s Germany demonstrates, both Waller and another eminent genocide studies scholar, Christopher Browning, stress the fundamental role of “escalating commitments” in the creation of perpetrators.65 Were Germans asked in 1933 if they supported the complete destruction of European Jews, few would have said yes. The incremental nature of the genocide, however, created a series of escalating commitments, whereby such horrific acts were made acceptable over time. Moreover, in an ironic twist, as persecution against Jews became harsher and harsher over the course of several years, many p eople ended up rationalizing this persecution by convincing themselves that Jews deserved this punishment or brought it upon themselves. This is an example of what Melvin J. Lerner has called the “ just world phenomenon.” Lerner argues that people naturally want to see the world as a just place. As a result, when bad things start happening to certain groups, it is easier to blame the victims for their own hardships than to change one’s belief that the world is ultimately just.66 The just world phenomenon was not only present during the perpetration of the Holocaust. In a 2020 survey conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, 10 percent of U.S. adults and 15 percent of U.S. millennials believed, when asked, that Jews caused the Holocaust.67 Accepting such faulty logic becomes inevitably easier when the affective regime of a society rewards such thinking. Germans who resisted Nazism faced constant opposition and threat in their daily lives. Likewise, those who came to support the party and its efforts enjoyed social inclusion, safety, and the potential for social and professional advancement. I focus here on the role of resonant violence with Nazi perpetrators and sympathizers to reiterate that resonant violence is not only and not always about negative emotion. Resonant violence has both positive and negative aspects, depending on one’s social group. Some p eople benefit from resonant violence, just as others suffer from it. Indeed, if it did not positively benefit
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some, there would be no reason for it to exist. In that way, resonant violence is similar to a Foucauldian understanding of power. According to Foucault, power is not a force that only comes from some higher authority like the state. Rather, it is the confluence of relations between individuals, institutions, and objects. Power emerges from every body, just as it acts upon every body. Importantly, Foucault stresses that power is not synonymous with repression or force. The real, well, power of power is that it is often experienced happily, voluntarily, and not as a command.68 Similarly, for resonant violence to function, it must be experienced by some as a source of good. The big distinction between this concept of power and resonant violence, of course, is that the experience of it is so one-sided. While certain groups experience it positively, others experience it completely negatively. The productive nature of resonant violence for certain groups is always dependent on its destructive nature for other groups. But this beneficial side of resonant violence is what makes it so insidious. To reverse its effects, the group that most benefits from it must act selflessly, potentially against its own interests, in order to deter the deprivation of the “other.” In other words, reversing the effects of resonant violence requires a sense of empathy and collective responsibility, and these two qualities are difficult, though not at all impossible, to cultivate across a society. We know that cultivating such an environment is possible, however, because it has been done before in countless instances, and the remainder of this book details some of those instances. I propose that the most effective way to cultivate the sort of affective environment that can undo the damaging effects of resonant violence is through group-embodied practices, or, as I call them in the pages of this book and elsewhere, co-embodied practices: “ritual acts performed by individual bodies coming together in public space and acting in concert.” 69 Embodied practice is deeply connected to affect and its transmission. In fact, I argue, along with social scientist Margaret Wetherell, that embodied practice is the clearest way to read and understand how affect manifests in daily life. To emphasize this assertion, Wetherell develops the term affective practice to articulate how affect at once manifests in and is shaped by the body. According to Wetherell, affect is deeply related to the creation of patterns of beh avior, and these patterns lead to the formation of “affective ruts.” 70 These ruts emerge when affect creates performed tendencies within people—h abitual ways that people interact with others and the world around them. The embodied perform ance of those tendencies reinforces the affect that produces them, along with the tendencies themselves. We can see this clearly in the case of resonant violence. The affective regime of resonant vio lence pushes p eople to behave in certain ways; when p eople fulfill expectations by behaving like this, their beh avior is encouraged and reinforced, leading to repetitive perform ances of that beh avior, then further reinforcement, and so on. For instance, in an example that I take from Waller, the Nazi
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salute is an affective practice. During Hitler’s reign, all Germans were forced to greet each other with the Nazi salute and the statement of “Heil Hitler.” Initially, non-Nazi sympathizers may have only performed this action to fit in or to avoid punishment and social exclusion, even though, in their minds, they disagreed with Nazism and its tenets. Over time, however, that beh avior becomes reinforced, and the cognitive dissonance that the individual experiences in performing an action that goes against their own psychology actually leads to a shift in their psychology to align with their outward beh avior.71 It is, therefore, the embodied, affective practice of the salute that can create the perpetrator or Nazi sympathizer. Resonant violence produces an affective regime that allows for the creation of patterns and the perform ance of actions that reinforce t hose patterns. On a more positive note, however, when individuals become aware of the power of such affective practices to create these patterns, they can use affective practices to reverse the effects of resonant violence—to transduce it. Whereas some co-embodied practices (like the Nazi salute) lead to the proliferation and amplification of resonant violence, other co-embodied practices can positively transform resonant violence, creating new “affective ruts” that lead away from practices that exclude and persecute certain groups. Such acts transduce resonant violence: they rework the way affect resonates across bodies. Through co-embodied practices, social actors can produce new affect that c ounters the damaging affective force of resonant vio lence. Out of these practices can emerge not only new, positive affect, but also new forms of agency and power. The remainder of the book turns to focus on some of these practices.
C hapte r 2
Building Memory p r ac t ic e s of m e mor i a l i z at ion i n p o s t-h ol oc au s t be r l i n Former French minister of culture Jack Lang once remarked, “Paris is always Paris and Berlin is never Berlin.” To walk through the city center of Berlin is to witness a mode of historical presence different from many other European capitals. Unlike Rome or Paris, where the stories of centuries past loom large in every building, Berlin’s cityscape tells an ongoing story of becoming. Memory scholar Andreas Huyssen writes, “Berlin is a city text frantically being written and rewritten.” 1 B ecause much of Berlin was completely destroyed in the bombings of World War II, many of the city’s buildings date from the second half of the twentieth c entury, or even later. As you walk down Unter den Linden or Friedrichstrasse, two of Berlin’s most important avenues, you are likely to pass an eighteenth-century Prussian palace, riddled with bullet holes that have been patched with newer stone; a Bauhaus block of a building that was constructed during the communist era; and a shiny, glass modernist dream, built a year or two ago—or still u nder construction. Berlin is an “urban palimpsest,” 2 a city that is at once historic and modern, with layer upon layer of history written upon it. Unlike in many European capitals, however, the past that seems most discernible is not centuries or millennia old; in Berlin, the most visibly evident history is the recent past, dating from the end of World War II u ntil today. And although this recent history is certainly detectable through the proliferation of contemporary architecture, it is especially evident in the abundance of memorials across the cityscape. Huyssen writes, “Berlin as text remains first and foremost historical text, marked as much, if not more, by absences as by the visible presence of its past.” 3 Some of the most present absences in Berlin are the voids that were created by the death and destruction of World War II, most especially through the National Socialist project to annihilate European Jewry, as well as many other social groups, including the Roma-Sinti, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, and the unemployed (or so-called asocials). To visibilize these absences, Berlin has become a city filled with memorials. Memory
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scholar Jennifer Jordan writes, “Remembering can, and does, leave its marks on the skin of the city.” 4 A stroll through any neighborhood of Berlin proves Jordan correct, as it is difficult to walk more than a few blocks without passing a memorial. Some of them are obvious. Some of them are almost invisible. But all respond to a need to acknowledge the resonating impacts of past vio lence by granting them physical space in the present. The memory landscape, or memoryscape, of a place offers crucial insights into a given society and how it relates to its own past. In their study on memory practices in Berlin and Buenos Aires, Peter Birle et al. write that memory projects “reveal that the inscriptions of collective memory in the urban landscape are always the product—a nd at the same time the testimony—of the state of the debates and of the public confrontation with the past in the moment of their construction, just as they are the product of the power relations between the diverse social actors involved.” 5 Thus, the memorials that fill an urban landscape do not only commemorate a past event; they tell a story of how the society related to the event at the moment of its design and construction. In a city like Berlin, which features dozens, if not hundreds, of memorials related to the same event—the Nazi project of destroying various social groups, especially Jews—t he diversity of t hese memorials tells the story of how Germany’s relationship to its own genocidal past has evolved over time. Moreover, given that worldwide practices of memorializing past vio lence have been inevitably shaped by German Holocaust memory practices, by taking a walk through the memoryscape of Berlin, one can see not only one society’s changing relationship to its past, but also the story of how global memory and memorialization practices have changed since the end of World War II. French scholar Pierre Nora has famously written about the contemporary emergence of lieux de mémoire, or places of memory, as a response to the disappearance of milieux de mémoire, or environments of memory.6 According to Nora, active processes of memory, which keep the past alive in the present through embodied practice and affective identification, have been engulfed by the tides of history, which Nora portrays as the institutionalization and stagnation of memory. Nora portrays history as seeking to relativize and mobilize the past toward specific ends, destroying personal memory in the process. If it were not for the politic al project of history and its encroachment into all aspects of life, the embodied nature of memory would be more acknowledged and acknowledgeable. Nora writes, “Each gesture, down to the most everyday, would be experienced as the ritual repetition of a timeless practice in a primordial identification of act and meaning.” 7 Instead, history works to annihilate these milieux de mémoire so they do not interfere with historical prog ress. It may be that, in the historical moment and cultural context in which Nora wrote t hese ideas (1980’s France), he was right. Indeed, even Nora is emphatic in highlighting the cultural specificity of his argument, although this has not
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stopped almost every memory scholar (including this one) from referencing his work in their analyses of other cultural contexts. A comprehensive look at the memorial landscape of Berlin, however, is enough to show that the way p eople relate to the past is constantly evolving, shaped by each subsequent generation as it has sought ways to come to terms with Germany’s past and with the crimes of its ancestors. It is therefore difficult to speak of memorial practice in g rand, universal terms, especially over the period since the Holocaust, an event that has inarguably revolutionized notions of public memory and practices of memorialization. Perhaps Berlin and its bevy of memorials can demonstrate that lieux de mémoire and milieux de mémoire are not necessarily mutually exclusive concepts. If places of memory and environments of memory can both exist at once, then the entity that connects these two concepts is the body, for it is the body that exists within, experiences, shapes, and constitutes these spaces. Perhaps the inconsistencies of Nora’s argument, then, can be addressed through a shift in focus away from the sites of memory themselves toward the body existing within these environments. This chapter w ill take the form of a self-g uided walking tour through Berlin, with stops along the way to examine a handful of memorials that reference the same historical period of the events of World War II and the Holocaust. Walking tours are a form of embodied engagement with physical space that is most often associated with tourists. As they follow a guide or a predesigned route, visitors read or hear stories about a series of sites that are connected through the embodied journey of the walker. By framing this chapter as a walking tour, rather than as a sequence of analyses of the selected memorials and monuments, I use a perform ance studies lens to foreground the body of the visitor, which is all too often erased in descriptions of memory spaces. In one of the principal texts in the field of perform ance studies, Diana Taylor distinguishes between the archive and the repertoire as the two primary modes of knowledge transmission.8 The archive encompasses the written word, documents, photog raphs, and all that can be captured and stored in physical form. The repertoire, on the other hand, refers to embodied forms of knowledge transmission, including oral history, theater, dance, ritual, and all the other ways knowledge can be passed among h umans through the body. Although monuments may traditionally be viewed as part of the archive— physical structures that literally concretize memory, representing it in physical form—t his chapter demonstrates how the line between the archive and repertoire often blurs. In the end, memory spaces are designed to be inhabited by bodies, as the transmission of memory is dependent on the dialogue between the memorial space and the individuals who visit it. Spaces of memory are only fully themselves when there are people within them, given that it is never these spaces but the p eople engaging with them who remember. This chapter explores how an archive of memory spaces in Berlin activates the bodies of visitors to build in them a new repertoire of memory practices.
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This chapter itself plays off this tension between the archive and the repertoire through the form it takes. As a walking tour, this chapter depicts what Taylor calls the peripatetic method.9 Knowledge is produced and transferred not only through reading or lecture; it comes from “walking and talking” with others.10 It is my hope that readers w ill not only read this tour in the archive that is this book but consider enacting it themselves. Even if they do not, the frame of the walking tour both encourages readers to position themselves within t hese spaces physically and reminds them that t hese spaces do not exist in isolation. They are all parts of the same cityscape—a ll quite close to each other, in fact. As such, they are constantly speaking to each other, just as they speak to the p eople who pass by them. By visiting the following memory spaces, each of which was created in a different period a fter WWII, this chapter w ill demonstrate a marked shift in practices of memorialization from the mid-t wentieth century u ntil today—a shift characterized by an increasing distrust of traditional monumentality and permanence, a move away from literal representat ion toward abstraction, and an amplified focus on the subjective, emotional, and embodied experience of the individual visitor. This chapter understands memorial spaces as more than a text to be read; they are the result of a co-embodied practice through which the needs and desires of vario us stakeholders come together in the construction of a physical space. Furthermore, not only are the design and construction of memorial spaces co-embodied, but so too are those practices that occur within the spaces once they are complete—t he practices whereby visitors engage with the site, the past, and each other. I refer to this full range of phenomena as co-embodied practices of memorialization. As practices of memorialization have shifted, so too have the sorts of affective displays and experiences that are deemed permissible and appropriate for the visitor. This increased focus on the visitor’s emotional life and the facilitation of embodied practice to engage with the past highlight an increasing recognition that the resonant violence of genocide is an affective force felt within and through the body. Through creating spaces that both represent and inform about the past, and recall it affectively in the present, new memorial spaces seek to transform the present effects of resonant violence into a force that can be experienced and productively manipulated by and for the contemporary subject, contributing to the formation of new modes of agency through which the subject can not only encounter resonant violence but also potentially transform it. Rather than detailing the memorials themselves, the true aim of this walking tour is to frame them as gestures toward facilitating shared, embodied remembrance practices that respond to resonant violence. As w ill become clear, however, these memorials—a lthough at times both affective and effective—focus largely on individual experience, rather than opening space for the kinds of collective action needed to meaningfully transduce resonant violence.
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2.1. Map of Berlin Memory Walking Tour. Google
Soviet War M e mori al This tour of the memory landscape of Berlin begins at the heart of the city, at one of its most recognizable monuments—the Brandenburg Gate (Point A on the map). This eighteenth-century, neoclassical landmark sits at the beginning of Unter Den L inden, one of Berlin’s most famous boulevards. B ehind the gate is the Tiergarten, the city’s largest park, and just to the right of that is the Reichstag, home of the German Bundestag, the parliament of Germany. Although the gate was commissioned by Frederick Wilhelm II of Prussia as a sign of peace and prosperity, it has been the site of much contention, particularly a fter the Second World War, when Berlin, like Germany itself, was divided into two. The greatest symbol of this division, the Berlin Wall, passed just in front of the Brandenburg Gate. It was from this spot that Ronald Reagan made his famous “Tear Down This Wall” speech in 1987, and thousands of Germans gathered here to dismantle that wall on November 9, 1989. For many, particularly tourists, the Brandenburg Gate represents the center of Berlin. In the 1990s, when the German government moved back to Berlin from Bonn, the Bundestag developed a plan to build up this central government district, much of which was quite desolate a fter the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. It is within this context that many of the monuments and memorials to World War II and the crimes of the Holocaust came to be located in this area around the Brandenburg Gate. The first memorial on this walk through Berlin’s memorial landscape predates all this recent history, however, and is located only
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2.2. The Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten. Photo by the author
350 meters away, if you walk directly down Straße des 17. Juni into the Tiergarten. Stop between the two armored tanks at the entrance to the Soviet War Memorial (Point B). The Soviet War Memorial, dedicated in late 1945, is instantly recognizable as a war memorial. Two massive T-34 tanks flank the entrance to the memorial, their guns defending the monumental structure b ehind them. As visitors approach, they pass two Red Army ML-20 152-mm gun-howitzer artillery pieces, which stand guard beside the memorial as well. Behind the artillery guns stands an arcade of columns constructed of gray stone, with a taller pillar at its center. On top of the central pillar, the statue of a Soviet soldier, many times larger than life-sized, presides over the structure and the people below. The soldier, dressed in a long army coat, a helmet adorned with a five-pointed star, and a r ifle complete with bayonet at his back, looks down at the ground below. The pillar upon which the soldier stands features an inscription in golden Cyrillic letters, the translation of which reads, “Eternal glory to heroes who fell in b attle with the German fascist invaders for the freedom and inde pendence of the Soviet Union.” The pillars of this monument contain the remains of some 2,500 Soviet soldiers who died in the 1945 Battle of Berlin. The Soviet War Memorial is an ideal starting point for exploring how practices of memorialization have changed since the end of World War II. Obviously, this monument is not a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust or any of the other mass atrocities perpetrated against civilian victim groups during this period. Rather, it is representative of what most memorials up to
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the time of its construction were created to commemorate: soldiers who died during a war. U ntil the second half of the twentieth c entury, most monuments of collective memorialization—those created to remember a group of people who died rather than, perhaps, a laudable individual—were related to war and the death of soldiers. This memorialization of t hose who died in wars took place in two ways: the commemoration of battlefield sites and the construction of war memorials.11 Sociologist and architecture scholar James M. Mayo defines a war memorial as “a social and physical arrangement of space and artifacts to keep alive the memories of persons who participated in a war sponsored by their country.” 12 While this definition may appear at first glance to be quite obvious, it highlights several different aspects of war memorials that set the stage for how post– World War II memorialization separated itself from more traditional memorialization practices. First, Mayo’s definition underscores that memorials in general are built to alter social, as well as physical, space. In his analysis of the war memorial as object, German historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that the war memorial serves two functions through its commemoration: while it foremost works to identify the dead as dead and no longer with us, it also represents them as “heroes, victims, martyrs, victors . . . vanquished.” 13 Through this process of representation, the living visitors are presented with iconic images with which they should identify; thus, t hese war memorials also “lay claim to lost life to make survival meaningful,” contributing to the formation of a national identity, which in turn promotes the consolidation of the nation- state as an entity worthy of fighting and d ying for.14 Second, Mayo’s definition indicates that the memorial is intended to honor those “who participated in a war.” The active verb “to participate” is essential to the war memorial, as it highlights the fact that those honored through the memorial either fought willingly for the cause of the war or, in the case of those who w ere conscripted into serv ice, fought as citizens of a country that had among its civic duties the responsibility to serve in the armed forces if so called upon by the state. This notion of commemorating those “who participated” is specific to the war memorial, marking a clear divide with memorials to the victims of genocide, which commemorate the victims of an atrocity they would have never participated in actively and willingly. Fin ally, Mayo ends his definition by clarifying that these soldiers died while serving in a war “sponsored by their country,” stressing the intense and undeniable connection between the war memorial itself and the nation-state. Traditionally, war memorials are never only about memorializing those who died in a war; they are also about justifying the war that brought about the deaths, as well as legitimizing the state that went to war.15 War memorials relate a pol itical narrative and construct a national identity that firmly places the citizen-subject within the social realm of the state, and the Tiergarten Soviet War Memorial is no exception to this rule. The towering monumentality of the
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structure echoes the monumentality of the state itself. What is especially compelling about the Soviet War Memorial is that it rests, of course, outside of the country whose soldiers it honors. It was constructed in a foreign land, away from the families of the soldiers entombed and commemorated here. The audience for this narrative was not the Soviets themselves, but the defeated Germans. Moreover, the Soviet War Memorial does not even stand in the part of Berlin that was occupied by the Soviet Union when Berlin was divided into the four Allied-occupied zones after World War II; rather, it sits in the British- occupied section of the city. Its audience, therefore, were not only the Berliners who had access to the Tiergarten, but also the Western-occupying powers—a fact that would take on particu lar significance in the years of the Cold War. Even when the city of Berlin was divided by its famous wall for decades, the Soviets still sent soldiers every day to stand guard over this war memorial in the West; honoring the Soviet state through this war memorial became an essential element of representing the Soviet Union to the world during the Cold War. Although the Soviet War Memorial is a textbook example of war memorials as they have been designed for centuries, practices of war memorialization began to change in the first half the twentieth century. Most scholars place this change as occurring a fter World War I. Although war memorials have existed for millennia (see the obelisks of ancient Egypt and the triumphal arches of ancient Rome), most earlier war memorials have focused on celebrating the triumph of war rather than the suffering it brought.16 The devastation of World War I, however, changed things immensely, as the level of anguish experienced by Europe during this conflict was so counterfactual to the modern ideals of European “civilization.” Because of this, war memorials a fter World War I began to highlight the suffering of soldiers rather than the triumph of war. Memorials began to portray the figure of the soldier as a disheartened, “pathetic hero.” 17 This shift in war memorialization occurred in most of the countries that participated in World War I; Germany and the Soviet Union, however, would come to rebuke this “defeatist” form of memorialization,18 and the Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten is an example of their resist ance to that mode of memorialization. The Tiergarten Memorial was dedicated on November 11, 1945, only six months a fter the end of the B attle of Berlin. Photog raphs at the memorial site show that the Soviet War Memorial was constructed amidst a field of ruins. When it was dedicated, it was the only structure within its vicinity—i ncluding the decimated Reichstag close behind it—that was not riddled with bullet holes or demolished by bombs. The speed with which the Soviets constructed this monument to honor the 2,500 Red Army soldiers who died in the b attle illuminates the other message that this massive stone structure tells—a story of victory and a reminder to the world that it was the Soviets who liberated Eastern Europe and Germany itself from the tyrannical grasp of Nazism. The soldier positioned atop the monument is anything but disheartened or pathetic;
2.3. The soldier atop the Soviet War Memorial, with his hand reaching downward in a gesture of mourning. Photo by the author
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he stands tall and stern, one hand on his b elt, the other reaching downward, in an iconographical sign of mourning for the fallen. This soldier is the traditional embodiment of power. While he may not be triumphant, that triumphalism is replaced by a more import ant quality—t hat of being in command. The Soviet War Memorial in Berlin is as much about portraying the Soviet Union as a powerful, commanding force as it is about honoring the 2,500 soldiers whose remains are contained within the monument itself. This fact is highlighted not only by the military artillery surrounding the memorial, but also by the fact that the stones used to construct the memorial were taken from Hitler’s chancellery.19 The Soviets literally used the ruins of the German state to build a monument to their own triumph over it. All t hese symbolic gestures point to the most impor t ant distinction between this Soviet War Memorial and the forthcoming memorials on this walking tour: the relationship between the memorial and its audience. War memorials like this one convey a specific metanarrative that focuses on consolidating state power and placing the audience as citizen-subjects to that power. This monument and most other war memorials are figurative, utilizing realistic images of soldiers, as well as recognizable tropes of monumental architecture, to convey a clear, indisputable message. Moreover, this memorial structure is not one with which visitors can directly engage; it is not an interactive space. Visitors are permitted only to stand before the monumental structure that towers above them and the weapons of war that surround them. The monument does not leave open room for interpretation. Both its iconography and its literal inscription tell the viewer exactly what to think and feel regarding the structure. “Eternal glory to heroes who fell in battle with the German fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union.” This memorial inscription references three identity groups and tells the viewer exactly how to relate to each group. First, there are the war heroes, who are to be given eternal glory. Second, there are the German fascist invaders, the evil enemy who caused the deaths memorialized here. The use of the term “invaders” is especially interesting, again, because this monument is not constructed on territory invaded by the Germans, but in the German capital. Consequently, this phrasing evokes not only the German invasion of the rest of Europe, but also the invasion of fascism within Germany itself—a theme that Soviet forces in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) used time and again during the Cold War. Fin ally, t here is the Soviet Union, the hero state, which is described in the inscription as free and independent. The problematic nature of t hese terms does not need to be stated h ere, of course; rather, this represents the first of many Soviet monuments in Berlin to use such language to celebrate the Soviet cause in Eastern Europe. The inscription itself, however, is ultimately secondary to the iconic visuality of the memorial, the message of which is unmistakable. War memorials
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like this one are anything but abstract. Their goal is to convey a meaning that is universally understood by all viewers. Just as visitors have no option to interact with the memorial in any way other than by looking at it, there is little or no room for personal, subjective interpretation of the memorial. Its monumentality intends to evoke an affective response of awe, for both the soldiers whose lives were lost and the state for whom those lives were sacrificed. The universality of interpretation exemplified by the Soviet War Memorial and the singularity of emotional responses it seeks to evoke in viewers are perhaps the two elements that set it distinctly apart from the practices of memorialization that w ill follow it, both historically and, more immediately, on this tour. As we continue this walk through Berlin’s memorial landscape, and as we end the tour with Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, dedicated in 2005, the shift that has occurred between the construction of this first memorial and the construction of the final one described in this chapter w ill become blatantly clear. In fact, the differences between the Soviet War Memorial and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe reflect a more widely recognized paradigmatic shift beginning just a fter the end of the Second World War—the shift from modernity into postmodernity. For the purposes of this chapter, I evoke this shift from modernity to postmodernity in the same manner it has been defined by such theorists of the postmodern as Zygmunt Bauman, Alain Touraine, Ulrich Beck, and Jean-François Lyotard.20 That is, the move from modernity to postmodernity is marked by an abandonment of the notion of universality for what Peter V. Zima has called a “solidarity with the particu lar.” 21 Whereas in modernity the notion of a universal truth still held sway, “the postmodern condition,” to use Lyotard’s famed phrase, is characterized by a g reat pluralism of thought and belief, increased recognition of subjective experience, and what Lyotard has called an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” 22 It is this incredulity—t his need to find subjective truth through individual experience—t hat pertains to the questions raised in this chapter. Through the metanarrative it relates and the universality of emotion it seeks to evoke, the Soviet War Memorial marks a prime example of modern practices of memorialization. The mass death represented by this space was the opposite of unthinkable; rather, it marks the passing of noble young soldiers fighting for their country, willingly sacrificing their lives for an ideal. The memorial asks visitors to remember t hose who have fallen; the predominant emotions experienced center around gratitude and honor. The memorials in the remainder of this chapter, however, deal with an altogether different topic. The lives that w ere lost through the Holocaust and the other mass atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime are not nearly as “thinkable.” If the war memorial represents a prime example of citizens in sync with the state for which they fight, the genocide memorial is a spatial recognition of the state failing its citizenry. Rather than sacrificing their lives for an
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ideal, the Jews of Germany and the remainder of Europe were murdered because of Nazi ideology. T hese were not young soldiers, but people of every age being herded like cattle into train cars and gas chambers. The emotions that these new memorial spaces evoke are not about gratitude or even sympathy; it is, rather, an empathetic despair that moves the visitor to a visceral identification with the victim. These new practices of memorialization that have emerged to commemorate the Holocaust are examples of postmodern practices of memorialization. What exactly are the changes that have occurred over this sixty-year period that separates the construction of the Soviet War Memorial from the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial? How exactly do these postmodern sites perform? And what do they actually do within and for a society? The remainder of this walking tour w ill address these questions. He r b e rt Baum M e mori al Stone Walk back down Straße des 17. Juni toward the Brandenburg Gate. Pass under the gate and proceed down Unter Den Liden, the most famous boulevard of Berlin. As you walk, you w ill pass the newly constructed American embassy to your right, then, a few hundred meters farther, the Russian embassy, also to your right. Keep walking until you meet the River Spree, where you w ill cross over the Schlossbrücke onto Museuminsel. Directly ahead of you stands the majestic Berliner Dom church. Walk toward it until you find the large memorial stone in front of the church. This is the Herbert Baum Gedenkstein (Point C). The Herbert Baum Memorial Stone is characteristic of most memorials in former East Berlin constructed during communism by the GDR. It is a large, gray, stone cube measuring roughly one-and-a-h alf meters tall, wide, and deep. Each of its four sides features an inscription written in the same font that is featured on most communist-era memorials. On two sides it reads, “Unforgotten the courageous deeds and the steadfastness of the anti-f ascist resist ance group led by the young Communist Herbert Baum.” On the other two sides it reads, “Bound in friendship to the Soviet Union forever,” though the latter inscription is now covered by Plexiglas informational placards, to which we w ill return. The stone sits on Museum Island, at the corner of the Lustgarten, the large green square flanked by the Berliner Dom (Berlin’s cathedral church) to one side and the Altes Museum on another. It was here in May 1942 that the National Socialist party held an anti-communist, antisemitic exhibition org a nized by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. A resistance group led by a young Jewish leftist named Herbert Baum org an ized an arson attack on the exhibition, partially destroying it. Days a fter the attack, the Nazis rounded up around thirty of the resist ance fighters and executed them. The Herbert Baum Memorial Stone was commissioned and placed at the site of their act of resis tance by the city government of East Berlin in 1981.
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2.4. The Herbert Baum Memorial Stone. Photo by the author
The Herbert Baum Memorial Stone is a relatively unimportant and unnoticeable piece in the vast memorial landscape of Berlin, but it does tell an important story about the transformation of memorialization practices since the end of WWII and the Holocaust. The memorial stone is neither a war memorial nor a memorial to the Holocaust itself, but rather a monument to an act of resist ance against Nazism. It shares numerous characteristics with other communist-era Holocaust monuments across the former GDR, all of which demonstrate how the commemoration of Nazi human rights abuses by the communist state, which was perpetrating its own assortment of human rights abuses, served a deeply pol itical purpose in upholding and honoring the values of the communist regime. During the Cold War period, communist East Germany was much quicker to memorialize the Holocaust than its neighbors on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Fewer than ten years a fter the end of WWII, the GDR was already transforming former concentration camps like Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück into memory sites honoring those who died there. The way the GDR told the story of those deaths, however, was historically inaccurate and served mostly to create a narrative that undergirded the communist state. First, the victims of the Nazi crimes w ere never depicted as Jewish u ntil the late 1980s; rather, all victims of Nazism were described as “anti- f ascist fighters”—brave rebels living in a fascist state, fighting for the advent of communism. This language of anti-fascism became the official narrative of the GDR.23 The representational choice on the memorial stone, then, not only
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demonstrates the weaving of a political narrative that portrays communism as a long-awaited and fought-for political system, but also belies a deep antisemitism in the Soviet state and the political system it exported. This common practice is echoed in the Herbert Baum Memorial Stone; while its inscription lauds the “courageous deeds” of the “young Communist Herbert Baum” and his “anti-fascist resistance group,” nowhere on the original stone is it mentioned that Baum was Jewish. In reality, his murder fits within the genocidal project, rather than only within a framework of anti-Nazi resist ance. Second, the other inscription on the stone clearly demonstrates the politi cal message behind the memorial: “Bound in friendship to the Soviet Union forever.” This memorial stone is as much a testament to an act of resistance as it is a reminder of the “deep ties” between the GDR and the Soviet Union. Through memorializing the resistance of Herbert Baum and his group, the GDR was contributing to the construction of a historical narrative that placed Germany as already actively fighting for Soviet communism before World War II began. The stone naturalized the relationship between the GDR and the Soviet Union by intruding on everyday public space with a reminder of this connection. It also undergirded the GDR’s official assertion that they w ere the embodiment of the anti-fascist state, while West Germany represented the crucible of Nazi-era fascism. James E. Young writes that successful monuments “suggest themselves as indigenous, even geological outcroppings in a national landscape.” 24 The stone evokes this natural indigeneity both in its inscription and by the rough, boulder-like appearance of the stone: it truly does resemble a “geological outcropping” in the urban landscape of Berlin. There is more to the Herbert Baum Memorial Stone, however. Since it was updated in 2001, this memorial tells an import ant story about the changes in memorial practice since it was first constructed in 1981. The original Herbert Baum Memorial Stone was coded, making it difficult, if not impossible, for passersby to understand what the stone was memorializing. While viewers could see the name of Herbert Baum and his association with anti-f ascist resis tance, it was unclear what his “courageous deeds” were, and the fact that he was killed for performing those deeds was completely absent. The only clear message of the stone was its connection to communism through its mention of the Soviet Union. Jordan writes, “The stone does serve as a reminder of resis tance that took place in the m iddle of the city, but it does not necessarily evoke either the initial events—the efforts by young Jewish men and women to set this anti-Soviet propaganda exhibition on fire—nor the resulting murders.” 25 In response to this reality, Gerhard Zadek, a surviving member of the Herbert Baum resistance group, petitioned the post-communist city government to update the stone, adding information to it that would more successfully describe and contextualize it. In Zadek’s words, he wanted “to make transparent the different historical dimensions of the memorial stone on the
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Lustgarten.” 26 The result of this update are two large sheets of Plexiglas placed over two sides of the stone—the sides that declared eternal friendship to the Soviet Union. One of the sheets of Plexiglas lists the names of thirty-four people in the group, while the other describes the history not only of the Herbert Baum group but also of the memorial itself, written in German, Eng lish, French, and Russian (the local language and the languages of the post-W WII occupying powers). This gesture to revitalize an old memorial tells an essential piece in the story about how memorialization practices are evolving. The main impulse for altering the memorial is the lack of clarity over the event it commemorates. This need for contextualization already sets this memorial apart from more traditional, modern memorials, like the Soviet War Memorial described in the previous section. Traditionally, memorials like the Herbert Baum Memorial Stone and the Soviet War Memorial have not been interested in educating viewers about a specific event, but rather in promoting a certain political relationality between the viewer and the state that constructed the memorial. The placement of the Plexiglas plaques over two sides of the memorial at once informs the visitor and obscures the overtly political message of the memorial, hiding references to the Soviet Union. Consequently, the designers of this modification attempt to honor the initial act of Herbert Baum and his group, while trying to separate it from the pol itical motivations of the East Berlin city government when they constructed the memorial in 1981. The plaque that explains the memorial contains six short paragraphs of text. The first three describe who Herbert Baum and his group were, what they w ere protesting, and how they w ere captured and executed by the Nazis. The remaining three paragraphs tell a different story than the original builders of the memorial ever intended. In the fourth paragraph, the plaque explains how, in the weeks a fter the arson attack, Nazis rounded up five hundred Jews at random and punished them as a reprisal for the actions of the group. This statement clarifies that Baum was not merely an anti-f ascist fighter; it serves to tie the actions of Herbert Baum directly to the Jewish community and the antisemitism of the Nazis—a fact that the original memorial conceals. In a strange twist, however, this new text presents a new erasure. While the original stone fails to acknowledge the Jewish dimension of this event, the new plaque fails to acknowledge the fact that Baum and his cohort w ere, in fact, communists, calling them instead “members of antifascist resistance groups.” Whereas for the GDR the term “anti-fascist fighter” was used to replace a reference to Jews, the updated memorial plaque uses the same language to mask connections to communism, demonstrating that, when it comes to memorials, intentional forgetfulness can often be a tool used to convey the message deemed necessary and proper for the time and for the state regime overseeing the monument’s construction.
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The remaining two paragraphs of the plaque read as follows: The present memorial, designed by the sculptor Jürgen Raue, was commissioned by the city council of East Berlin in 1981 without providing historical information on the act of resist ance that happened here. This memorial thus documents the brave act of resist ance in 1942, the conception of history in 1981, and our continuous remembrance of resis tance to the Nazis. With these new inscriptions, the memorial acknowledges its own transformation. No longer is the Herbert Baum Memorial Stone only a memorial to the actions of the Herbert Baum resist ance group; it is now also a memorial to the memorialization practices of the GDR. And it does not end t here: it is also a memorial to the continuing efforts of the German State to remember and memorialize the past. Taken to the extreme, these memorial plaques could potentially require new memorial plaques on them that explain the efforts of Zadek to alter the memorial, the public discussions that emerged around his proposal, and the artist or designer who came up with the idea of placing the Plexiglas plaques. And so on. And so on. While the Herbert Baum Memorial Stone exemplifies several important aspects of the evolution of memorial practice in the postmodern era, it highlights one important change in particu lar. Memorials have grown to have an increasing degree of self-reflexivity. Designers of memorials have more and more come to acknowledge their own presence in memory processes, which in turn encourages viewers to become more aware of their own subjective experience of the memorial. Viewers are no longer only asked to accept a memorial at face value but are sometimes offered stories of the social context that led to the construction of the memorial as part of the memorial text. This said, viewers’ experiences of this particu lar memorial remain limited. The memorial stone does not engage the viewer beyond providing another monument to look upon. Even though the memorial stone clearly demonstrates an aspect of how resonant violence functions through its recognition of the manipulation of historical narratives for political ends, it provides a limited outlet for the viewer to engage with the resonant violence it highlights. The viewer can read the memorial and ponder its message, but it remains unclear how and if this memorial is intended to alter the viewer’s beh avior or worldview in any meaningful way. National M e mori al to the Vi c ti m s of War and Ty ranny From the Herbert Baum Memorial Stone, turn around and walk back toward the Brandenburg Gate, crossing the bridge that brought you onto Museuminsel. Immediately, you w ill pass the pink German History Museum to your right. If you look at its exterior walls, you w ill notice patched bullet holes and other damage to the façade—a
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2.5. Exterior of the Neue Wache, which h ouses the National Memorial of the German Republic to the Victims of War and Tyranny. Photo by the author
relic of the B attle of Berlin in WWII. Directly after this museum, walk to the right toward the small, neoclassical building with the six columns. This is the Neue Wache, the New Guardhouse (Point D). Neither of the two memorials that we have visited thus far in this walking tour have dealt explicitly with the mass human rights violations or genocidal murder that has come to be known as the Holocaust. This fact is largely reflective of the historical reality of Holocaust memorialization in Berlin; although East Germany began transforming former concentration camps into memorial spaces in the 1950s, and although West Germany followed suit in the 1960s and ’70s, Berlin featured no national memorial to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust per se u ntil a fter reunification, when the capital was relocated to Berlin from Bonn. The first successful attempt to create a federal monument to the victims of this period can be seen at this site, in the Neue Wache. This neoclassical structure, originally constructed in the nineteenth century, was built as a guardhouse for the king of Prussia, but today it is officially recognized as the National Memorial of the German Republic to the Victims of War and Tyranny. The building resembles an ancient Greek t emple, with its portico surrounded by a Doric colonnade. The triangular frontispiece of the building features a bas relief of a winged victory designed by the original architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The structure is flanked by statues of Prussian generals Scharnhorst and Bülow. Visitors access the memorial space
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2.6. Interior of the Neue Wache, with an oculus directly above the sculpture by Käthe Kollwitz. Photo by the author
by walking through the portico and entering through one of three doorways into the structure’s inner sanctum. The walls of the mostly empty space are covered with smooth, gray blocks of stone. The floor is covered by smaller, polished river rocks, which appear wet when touched by light. Above, the ceiling features a large, circular oculus at its center that allows a circle of sunlight to track across the room as the day progresses. When it rains, a pillar of rainwater showers the memorial’s central figure, which sits directly below the oculus. It is a black, stone sculpture, a bit larger than life-sized, featuring a hooded woman cradling the dead body of an adult man. An inscription on the floor in front of the statue reads: “DEN OPFERN VON KRIEG UND GEWALTHERRSCHAFT,” or “To the Victims of War and Tyranny.” The memorial that exists in the Neue Wache today was dedicated on November 14, 1993, on the German P eople’s Day of Mourning. This was not the first time this building had been used as a memorial space, however. In fact, the Neue Wache has existed as a memorial space almost continuously since 1929, when it was dedicated as a memorial to the fallen soldiers of World War I. Subsequently, it was redesigned as a WWI memorial in 1934, then as a site for honoring military heroes u nder the Nazi regime, and then as a memorial to the victims of fascism u nder the GDR.27 The initiative to redesign the memorial yet again after reunification was championed by then chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was responding largely to the fact that foreign dignitaries
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had no place to honor formally the fallen soldiers of the world wars, as is customary in official state visits. 28 In petitioning for the memorial, Kohl cited the fact that t here w ere fewer and fewer Germans who had lived through the world wars, and so they needed to be memorialized so that they would not be forgotten.29 T hese reasons for constructing the memorial, as well as the history of the Neue Wache itself, position the Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny as a fascinating link in the evolution from traditional, modern forms of memorialization like the war memorial to the contemporary, postmodern memorials that w ill be described later. For one, the Neue Wache falls somewhere between a war memorial and a memorial to the victims of atrocities in that it memorializes both soldiers and civilians in a single site. Given the history of the Neue Wache itself—a former guardhouse where soldiers were stationed, then a memorial to the soldiers of WWI—the fact that the current memorial honors soldiers of both world wars seems aligned with the history of the site. What is different (and problematic) about this memorial, however, is that it commemorates these soldiers alongside the victims of genocide and human rights abuses of the Nazi and communist regimes. This commemorative practice is decidedly postmodern in two impor ntil after World War II, it is rare, though not without examtant ways. First, u ple, that the civilian victims of war crimes or genocide were memorialized in such a large-scale fashion. B ecause memorials w ere usually constructed by states until that point in history, and because traditional memorials, as was argued earlier in this chapter, normally present a narrative that legitimizes the state that constructs it, it was not until after World War II and, specifically, the Holocaust, that states began constructing memorials to the victims of their own formerly genocidal policies. While the Neue Wache Memorial is not exactly a full mea culpa of the state to its victims, it is the first step in a larger process wherein this form of memorialization has become normalized and even expected. Second, and connected to the first point, this monument moves toward postmodern forms of memorialization in the affective response it evokes in visitors. Whereas the war memorial stirs emotions of respect and gratitude toward fallen soldiers, conferring the stately category of “honor” to the commemorated, postmodern memorials are decidedly less admiring. Instead, postmodern memorials to events like the Holocaust begin a move toward a different form of affect generation, creating an affective identification between the viewer and the victim. Rather than portraying the commemorated individuals or groups as valiant citizens who sacrificed for the good of the state, the Neue Wache is the first on this tour that allows for other sorts of emotions like sadness, mourning, and empathy for the victim. This move toward affective identification with the victim is directly tied to a recognition of resonant violence, and it w ill be discussed more in the coming steps of the tour. The stark interior of the Neue Wache is strikingly different from the powerful monumentality of the Soviet War Memorial. The dark colors and
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limited light create a somber atmosphere, while the oculus and the single sculpture, designed by German artist Käthe Kollwitz and entitled Mother with Her Dead Son, grant a sense of sanctity to the space. The figures in the Kollwitz sculpture are only slightly larger than life-sized, creating a sense of identifiability between the visitor and the memorial. Whereas the statue of the soldier in the Soviet War Memorial is many times larger than life-sized and towers above the visitor, the human images in Kollwitz’s work sit at ground level, where visitors are even able to touch them. All t hese elements contribute to a space that allows for subjective identification with the memorial. There is no inscription telling the viewer how to feel; only the stark words “To the Victims of War and Tyranny” are e tched below the statue. Furthermore, the visitor may choose w hether to view the memorial from within the doorway or to venture into the stone interior, toward the sculpture or any other spot in the otherw ise empty chamber. It is up to individual visitors to determine how they w ill interact with the space. In my personal encounters with the memorial, the space has always evoked emotions of mournful sadness or pity. For this reason, I was surprised when I read that Chancellor Kohl, when he selected Kollwitz’s statue for the memorial, did so because, for him, it was quite hopeful, embodying a sense of “indestructible humanity.” 30 Kohl’s interpretation of the piece might be connected to its obvious religious symbolism—a point to which I w ill return. The fact that the memorial space can be interpreted in two completely differ ent ways, however, is indicative of another import ant step in the evolution of memorial practices away from the modern war memorial toward the postmodern memorial spaces of today: the potential for differing subjective experiences of the sites. In a 1983 study of how to memorialize another Berlin site, which would eventually become the Topography of Terror—a permanent exhibition of the evolution of Nazism in Germany and its chilling effects— the authors of the document argued that the site should not become “a ‘monument’ in the nineteenth-century tradition.” 31 Echoing some of the critiques already made of modern memorials like the Soviet War Memorial, they write, “Such a monument is thus the result of a selection; it prevents the observer’s own confrontation with the complex historical event. Insofar as the monument narrows one’s perception and dictates the conclusions one draws from it, it is authoritarian.” 32 The authors claim that traditional monuments provide only one possible mode of interpretation of the memorial site. But there is an inherent contradiction in using authoritarian architectural modes to commemorate the victims of authoritarianism. The Neue Wache takes the first steps in responding to that contradiction by opening the field of interpretation to the visitor. Of course, the suggestion that it is ever possible to remove the authorial hand completely from the memorial space is wishful thinking. The notion that a memorial can create a space for “the observer’s own confrontation with the complex historical event,” however, foreshadows the exact path
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that the Neue Wache begins to forge and that w ill be trod even further by the subsequent memorials on this walking tour. For viewers to have their own encounters with the site, and especially for them to be able to identify affectively with the victims, they must know who the victims being commemorated are. In the case of the Neue Wache, the answer to this question is given first by the name of the site—t he Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny—a nd then more specifically through signage at the entrance to the space. On the portico of the memorial, plaques displayed in multiple languages explain the history of the Neue Wache and detail t hose commemorated by this memorial. The dedication reads: THE NEUE WACHE IS THE PLACE WHERE WE COMMEMORATE THE VICTIMS OF WAR AND TYRANNY. WE HONOUR THE MEMORY OF THE PEOPLES WHO SUFFERED THROUGH WAR. WE REMEMBER THE CITIZENS WHO W ERE PERSECUTED AND WHO LOST THEIR LIVES. WE REMEMBER THOSE KILLED IN ACTION IN THE WORLD WARS. WE REMEMBER THE INNOCENT WHO LOST THEIR LIVES AS A RESULT OF WAR IN THEIR HOMELAND, IN CAPTIVITY AND THROUGH EXPULSION. WE REMEMBER THE MILLIONS OF JEWS WHO WERE MURDERED. WE REMEMBER THE SINTI AND ROMA WHO WERE MURDERED. WE REMEMBER ALL THOSE WHO W ERE KILLED BECAUSE OF THEIR ORIGIN, HOMOSEXUALITY, SICKNESS OR INFIRMITY. WE REMEMBER ALL WHO W ERE MURDERED WHOSE RIGHT TO LIFE WAS DENIED. WE REMEMBER THE PEOPLE WHO HAD TO DIE BECAUSE OF THEIR RELIGIOUS OR POLITICAL CONVICTIONS. WE REMEMBER ALL THOSE WHO W ERE VICTIMS OF TYRANNY AND MET THEIR DEATH, THOUGH INNOCENT. WE REMEMBER THE WOMEN AND MEN WHO SACRIFICED THEIR LIVES IN RESISTANCE TO DESPOTIC RULE.
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WE HONOUR ALL WHO PREFERRED TO DIE RATHER THAN ACT AGAINST THEIR CONSCIENCE. WE HONOUR THE MEMORY OF THE WOMEN AND MEN WHO W ERE PERSECUTED AND MURDERED BECAUSE THEY RESISTED TOTALITARIAN DICTATORSHIP A FTER 1945. Every memorial has its sphere of inclusion, meaning that each memorial is constructed to remember a specific and predetermined individual or group. This sphere can range in size. For instance, a tombstone in a cemetery is usually a memorial to a single individual, whereas the Herbert Baum Memorial Stone commemorates the thirty-four individuals now listed on the Plexiglas plaque recently attached to its side, and the Soviet War Memorial at the beginning of this tour commemorates the 2,500 Soviet soldiers who died in the B attle of Berlin. The sphere of inclusion of a given memorial determines not only whom a memorial commemorates, however, but also who the audience for that memorial w ill be. In other words, a memorial’s sphere of inclusion contributes to the power of a memorial to affect its viewers in the present and helps to influence what its effects on t hose people w ill be. The inscription at the entrance to the Neue Wache memorial details the very large sphere of inclusion that the German National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny encompasses. In a single site, the German state has chosen to commemorate a large number of groups: the soldiers of both world wars; civilians who lived through those wars; Jews and Roma-Sinti who suffered and died during the Holocaust, as well as members of other groups victimized by Nazi policies, including homosexuals, the disabled, and groups persecuted for their religious beliefs, like Jehovah’s Witnesses; all “victims of tyranny,” which is a term that is left undefined, though it seems to refer both to Nazism and Stalinism; t hose who died as resist ance fighters; and all victims of the totalitarian regime of the GDR. Not only is the number of individuals commemorated through this single memorial notably large, but so too is the period of time the memorial encompasses. The temporal sphere of inclusion of the Neue Wache Memorial begins in 1914 with the First World War and ends around 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall—a period that comprises almost the w hole of the twentieth century. The exceptionally large sphere of inclusion of the Neue Wache Memorial has been, perhaps, the most controversial element from its institution. From the very beginning, people rallied against the vagueness of a memorial to “victims of war and tyranny.” A fter all, such a phrase could include not only, for instance, the Jews who died completely involuntarily in gas chambers, but also any SS officers who died in the process of killing them, given that many of them would later claim in court cases that they, too, were “victims” of Nazism, forced to perform their jobs and follow orders. In light of the public
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outcry surrounding this notion, Kohl and his cabinet agreed to place the plaques at the entrance to the memorial to specify the groups being commemorated at the Neue Wache, but this concession failed to appease critics. Indeed, hundreds of protestors who opposed Kohl and his memorial filled the streets to rally against the memorial on the day of its dedication; they were held back by eight hundred police officers in full riot gear. Due to the volatility of the event, the dedication lasted less than ten minutes, to avoid violent conflict. 33 For many, the memorial’s sphere of inclusion was still too large. Even with the plaques, the memorial was still openly commemorating victims of the Holocaust alongside soldiers of the Wehrmacht, or German army, which was involved in the death of millions of Jews in the East during the war. This sentiment was amplified by the fact that the previous memorial h oused in the Neue Wache, the GDR’s Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism, included in its foundations the soil from nine battlefields and nine concentration camps, in an effort to honor both the soldiers and the “resist ance fighters” who died in the fight against fascism. When the memorial was renovated by Kohl’s government, the soil from the battlefields and concentration camps was kept in place, in a symbolic gesture that again equates the soldier and the concentration camp victim. 34 Furthermore, the central figure of the memorial, a sculpture of a mother cradling her dead son, has direct references to the Christian iconography of the pietà, or the image of the Virgin Mary cradling her son, Jesus, a fter he was crucified. For obvious reasons, many members of German Jewish society saw this as an inappropriate and insensitive way to memorialize the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.35 The level of conflict generated through this memorial raises the question of how a memorial can be “successful” if the p eople it is meant to honor feel dishonored by it. Stefanie Endlich writes, “Above all, the survivors of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the families of murdered Jews were not ready to cry for their own alongside the people who were laying wreaths in memory of the members of the Wehrmacht who died in the war.” 36 According to both Brian Ladd and Henry W. Pickford, what the Neue Wache is actually trying to do is to create a new, united sense of German identity, one that was desperately needed at the time of the memorial’s construction, after the country had been divided for so many years. Pickford writes, “The confluence of contradictory historiographies often results in symbolic conflict, and such conflict is perhaps nowhere more noticeable than in public memorials that seek to rescript t hese various histories into one story, one mythos.” 37 Following Pickford, it becomes clear that the real conflict in the case of the Neue Wache arises not around commemorating soldiers or in memorializing Jews or Roma-Sinti people, but in the effort to force these conflicting historical realities into a single narrative. The schizophren ia of including these differing groups in one memory (or memorial space) is too
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difficult. For victim groups, especially, sharing the space of memory can feel more like a slight than an honor, since it arguably demonstrates that each group’s pain is not worthy of its own memorialization; it can feel, instead, as though the public only has the energy for one memorial space for all victims. Ladd puts this another way, saying that the biggest problem with the memorial is that it creates an “implied equality” among all victims within the memorial’s sphere of inclusion. 38 For Ladd, too, it is not necessarily the fact that all t hese groups are memorialized, but the fact that they are memorialized together that makes them appear as if they are equal. The soldier who willingly fights for his country on the battlefield and the Jew who is gassed to death in a concentration camp are h ere put on the same level. And it could be argued that the introduction of the sculpture degrades the level of the Jewish victim in this equation even further. A point that is aptly argued by Ladd, however, is that, while this “implied equality” among victim groups does lead to controversy and discomfort, few seemed concerned with the notion of equating German identity with a state of victimhood, which is arguably the single “mythos” conveyed by the memorial that Pickford refers to above. Ladd writes, “Amid the dispute about which victims to honor, the fact that victimhood was the touchstone of identity did not attract much criticism.” 39 The controversy of the memorial’s sphere of inclusion alongside the relative consensus on the adoption of a narrative of victimhood is indicative of some underlying recognition of resonant violence and the way it functions. In establishing this memorial space, the politicians, designers, and broader public were all clearly aware of a need to acknowledge the enduring impacts of the violence Germany had perpetrated and experienced over the past decades. The attendant controversy of determining how to accomplish this goal illustrates exactly how that affective violence is not truly in the past—it continues to shape social identities and relationships. Indeed, for the Jewish community asked to remember their murdered loved ones alongside their killers, it has been experienced as a continuation of the original violence. In many ways, then, what the Neue Wache most clearly represents is not the memory of any one group of victims, but the strugg le for Germany to come to terms with its own history of violence and how that violence continues to resonate. That strugg le is a complicated one. T hose who perpetrated violence during WWII could just as easily have become victims u nder the communist regime. Nazis who ran concentration camps often became prisoners within t hose same camps when the Soviet army liberated them, suffering some of the same human rights abuses that they had perpetrated on others. Acknowledging this does not condone their horrific actions during World War II. It is only to illustrate how complicated memory is—especially when one is trying to consolidate all this complex memory into a single space. Perhaps, then, the Neue Wache Memorial is not so much a memorial to the victims of war and tyranny as it is a memorial to the strugg le to reconcile German identity.
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The Neue Wache Memorial is a compelling step on the path toward con temporary practices of memorialization. It contains within its walls both glances of what is to come and many elements of the past. The next step on our walking tour, however, w ill pull us more fully toward the realm of postmodern practices of memorialization, and to get there, we only need to cross the street. Bibliothe k Exit the Neue Wache and look to the opposite side of Unter den Linden. Directly ahead of you and to your right, you w ill see a large, open square. This is Bebelplatz (Point E). Cross the street to get to it and walk toward the center of the square u ntil you find the small, Plexiglas window inlaid in the stone plaza. The memorial at the center of this sprawling square off Unter den Linden could go almost unnoticed by passersby, especially during the daytime, when there are no lights to reveal its location. Near the center of the square, however, rests a fascinating memorial to Nazi persecution that represents a leap toward new forms of memorialization and public art. The memorial, designed by Israeli artist Micha Ullman and entitled Bibliothek (Library), is located under the square. Visitors can see the memorial through a small, square, Plexiglas window that is flush with the cobblestones around it. When viewers peer into the window, they see a room beneath Bebelplatz. The fifty-square-meter room is completely white and descends to a depth of roughly five meters. While the center of the room remains vacant, the walls of the room are lined with empty bookshelves that span from floor to ceiling. At nighttime, the room is lit from within, sending bright, white light out of the window into the square above. Inlaid in the cobblestones nearby is a bronze plaque with two inscriptions. The first explains that the memorial commemorates the Nazi book burning that occurred in Bebelplatz on May 10, 1933. On that night, Nazis burned some twenty thousand books that w ere deemed to be antithetical to National Socialism, including the works of Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein. The other inscription is an 1820 quotation by German author Heinrich Heine, which reads, “That was but a prelude: where they burn books, they w ill ultimately burn p eople as well.” Bibliothek, which was installed in Bebelplatz in 1995, is representative of a move in the larger memorial zeitgeist through which memorials and public art have become more closely interrelated, contributing to what Young has called “the art of public memory.” 40 The turn to contemporary artistic practices to replace the figurative statuary of modern war memorials is due in large part to the nature of the Holocaust and the events that occurred around it. The sheer scale of death and destruction of the Holocaust was so massive that, as the world became aware that this genocide had occurred, scholars began to speak of the unrepresentability of the event—an idea articulated most commonly
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2.7. Micha Ullman’s Bibliothek, a memorial commemorating the Nazi book burning of May 1933 in Bebelplatz, Berlin. Photo by Charlotte Nordahl, licensed u nder the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
through citing the famous 1949 quotation of Theodor Adorno: “To write poetry a fter Auschwitz is barbaric.” 41 The idea that the Holocaust is unrepresentable stems largely from theories that understand traumatic memory as a phenomenon that one cannot represent fully.42 I argue, however, that while the Holocaust and its horrors may not be fully representable through any single act of representat ion, the very fact that there exist so much compelling and effective literat ure and artistic practice dealing with the Holocaust demonstrates the Holocaust’s representability.43 Perhaps instead we could think of the discourse of the unrepresentability of the Holocaust as one of the ways in which it is represented. It is this feeling of unrepresentability that has pushed memorialization practice away from traditional modes of realism and figuration, which feel somehow insufficient to remember such a seemingly unimaginable thing, into the realms of the abstract and the artistic, which offer new possibilities for representing the past in ways that eschew the literal for the metaphorical. This move from the real to the abstract as a means for understanding is also tied to the shift from the modern to the postmodern. Although an event like the Holocaust may seem unrepresentable through the g rand narratives of modernism, it may be made more comprehensible through the postmodern lens of subjective experience. In fact, the Holocaust serves as the paradigmatic
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case for this tension between the understandable and the unrepresentable for the creator of the term “postmodernism,” Jean-François Lyotard, when he develops his concept of the différend. Lyotard defines the différend as “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put in phrases cannot yet be.” 44 In other words, the différend describes a moment when an event or reality is unrepresentable through words. The case that Lyotard gives as the supreme example of the différend is the Holocaust. Lyotard writes how Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson refuses to believe that gas chambers were used to murder Jews because he cannot find an eyewitness who has seen the gas chambers in action. The irony, of course, is that it is all but impossible to find an eyewitness who w ill admit to seeing the gas chambers kill because that person would be dead. (In fact, we do have the testimony and photog raphs of so-called Sonderkommandos, Jews who were forced to aid in the process of removing corpses from the gas chambers and burning them.) Regardless, what Faurisson has created, then, is a différend, a state in which it is impossible to prove that the Holocaust occurred through the terms that he requires in order to believe it. The différend thus transforms the defendant of this unprovable claim into a victim who knows something to be true but is unable to express it adequately enough for others. According to Lyotard, the différend is recognizable through the feeling it evokes in the subject—a feeling of discomfort, a feeling that “one cannot find the words” for something.45 While many become defeated by this feeling, Lyotard argues that it should, instead, be taken as a challenge for finding new modes of expressing this truth that seems inexpressible through the speech act. He writes, In the différend, something asks to be put into phrases, and suffers from the injustice of not being able instantly to be put into phrases. This is when human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language, not to augment their profit by the quantity of information communicable through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist.46 In other words, the feeling that allows a subject to recognize the existence of a différend should not lead to the defeat of the subject, but rather push the subject to find a new language to communicate that which they know to be true. In the case of the différend of the Holocaust, modern practices of memorialization have been insufficient for conveying the horrors of this historical event and properly commemorating its victims. T here is a feeling that it exceeds not only the utility of spoken and written language, but also the previous language of memorialization practice. The need to express the
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inexpressible has led to the creation of new idioms in Holocaust memorialization, most especially through the realm of abstract art, as exemplified through the memorial in Bebelplatz. Moreover, in a move that echoes Taylor’s binary of the archive and the repertoire,47 t hese new practices also tend toward opening space for embodied engagement. When the modes of represent at ion available through the archive are insufficient, perhaps engaging the repertoire offers new inroads. Rather than a sculpture with realistic figuration or a memorial stone with a description of an event or a list of names, Bibliothek uses a different language that not only conveys the reality of a historical event, but evokes a new type of affective response in the visitor. The Bebelplatz memorial is different from the previous memorials on this tour in several ways. First, it does not commemorate an event that is intended to be remembered with respect or honor, like the death of a soldier or the anti-fascist resistance actions of the Herbert Baum group. Rather, it marks an important step on the treacherous slope of pre-W WII Germany toward genocide. To be clear, this memorial does not directly memorialize the Nazi genocide of the Jews or Roma-Sinti and/or the persecution of other groups. The memorial does frame itself as a Holocaust memorial, however, given that 1) many of the books that w ere burned during this historical event were written by Jewish authors and 2) the quotation on the plaque next to the memorial draws the eerie connection between the burning of books and the burning of bodies, which the Nazis would begin to do less than a decade a fter this book burning. In this way, the books missing from the empty bookshelves in Bibliothek are metonymic stand-ins for the victims of the Nazis. The memorial thus fits within the larger paradigm of postmodern memorials not only in its form, but in its subject m atter. This memorial is not intended to forge a glorious national myth; on the contrary, it contributes to a narrative of shame, and the memorial stands as a measure of symbolic penance for that shameful act. It would be difficult to convey a message of national disgrace with the same tools that have been used by the state since the beginning of governance to tell a story of national triumph. Traditional modes of memorialization fail in this instance. The abstract, the artistic, and the metaphoric, then, are asked to step in to perform this job instead. To articulate this différend, Ullman turns to symbolic gesture. The concrete bookshelves of the memorial offer space for twenty thousand books, the number that w ere burned by the Nazis on May 10, 1933. The whiteness of the concrete in the room conveys a sacred space, especially when it is lit with white light at nighttime, reminding visitors that what was lost in the burning of these books exceeds the materiality of the volumes themselves—it was a burning of ideas, of epistemologies. Indeed, the space has the feel of an altar where a sacrifice has been made. The small Plexiglas window—the only point of access for viewing the memorial—limits the number of viewers to only a handful of people at once. As such, this memorial is less a communal experience than an
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individual one. By limiting the number of viewers, Ullman creates a space for individual reflection.48 This is markedly different from modern memorials, which are massive in size and intended to be viewed in groups, as a means of solidifying the ties among individual citizens. Finally, Ullman’s memorial is inaccessible. Visitors cannot enter it; they can only look from without. The space he creates is an impenetrable void that can never be fully encountered by the viewer. This sense of emptiness created by the void mimics the void created by the burning of ideas in Nazi society, and, subsequently, the void of the Holocaust. Bibliothek foregrounds what is missing. This articulation of a void is characteristic of many Holocaust memorials. One other architect who has directly addressed this encounter with the void in his own work is Daniel Libeskind, the Polish American architect of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, among many other buildings and memorials related to the Holocaust. In all his work, Libeskind focuses on “the void,” which signifies both an empty public space that w ill be filled by his architecture, but also “the void of memory.” 49 His designs seek to make this void visible and to fill it with something that can lead to a deeper understanding of how this void functions. Specifically, Libeskind refers to the Nazi genocide of Jews as “the Holocaust Void,” the space of absence left a fter six million members of a single community were destroyed.50 Young describes Libeskind’s void as “a void so real, so palpable, and so elemental to Jewish history in Berlin as to be its focal point a fter the Holocaust—a negative center of gravity around which Jewish memory would now assemble.” 51 One element that is especially intere sti ng about this negative space, according to Libeskind, is that it resists the positivist history or g rand metanarratives of modernity; instead it is transmitted through individual subjects and their own narratives created through the experience of this voided space.52 It is this same negative center of gravity that Ullman creates in Bibliothek. Like Libeskind’s, Ullman’s void is intended to create a space of personal reflection rather than contribute to some g rand metanarrative that connects the viewer to o thers. E very individual’s experience of the void is subjective and unique. The impact of memorials on public space amplifies when they become sites for other forms of embodied practice. In the case of war memorials, for instance, the sites are often used to host commemorative ceremonies related to the military. Often, these embodied practices elaborate upon the initial message of the memorial itself; in the case of postmodern memorials, however, these practices can serve to create new narratives and new experiences that e ither contribute to or serve as a counterpoint to the memorial. These practices can also become avenues for the transformation of the resonant violence to which these memorials respond into more positive affective forces in the present. An example of such a practice occurred at the Bebelplatz memorial seventy years a fter the book burning it commemorates. In May 2003, artist Tina Schwichtenberg created a temporary art piece at the Bebelplatz memorial
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2.8. A rtist Tina Schwichtenberg in the pro c ess of creating Mehl-A rt in Bebelplatz, May 2003. Photo by Rolf Johanning, courtesy of Tina Schwichtenberg
entitled Mehl-Art (Flour Art). For the piece, Schwichtenberg placed large stencils with the cut-out names of many of the authors whose books w ere burned in Bebelplatz by the Nazis. She scattered the dust of grounded marble—which had an appearance similar to flour, hence the piece’s title—over the stencils. When the stencils were lifted, the names of the authors remained on the ground of Bebelplatz, next to the Plexiglas window of the memorial. As time passed, the wind began to blow the names away. Children r unning through the plaza accidentally kicked through the dust, rendering it illegible. The marble dust, a derivative of the same material used for its durability and permanence to make the statues and sculptures of more traditional memorials, now took on the appearance of ashes. The names of the authors w ere carried away by the wind, just as their burned works had been seventy years e arlier.53 Describing her work, Schwichtenberg says, “As fast as wind makes names dis appear, the work of a poet is burnt in a fire.” 54 While Ullman’s Bibliothek is available for visitors to view e very day at Bebelplatz, Schwichtenberg’s Mehl-Art was only experienced by the people who were in the square on the day that the piece was created. Just as quickly as the piece was completed, it was swept away by the wind, never to be seen by anyone again. Indeed, the temporary nature of the piece is essential to Schwichtenberg’s conception of it; the way that she transforms the seeming permanence of marble into dust floating in the wind is meant to mirror the way the Nazis sought to destroy completely not only the writing, but the very
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thoughts of people like Benjamin, Marx, Einstein, and Brecht through the symbolic burning of their books. This impermanence as the central characteristic of Mehl-Art places the piece within a larger category of memorial practice that emerged within the last several decades, specifically in the field of Holocaust memorialization: the countermonument. The “countermonument” is a concept developed by Young to describe a trend of “brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being.” 55 In late twentieth-century West Germany t here emerged a general distrust for the traditionally monumental. This aversion to monumentality stemmed largely from the fact that monumentality had many close ties to Nazi fascism. For instance, one of Hitler’s main domestic programs was to rebuild the cityscape of Berlin itself, implementing a design spearheaded by architect Albert Speer. Hitler envisioned a capital that was truly monumental in structure; his “Nazi architecture” was meant to symbolize the power and strength of the German people and their ideology. As Brian Ladd writes of Hitler’s vision for the city, “Hitler challenges Berlin— and still challenges it—because he envisioned a timeless, static city.” 56 Fearing that the use of such monumentality in memorials could lead to a stagnation of memory, failing to treat it as a living, present entity, the countermonument challenges the idea that a memorial needs to be permanent at all. Countermonuments seek to engage the viewer more actively, resisting “the authoritarian propensity in all art that reduces the viewers to passive spectators.” 57 Schwichtenberg’s Mehl-Art is a countermonument to the book burning. As it disappears, it is intended to become a living memory for all those who saw the dust being laid and the wind blowing it away. Moreover, Schwichtenberg attempts to give the viewers of her piece an embodied experience of the past. Rather than merely viewing the memorial—the only real option for visitors to Bibliothek—v iewers of Schwichtenberg’s piece have a choice. Do they simply watch the wind blow it away? Do they try to preserve the names from being destroyed? Do they walk through them and aid in their destruction? Even if they only watch, the visceral, affective experience of seeing the destruction symbolically replicated in Schwichtenberg’s piece is markedly dif ferent from the experience of viewing Ullman’s piece, where we only see the result of the destruction. As Young writes, “By resisting its own reason for being, the countermonument paradoxically reinvigorates the very idea of the monument itself.” 58 Resonant violence is an embodied force; its effects infuse our being and impact the ways we interact with others. By activating the body of the viewer to engage with the memorial space, countermonuments highlight this embodied presence of past violence, while at the same time giving the body a tool for responding to that violence through engaging with the countermonument itself. Through using the tactics of countermemorialization, Schwichtenberg makes the memory of the book burning alive by allowing individuals to
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experience an affective simulation of that destruction in the present moment— rather than only contemplating or reflecting upon that destruction in the past. This focus on the embodied, affective experience of the viewer w ill be taken to its ultimate manifestation in the final stop on our tour. Memorial to the M urde re d Jews of Eur ope Walk back down Unter den Linden to the Brandenburg Gate. Cross u nder the gate and turn immediately to your left. Walk along Ebertstrasse about two hundred meters until you reach the large field of gray concrete pillars. This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Point F). Since its dedication in 2005, Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by American architect Peter Eisenman, has taken the place of the Neue Wache as the de facto national site for Holocaust memorialization, so much so that the memorial is more commonly referred to as simply “the Holocaust Memorial.” This memorial has not only reshaped the memorial landscape of Berlin by providing a new central site for remembering the Nazi genocide of European Jewry; it has also reshaped the way artists and architects approach memorialization around the world. If the Neue Wache and the Bebelplatz memorials are the first steps away from traditional, modern memorial practice and toward a new form of contemporary, postmodern memorialization, the Holocaust Memorial is, at this point, representative of the end point of that path as it stands t oday. The Holocaust Memorial owes its existence at least partially to the controversy of the Neue Wache memorial. The idea of constructing a memorial that specifically remembers the Jewish victims of the Holocaust had been a passion project of German journalist and publicist Lea Rosh since 1988, a fter she visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum of Israel.59 Rosh, along with historian Eberhard Jäckel, began to argue that, while Yad Vashem provided a memorial space for the victims of the Holocaust in the symbolic land of those victims, there should also be such a space “in the land of the perpetrators.” 60 The public clamor that arose over the transformation of the Neue Wache into the central memorial of Germany to “the victims of war and tyranny,” particularly the idea that this memorial would serve as a site of memory for the Jews who had died as a result of the Nazi genocide, led to an agreement in the German parliament that a separate memorial would be erected specifically for Jewish victims.61 This compromise led to a series of other compromises, described well by Ladd, who writes: The decision to build a central memorial to victims led, perhaps inevitably, to an unseemly squabble among the victims. Representatives of the Roma (Gypsies) argued that the extermination of their p eople must not be separated from that of the Jews. A fter an ugly debate in which each side
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invoked Nazi racial categories to characterize the Third Reich’s treatment of the two groups, the Roma were promised their own memorial, although city leaders disagreed about w hether it should be nearby or at the suburban location of a former Gypsy prison camp. Roma leaders, in turn, declined to share their memorial with homosexuals or Communists, who, they argued, had not been persecuted for racial reasons. Soon skeptics began to raise the specter of a landscape of segregated victims’ memorials.62 Indeed, today Berlin has the Holocaust Memorial, the Memorial of the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered u nder the National Socialist Regime, the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted u nder the National Socialist Regime, and the Memorial and Information Point for the Victims of National Socialist “Euthanasia” Killings, which remembers some of the first victims of Nazi persecution, the eld erly and disabled who w ere “euthanized” as part of the Nazi T4 Project. All t hese memorials are within short walking distance of each other, and they are all managed by the same foundation, which was established by the German parliament to manage the Holocaust Memorial, the first of these four memorials to be dedicated. While these other three memorials also exhibit a rejection of traditional memorial practice and an attempt to create an immersive environment that asks the visitor to participate physically in the memorial experience, the Holocaust Memorial is by far the most representative of this new form of memorialization, and so it is to this memorial specifically that we now turn.
2.9. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Photo by the author
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The memorial spans a roughly five-acre site on the former “death strip,” a swath of land between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz that was left vacant when the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1989. It consists of 2,711 gray, rectangular, concrete pillars of varying heights, which together form a vast grid, roughly the size of three football fields. The heights of the pillars rise and fall, creating a wavelike pattern across the field. Visitors who enter the grid see that the ground, too, undulates. The farther one walks into the memorial, the lower the ground descends and the higher the pillars rise; visitors at the center of the memorial are surrounded by pillars that tower over them, blocking out much of the cityscape around the memorial. The pillars themselves are placed into the ground at a slight a ngle; none of them sits completely perpendicular to the ground. This fact, along with the unevenness of the ground, leads to a sense of uneasiness or unbalance for t hose who walk through it. Furthermore, the pillars are spaced in such a way that they do not allow for people to walk through the memorial side by side; everyone is forced to experience the memorial space independently. All these factors combine to create a memorial that evokes an affective response in the visitor without the use of any of the recognizable symbolism that has been part of traditional memorial practice. This rejection of the language of traditional memorials—the statue, the inscription, the eternal flame, etc.—in order to build a space that leads to more than just personal reflection but instead some sort of embodied engagement with the past was at the forefront of Eisenman’s mind when he designed the space. Rather than building a memorial that reinforces the traditional relationship of the passive viewer who looks upon and contemplates—but does not interact with—t he memorial object, the Holocaust Memorial creates what German scholar Stefanie Endlich calls an “affective environment” that “transforms the visitors themselves into part of the work and that should provoke in them sensations and emotions of an immediate manner.” 63 Eisenman’s primary goal in designing the memorial is to create an emotional response in the visitor. He is much less concerned with educating the visitor about the historical event of the Holocaust. Instead, he hopes to provoke a feeling in the visitor. Moreover, according to Eisenman himself, his memorial is designed not only as a place of mourning for the victims and their relatives or as a place of shame for the perpetrators and their descendants, but as a space where even those with no connection at all to the events of the Holocaust can have an affective experience that ties them to the event.64 To allow for this, Eisenman aspires for this affective environment to lead the visitor to have a new experience of time itself. In describing his own avoidance of traditional memorial forms for the creation of this new type of environment, Eisenman writes, “It is the memorial’s obdurate lack of obvious symbolism that makes its public claim to creating the sense of a dual time: one experienced in the present; the other, the possible remembrance of another
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experience of the past in the present.” 65 For Eisenman, the emotional experience produced within visitors through their engagement with the memorial space leads to a doubled or multilayered experience of time, where the visitor is at once aware of their physical presence in the architecture of the memorial in the present and open to the phenomenon of remembrance, which, rather than transporting the visitor to the past, actually becomes a part of their pre sent. This is not a dissimilar goal from other memorial spaces, which strive to wrap a remembered past, an embodied present, and a conscientious future into a single space. Through the recognition of this new temporality, the past and its remembrance can become a part of the visitor’s daily practice, rather than something that remains in a distant, untouchable, and, more essentially, unfeelable past. The hope, then, is that this past w ill subsequently influence the subject’s future. This work of making the past relevant and feelable is the central goal and success of the Holocaust Memorial, and, as I w ill soon argue, it is why these new forms of memorialization are particularly connected to a new understanding of the affective force of resonant violence. The Holocaust Memorial is not meant to be admired from a distance. It is completely opposed to, for instance, the Soviet War Memorial, with the massive statue of the Soviet soldier staring down at the visitors below, emphasizing the smallness of the visitor compared to the monumentality of the state. Instead, the Holocaust Memorial asks— i ndeed, requires— that the visitor come inside. As they walk through the field of pillars, their sensory experience of the memorial is amplified. They feel the coldness of the columns around them. They hear the sound of footsteps echoing off the stone. One visitor experiences a moment of anxiety as they almost run into a stranger coming from another direction. Another looks up to see the pillars blocking out the sky, then looks out to see the light of the city at the end of a pathway. Another hears c hildren r unning through the field, yelling as they play hide-a nd-seek; the incongruity of this reality produces anger or grief. Each visitor has a completely different experience, shaped by the other people visiting the memorial at the same time, by the weather that day, by their own emotional attitudes toward the space and any predispositions they may have about the site and what it represents. Although one of the essential experiences that Eisenman hopes for the visitor may be, according to him, a “destruction of the illusion of security,” 66 Hanno Rauterberg points out that the memorial space is open to any number of interpretations. What is common, he writes, is that “they all are forced to seek their own approach, both in a real and in a metaphorical sense.” He continues, “Each of us must decide for ourselves how far we dare to venture into this landscape of stelae and souls, and how we read it.” 67 The official guided tours of the memorial confirm this point. Org an ized tours of the Holocaust Memorial begin with a guide giving a brief contextualization of the site of the memorial and the fraught process of choosing a design, but visitors are then set loose within the memorial with a request to
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reconvene about ten minutes later. The guide then leads a discussion, asking visitors for their impressions and interpretations of the memorial, careful not to tell visitors if they are right or wrong. This openness leads to a large array of interpretations, questions, and even concerns among visitors, according to Adam Kerpel-Fronius, a research associate at the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (the entity that manages the Memorial) and one of the memorial’s first tour guides. He says: One t hing that r eally surprised me or which I experienced again and again is that German students, and Germans in general, ask much more about what the artists wanted to tell us. So they want an explanation. And Americans and British people have much fewer problems with the notion that it’s up to them what to make of it. So the creativity of dealing with your own emotions. So that it was r eally an open space of open interpretation.68 While Kerpel-Fronius notices a cultural difference in visitors’ willingness to openly interpret the site, and w hether or not that generalization is universal, what he does articulate is a key aspect, not only of the Holocaust Memorial in par t icu l ar, but of the new category of postmodern memorial practice that it represents: the centrality of subjective experience. Rather than presenting a clear metanarrative, the Holocaust Memorial opens a space for visitors to create their own narratives, or, as Irit Dekel, an Israeli scholar who has done extensive fieldwork at the Holocaust Memorial, puts it, it asks each visitor to create their own “memory way.” 69 By constructing a site that calls for the embodied experience of the visitor to activate it, the memorial creates a new sense of agency in the subject. Dekel argues that “self- exploration in and of the site constructs agency and judgment that, while triggered by the memory of the past, exceed it and should be discussed through the framework of political action.” 70 In the same way that Eisenman works toward the construction of a dual temporality for the visitor, within which one experiences the past in the present, Dekel takes this idea one step further, offering that the Holocaust Memorial creates new subjective capacities that may have a relationship to the past, but are activated and utilized completely in the present. The result is that “the Holocaust Memorial commemorates the rememberers themselves.” 71 As much as the memorial refers to a historical event, it refers memorial visitors to themselves, asking them to acknowledge and interpret their own relationships to the memorial and, thus, to the past. It is here, in the combined conscientiousness of affective experience and subjective agency formation, that we see the true elucidation of a new form of postmodern memorial practice. The move toward the creation of an affective monument is directly tied to the new paradigm set into motion by the Holocaust. This increased acknowl edgment of the role of affect in thinking about Holocaust memory is deeply connected to a coming to terms with the role that affect plays in genocidal
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violence itself and the way it manifests in society. In other words, to borrow Clough’s term, the “affective turn” of Holocaust memorialization72 is connected to an acknowledgment, whether conscious or unconscious, of resonant violence, and an attempt on the part of memorial artists and funders to use practices of memorialization as a means of transducing that violence. This walking tour through the memorial landscape of Berlin has followed a chronological progression through which we have seen quite the evolution in memorial practice. In each of t hese sites, the designers have more and more embraced the symbolic over the figurative/realistic. They have moved away from painting a g rand and objective historical metanarrative toward creating a space for the facilitation of a subjective experience. They have distanced themselves from emotions that are traditionally associated with the state, like honor, and embraced other, less celebratory emotions, like suffering (of the victims) and shame (of the perpetrator society). Fin ally, and most importantly in the case of the Holocaust Memorial, they have moved toward initiating a fully embodied experience to the point where the memorial is only fully itself when the visitor is existing within it. By immersing the visitor fully within the memorial spaces, these new kinds of memorials may be aiding in the institution of what Edward S. Casey calls body memory,73 or the type of memory that develops through embodied engagements with the past (for instance, visiting memorial sites) that help shape the way the body performs in the present and future. Interestingly, body memory can become incorporated into our subjectivity without our conscious awareness of it; our decisions and impulses can likewise be shaped by the memory, even below the level of consciousness. Casey writes that this understanding of body memory “acts to undermine the premise that remembering is a replicative replay of the past in some specifically representational guise. It introduces the alarming notion that we can remember the past without reproducing it in any identifiable represent at ional format.” 74 Of course, resonant violence itself can be viewed as a form of body memory that, for many, operates u nder the level of consciousness, but nevertheless shapes our beh avior. The hope of immersive memorials like the Holocaust Memorial, however, may be to create new forms of body memory that reshape the way the past impinges on the visitor’s present, influencing their decisions and approaches to life, even if the visitor is unaware of that influence. Cvetkovich writes, “The turn to memory is also a turn to the affective or felt experience of history as central to the construction of public cultures, to give a range of people the authority to represent historical experience, and often implicitly to suggest a plurality of points of view.” 75 If Cvetkovich is correct, than the Holocaust Memorial is a perfect example of this turn to the “felt experience of history,” as its ultimate goal, according to Eisenman, is to create the experience of “dual time” where history is not only learned but felt. More importantly, however, the Holocaust Memorial represents an effort to
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transduce the negative affective force of resonant violence into another force altogether more positive and less damaging— n amely, into new forms of pol itical agency in the visitor. Rather than being put in the position of passive spectator, the visitor must actively engage with the Holocaust Memorial, creating their own path through its field of concrete slabs. They must feel their way through the past and decide how that experience w ill affect their present and future. This describes a process similar to what Freud and, subsequently, Dominick LaCapra have called “working-t hrough.” 76 The term is traditionally used to describe the process a traumatized subject undergoes in order to process their trauma effectively and move forward in a productive way; h ere, the memorial visitor and their affective encounter with the past through their embodied engagement with the memorial space can be seen as a way of working through the collective, social experience of resonant violence. Working through, LaCapra writes, is “intimately bound up with the possibility of ethically responsible action and critical judgment on the part of someone who strives for the position of an agent and may thereby counteract his or her own experience of victimhood and the incapacitating effects of trauma.” 77 Through the embodied encounter of the Holocaust Memorial and the affective experience that it generates, the visitor is moved toward “ethically responsible action and critical judgment,” through which the horrors of the Holocaust become more than a historical reality, but something that is felt and comprehended in a new way that allows it to influence the subject’s engagement with the world in the present. The subject thus moves away from being a conduit of resonant violence and its pervasive, affective force, becoming an agent who can manipulate and transform this force in positive and productive ways. In her book Political Emotions, Martha C. Nussbaum first acknowledges the centrality of affect in public and pol itical life, then argues that, rather than fearing its irrationality, we should embrace its power to effect positive change and a politics of love. Nussbaum wants us “to imagine ways in which emotions can support the basic principles of the political culture of an aspiring yet imperfect society, an area of life in which it can be hoped that all citizens overlap, if they endorse basic norms of equal respect.” 78 In other words, in the face of resonant violence, which exhibits perhaps the most destructive possibilities of publicly circulated emotion, Nussbaum proposes using positive emotion, guided by an underlying sense of respect and care, as a means of countering it. To do so, Nussbaum insists on the necessity of expanding our circles of concern: The ones who w ill stir deep emotions in us are the ones to whom we are somehow connected through our imagining of a valuable life, what I s hall henceforth call our “circle of concern.” If distant people and abstract principles are to get a grip on our emotions, therefore, these emotions
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must somehow position them within our circle of concern, creating a sense of “our” life in which t hese people and events m atter as parts of our “us,” our own flourishing.79 I argued earlier in this chapter that every memorial space has its own sphere of inclusion, or a designated individual or group that it memorializes. In demarcating that sphere of inclusion, we could say that what the memorial wants is for visitors to incorporate that sphere of inclusion within their own circles of concern. Importantly, Nussbaum argues that “symbols and poetry are crucial” for this phenomenon to take place.80 Through the embodied experience of the symbolic and material structure of the memorial, the memorialized group is supposed to m atter to us more than it did before. The memorial can at once make us aware of the damaging affective force of resonant violence and provide an avenue for new, positive emotionality that, at the very least, enlarges our circle of concern and, with it, our sense of responsibility to the people within it. The Holocaust Memorial represents an instance of acknowledging not only the way that affect functions in the perpetration of genocide, but also in the transformation of that negative affect into potentially more productive forms of agency. Affect is an unwieldy force, however, and therefore many people are often wary to trust it. This distrust is evident in the Holocaust Memorial in one big way. Although Eisenman always wanted the memorial to stand on its own, public outcry and the fear—another affect—that people would not understand what it means led to the construction of a so-called Place of Information underg round beneath the memorial. This small museum gives visitors an overview of key historical moments of the Holocaust, contextualizes the cultural backgrounds of the victims, and memorializes those victims further in a room where short victims’ biographies are read in a continuous loop in both German and Eng lish. While the exhibition in the Place of Information is quite effective and comprehensive, it does betray a skepticism in the power of the memorial to stand alone, as well as a distrust in the ability of visitors to understand properly the message of the memorial. As memorial practices have evolved since the Holocaust, and as they continue to evolve in the future, there w ill always be those who are uncomfortable with change, perhaps particularly as the affective experience of the visitor becomes an increasingly central focus of t hese practices. Fin ally, although the Holocaust Memorial does represent an increased focus on subjective experience in memorial practice, it, and all the other memorials on this walking tour, were created and are managed by the German government in some form or other. Even though these new memorials do seem to create an open space for interpretation and engagement with the past, it would be naïve to forget that all these memorials are also still instruments of state power. It is therefore essential to interpret our experiences of
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these sites through that lens. If these memorials do encourage new modes of subjective agency, how is that agency also interpolating the citizen-subject to behave in certain ways? This chapter demonstrates that memorials and the embodied practices that they encourage can be an effective piece in the puzzle of resolving the dissonant force of resonant violence in post-atrocity societies. Most of the memorial practices detailed in this chapter, however, focus on the individual, and resonant violence is nothing if not a social force, experienced collectively. The subsequent chapters, then, focus on increasingly collective embodied practices that contribute to the processing of resonant violence. As collective actions always occur within and are often deeply connected to physical space, however, I w ill begin this exploration by turning to another category of memorial space: the site of mass atrocity itself. As w ill become clear, these sites encourage and allow for unique forms of embodied practice, quite distinct from those detailed along this walking tour. In particu lar, I w ill focus on practices that eschew individual experience for collective engagement. Although this walking tour through Berlin ends h ere, this journey w ill now continue onward, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and in a different hemisphere, as we now turn to Argentina.
C hapte r 3
Filling the Absence e m b odi e d e ngage m e n t s w i t h f or m e r s i t e s of at roc i t y ESMA—short for Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, or the Higher Navy Mechanics’ School—was the largest clandestine detention center in operation during Argentina’s last military dictatorship, which began a fter a military coup d’état on March 24, 1976, and lasted u ntil December 1983, when the dictatorship fell and democracy returned. Throughout this seven-a nd-a-h alf-year period, a series of right-w ing military juntas controlled Argentina. During their reign of terror, the repressive state sought to root out all political opposition by “disappearing” t hose who were deemed left-w ing “subversives.” The disappeared were taken from their homes or the streets and transported to one of more than five hundred clandestine detention centers, like ESMA, spread across the country. T here, they would face inhumane living conditions, slave l abor, and torture. When the military apparatus decided t here was no more information to be gained from the prisoners, they were murdered, and their remains were disposed of to destroy evidence of the crime. As many as thirty thousand Argentinians were disappeared during this period. Around five thousand of them passed through ESMA. I visited ESMA in 2011, in what would become the first of many visits over the next eight years. At that point, no concrete plans had been made to transform the Casino de Oficiales into the official memory site it has become today. In fact, the building was not open to the public except by special appointment. Visitors were not permitted to explore the mostly empty site on their own; a guide accompanied visitors everywhere, explaining and contextualizing the vacant spaces in the building to the curious few who came. Since that first visit, I have watched as ESMA has evolved as a site of memory, through the multi-year deliberation process to design a new exhibition for the space, the installation of that permanent exhibition in 2015, and the numerous subsequent temporary exhibitions and programs that have taken place at the site. This chapter details and analyzes that process, tracking the evolution of a memory space and the practices that have shaped it.
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Despite the particularities that are present within every instance of genocide or state terror, one t hing they all share is that they leave b ehind physical spaces that serve as reminders of the violence, even after the killing ends. Many of t hese sites contain material aide-mémoire—concrete evidence of the violations that occurred within their bounda ries. From the former clandestine detention centers of the numerous Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s and ’80s to the Killing Fields of Cambodia to places like the Nyamata Church in Rwanda to the former Nazi concentration and death camps of the Holocaust, t hese spaces and what occurred within them represent the absolute pinnacle of inhumanity. T hese memorial sites are different from those described in the previous chapter. They are not merely symbolic spaces constructed to recall past violence and remember its victims. T hese are the actual places where that violence occurred. There is a “power of place” for visitors to t hese sites that exceeds the symbolic.1 Memory scholar Aleida Assmann describes t hese spaces as having an “antaeic magic,” a reference to Antaeus, a g iant from Greek mythology who had unlimited strength, as long as his foot remained connected to the ground.2 In former sites of atrocity, the resonant violence that can remain largely “unfelt” in quotidian space is impossible to ignore. In fact, people come to these spaces explicitly to connect with this antaeic magic—to feel resonant violence. Thus, for the teams of people working together to curate and manage these spaces, they present a unique opportunity for engaging with the visiting public and instilling in them a commitment not only to memory, but to combatting the resonating effects of past violence once visitors leave the space. Numerous scholars have written of former sites of mass atrocity, their memorialization, and how they contribute to the formation of collective memory.3 Rather than analyzing the sites themselves, this chapter focuses on the performativity of t hese sites,4 asking how they contribute to transforming the negative, affective force of resonant violence. Specifically, I examine t hese sites as places that allow for a certain set of shared, embodied practices, performed first by the sites’ curators, then by their visitors. I argue that it is never only the sites themselves, but rather the practices that transpire within these sites and through the process of transforming the spaces from sites of atrocity into sites of memory that contribute to the transduction of resonant violence, transforming the negative affect of the past into new affect that can have a positive influence on the present. While the historical factuality of the horrors that occurred within any given site of atrocity can never be undone, the practice of converting it into a site of memory and the subsequent praxes that fill the memorial space can spawn new sources of agency and power that can alter the way the violent past operates t oday and tomorrow. They do so through their ability to make p eople re-encounter and reactivate the past in the present. To make this argument, I focus principally on ESMA, which is now a site of memory in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was once the largest concentration
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and torture center in all of Argentina, and many of the people who lost their lives during Argentina’s last military dictatorship passed through ESMA. As such, it has become an iconic space and the site of many tense battles in Argentina’s fight over memory.5 Although ESMA is the main space that frames this chapter, I reference several other sites—not only other sites in the Argentine context, but also some former Nazi concentration camps in Europe. Although the crimes that occurred during the military dictatorship in Argentina and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust are specific events, each with its own set of culturally and contextually specific circumstances that need not be compared, one infamous aspect of the Holocaust was the construction of concentration and death camps, many of which are now sites of memory. The ways that post-Holocaust societies in Europe have dealt with these spatial remnants of the past have deeply influenced the ways p eople think about memorializing sites of mass atrocity around the world. As the Holocaust is such a paradigmatic case, it is difficult to address the concept of sites of mass atrocity that have become sites of memory without referencing it. As Assmann and Sebastian Conrad have argued, the increased globalization of the planet has also led to a globalization of memory, which often exceeds the framework of the nation-state as its “natur al container” as it resonates with other memory discourses.6 Holocaust memory has exemplified this statement, and its multidirectionality has had a specific influence on the development of memory narratives in Argentina, which hosted a huge influx of migration from Europe before, during, and a fter World War II.7 Furthermore, as Nayanika Mookherjee argues, the “genocidal cosmopolitanism” that has led to memory sites and museums around the world implementing a common toolbox to at once communicate the specifics of a case and relate them to a canon of internationally recognized cases of atrocity allows for these sites to assert “a global moral- historical lesson” through their curation.8 Through viewing memory sites in Argentina and post-Holocaust Europe alongside each other, one goal of this chapter is to demonstrate that, although the exact practices generated within each memory site are context specific, the practices are alike in their potential to transform the way past violence operates in the present. This chapter examines a specific subset of co-embodied practices that have emerged in response to the resonant violence of genocide: t hose that are facilitated through the creation and visitation of sites of memory that w ere once sites of mass atrocity. Holocaust scholar Avril Alba writes that “museum work is imagined as a relational act involving active participation of both those who provide information and those who receive it.” 9 Rather than analyzing the curation of memory sites solely based on their materiality and forms, this chapter views curation and visitation as co-embodied practices. The choices that site curators make and the ways that visitors engage with t hose choices and intervene upon spaces with their own choices mark site visits as an intersubjective exchange, replete with opportunities to disrupt the
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space in countless ways. This dialogic relationship among curators and visitors represents a protracted effort on all sides to encounter, understand, and engage with past violence. What practices do former sites of mass atrocity generate that potentially transform the already-present, destructive force of resonant violence into an affective force that is more constructive in nature, and how do they do that? To answer this question, I now turn to ESMA, the main site of this investigation. E SMA: Conte xt and Bac kg round ESMA is not just one building, but a complex that spans over forty-two acres (17 hectares) and that includes more than thirty buildings, all constructed in the same neoclassical architectural style, all with white facades and orange tile roofs, and all standing within the bounda ries of a brick-a nd- wrought-iron fence that separates the complex from the busy Avenida del Libertador in front of it. Many of the major concentration camps of the Holocaust were built in remote areas of Europe, outside of major cities and removed from large populations. That is not the case with ESMA. It is in the heart of one of Buenos Aires’ most pleasant residential neighborhoods, directly alongside one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. It is anything but hidden. ESMA is a paradigmatic site in the case of Argentina not only because of the number of people who passed through it, but also because of the wide range of abuses that took place within it during the dictatorship. Most of the crimes occurred within one building in the complex, the Casino de Oficiales, or Officers’ Quarters. Thus, the Officers’ Quarters has been deemed the official site of memory, while the other buildings in the complex have taken on new lives, as I w ill explain. Upon arrival, prisoners were usually taken to the top floor and detained in an area known as Capucha, or hood, so named b ecause the prisoners sequestered there were forced to wear hoods that prevented them from seeing anything or anyone. In addition, they w ere not allowed to talk or interact with each other. When prisoners were not in Capucha, they were usually in the basement of the building, which served two functions. First, it was a place for slave labor, where prisoners were forced to perform tedious tasks like manufacturing forged documents to be used in covering up the disappearances. Second, it was a place for torture, or, as the officers referred to it, “questioning.” Prisoners were subjected to any number of horrific acts, supposedly to elicit confessions of their subversive tendencies or to name other leftist subversives, who would subsequently undergo similar treatment. As Argentinian scholar and former detainee Pilar Calveiro writes, however, the a ctual purpose of the torture was “to make meat” of the prisoners—to take away their humanity completely. She writes: “It is the genuine labor of the concentration camp to destroy the person; to do this, they use torture, terror, and a w hole set of dehumanizing and depersonalizing mechanisms that . . . have a double function: to destroy the victim and to facilitate the work of the victimizer.” 10 A fter
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this dehumanizing process, when prisoners w ere no longer viewed as useful, most w ere sent on “death flights”: they w ere drugged and thrown from the side of planes into the Rio de la Plata, the river on the coast of the city. Unable to swim due to the sedatives, the victims drowned, and their bodies were swept away into the ocean. Most have never been found. A final important room in the Officers’ Quarters of ESMA is the maternity ward. Around five hundred of the thirty thousand p eople disappeared during were pregnant women. Rather than killing these w the dictatorship omen immediately, the perpetrators allowed the women to carry their babies to term. A fter the women gave birth, they were murdered, and their babies were given to military families and their allies to raise as their own. Many of these children are to this day unaware of their biological heritage, while others may suspect that they have been appropriated but are too scared or too comfortable with their current lives to investigate their true origins. Despite these challenges, thanks to the work of an important human rights group, las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo), who have created a DNA databank through which those with suspect origins may be tested to see if they were appropriated during the dictatorship, 130 of these 500+ appropriated children have discovered their true identities at the time of this writing. Throughout the dictatorship, ESMA was operating as both a detention, torture, and extermination center and as a military training academy. A fter the fall of the dictatorship, ESMA remained in the hands of the Navy for over fifteen years, u ntil 1998, when then president Carlos Menem had the navy moved to another site so that he could initiate a project to destroy ESMA altogether and replace it with a small memorial plaque and tree. Menem’s plan to demolish ESMA—and consequently destroy all evidence of the crimes that took place there—was met with hostility from the public, and especially by human rights groups, who refused to allow Menem to raze ESMA to facilitate a pro cess of “forgiving and forgetting” the crimes of the past. Thanks to a series of protests and a vocal public response, the Argentine courts ultimately shut down Menem’s initiative.11 It was not u ntil six years later, in 2004, that a new president, Nestor Kirchner, held his important press conference on the grounds of ESMA. In a watershed moment, Kirchner apologized to the Argentinian people for the crimes of the dictatorship and declared that ESMA would be converted into a site of memory, so that what happened there would never be forgotten and would never happen again. The subsequent process of converting the site of atrocity into a site of memory was neither simple nor quick.12 The practices that w ere generated through and b ecause of this process, however, have contributed to the transduction of resonant violence in Argentina. Public memory spaces related to past trauma are essential in the cultivation and negotiation of what Edward S. Casey calls public memory. According to Casey, public memory describes an active engagement with the past in order to frame discourse within the present toward the goal of shaping a
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specific vision of the f uture.13 Casey sees public memory as the memory environment within which other actions and discourses take place. As such, it is up for constant negotiation and renegotiation as a society’s relationship to the past changes over time. However flexible public memory may be, Casey sees as essential a public space within which public memory can be enacted and contested.14 In the case of traumatic memory, this need for space to ground and collect memory becomes especially import ant, as traumatic events inevitably lead to the formation of places-of-sanctuary and places-of-trauma. Former concentration camps and clandestine detention centers fit within Casey’s concept of places-of-trauma well, as they represent spaces where traumatic memories are collected and reflected upon. But the conversion of an atrocity site into a site of memory can represent the attempt to transform a place-o f- trauma into a place-of-sanctuary, providing a new safe space for engaging with the past. This transformation is reflected in a phrase used by Alejandra Naftal, the executive director of Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA, the entity that manages the Officers’ Quarters today. She states that her goal is to make ESMA a space that is “comfortable for the uncomfortable and uncomfortable for the comfortable.” She continues, “It must be a place of tribute, restraint, and reparation for the victim, but it must also be a place of discomfort for the indifferent.” 15 Like most former sites of mass atrocity, before ESMA was re-embodied as a site of memory, it underwent a process of alteration, destruction, and evacuation. Whereas those engaged in the positive transformation of resonant vio lence are most directly involved in re-embodying the spaces, the perpetrators’ final acts in the spaces usually encumber that process. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp of the Holocaust, for example, one of the final acts of the SS officers as the Red Army approached to liberate the camp was to blow up the crematoria and gas chambers in order to destroy evidence of the crimes perpetrated there. Club Atlético, a clandestine detention center that operated for one year only a few blocks from Argentina’s presidential palace, was completely demolished to make way for a highway. Taylor refers to the former Chilean concentration and torture center known as Villa Grimaldi as “emptied, though not empty,” 16 a description that can be extended to include most, if not all, sites of mass atrocity before their conversion into sites of memory. Additionally, although many sites are emptied by the perpetrators, some sites were emptied owing to other historical circumstances that followed their closure as sites of atrocity. For instance, both Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and Ravensbrück W omen’s Concentration Camp in Germany are without most, if not all, of the barracks that once h oused prisoners there. The barracks w ere not destroyed by the perpetrators, however; they were dismantled by displaced populations in need of building materials after World War II. ESMA went through similar pro cesses of alteration and destruction. When the military left the complex, they took with them anything they
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3.1. E ntrance to Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA featuring images of the disappeared. Photo courtesy of Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA
thought could be used as evidence of their crimes. Moreover, the perpetrators went to g reat lengths to alter the space in an effort to debunk survivor testimonies of what the center looked like. For instance, upon first entering the Officers’ Quarters, visitors find a strange alcove to the side of the main lobby. There are two doorways with no doors, leading to a small, closet-like space that makes no architectural sense at all—u ntil visitors discover that it was originally an elevator shaft. In order to support their claim that former prisoners were lying, the perpetrators had the elevators removed and the shaft closed when the Inter-A merican Commission of Human Rights came to investigate the site in 1979. Regardless of how t hese spaces are emptied, destroyed, and altered, t hose involved in the recomposition of these sites must decide how to respond to this emptiness. How w ill they fill the literal and figurative absences in the site? The decisions they make in curating these spaces subsequently impact the ways visitors engage with the site. Here, ESMA is a particularly intere st ing case, because the decisions that site curators have made to fill this vast complex have led to a range of different, often conflicting, practices through which visitors address the resonant violence represented by the site. In the following sections, I w ill first explore the practices through which visitors encounter the past through the sites, with a focus on how the choices of site curators and directors shape t hose practices. T hese mediated, embodied
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encounters with the past create connections between visitors and the resonant violence that produces these spaces. Then, I w ill examine how publics activate ESMA in the present through co-embodied practices that foreground resonant violence and transduce it through political action. E ncounte ring th e Past Perhaps the most essential embodied experience of visitors to former sites of mass atrocity is the very factuality of their physical presence at the place where such massive crimes occurred. The act of visiting former sites of atrocity shapes the identity of visitors, and the directors of these sites aim for these visits to have a lasting impact on their subjecthood. Historian Dominick LaCapra writes, “Witnessing is a necessary condition of agency.” 17 Although LaCapra is speaking specifically about concentration camp survivors and their need to tell their story to regain the agency taken from them by the trauma they have endured, the other meaning of witnessing—the act of seeing—can also be an essential experience in the formation of agency. According to a 2012 survey released by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum—perhaps the preeminent site of Holocaust memory—the plurality of individuals who visited the site (33.2 percent) did so in order to obtain “knowledge of the history of the camp.” 18 Another more recent study of Dutch tourists visiting concentration camp memorials found that one of the key f actors motivating their visits was a desire to gain “knowledge and awareness.” 19 What is interesting about these findings is that historical knowledge is something that can be attained in many forms: history books, documentaries, classroom lectures, newspaper articles. Presumably, people feel as though the knowledge they are receiving by being in the space itself is qualitatively different than the knowledge offered through these other sources. Naftal made a similar point during a 2017 conversation: Why do p eople come to a museum? T hey’re not coming to learn, because they already have books, school, the internet, or a film. [. . .] They come to live a physical experience, to be in a place. We want exactly this, that they live an experience that, as Walter Benjamin says, serves as a f lash of lightning that illuminates some moment of their existence, now or at some point in the f uture.20 eople visit these sites, in other words, to experience an affective or felt P knowledge. In the memorials described in the previous chapter, this affective experience must be generated through symbolic transformations of public space. At former sites of violence, however, this affective encounter occurs through the sites’ antaeic magic. 21 According to scholars of dark tourism John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, the desire of individuals to visit sites of mass death is connected in many ways to the same “incredulity toward metanarratives” discussed in the previous chapter.22 The large-scale violence represented through sites of atrocity can
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be so inconceivable that people need not only to “see for themselves,” but feel for themselves as well. The new sense of familiarity with past violence that visitors obtain at former sites of mass atrocity is one way of allowing individuals the agency to construct their own narratives and frameworks for understanding such violence.23 It also permits visitors an affective presence that brings them into closer contact with the resonant violence that might other wise be experienced as distant and impersonal. It is not only the visitor, however, who receives something from visiting the site, but also the site that becomes newly constituted by the visitor’s presence. According to one guide at Auschwitz, the physical presence of visitors is essential to the existence of the site. He says, “I think that to come h ere is a form of commemoration. . . . I tell [visitors] that this visit is not only a visit, but also a commemoration. That we build a virtual monument by coming here. That it’s a sign that p eople are coming, so it’s still a living place of remembering.” 24 Although the site can be seen as one kind of monument, the embodied act of visiting the site represents the construction of a “virtual monument” that has implications for the present and future, validating the existence of the site and affirming, as the guide also said in our interview, “that this physical place is important, that it exists, that it w ill keep existing, that it should be maintained.” 25 It is not only the embodied practices of the visitors that are constituted by the site, but the site itself that is constituted and sustained through the embodied encounters of the visitors. ESMA’s First Phase The Officers’ Quarters is the one structure of ESMA that is dedicated especially to t hese embodied practices of visitation, where visitors are permitted to be in the a ctual space of death, where the most horrific of the dictatorship’s crimes w ere enacted decades ago. As a memory site, this structure has gone through two distinct periods of curation, each with its own challenges, and I w ill address t hose two phases in turn. In the first phase, which stretched from the moment that Kirchner reclaimed ESMA as a site of memory in 2004 to the opening of its first permanent exhibition in 2015, the Officers’ Quarters, like most former sites of mass atrocity when they are first reclaimed as memory sites, was an emptied space, so much so that without some sort of information to frame visitors’ experiences, it is unlikely or even impossible that they would be able to understand what the place was and how it functioned. As a result, the public entity that managed the Officers’ Quarters during this initial period, known as Instituto Espacio para la Memoria y para la Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (IEM), which was formed by three different groups—t he national government, the city government, and a handful of human rights organizations—h ad to decide how to contextualize this vacant space. This is a choice that must be made at e very former site of atrocity as it is being re-embodied as a site of memory.
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As I mentioned e arlier, although the infrastructure and architecture of the former military school still exist, the perpetrators sought to erase and cover up all evidence of the crimes they committed there when they vacated the space in the 1990s. A contentious debate ensued regarding what to do with the space. Some argued that maintaining this emptiness might be the best pos si ble response to the terrible things that occurred in the space. For example, Argentinian sociologist Horacio González writes, “Among all the ideas put forth to shatter classical representation, the idea of emptiness is the most significant. Somehow, emptiness would suppose . . . the possibility of underscoring the absence of that which was wrested away by the horror.” 26 Here, González asserts that highlighting the emptiness of the space may be the best way to represent what was lost through the violence that occurred there. González is also quick to note, however, that a move toward emptiness is not a passive decision; this emptiness “must be constructed, planned, and given architecture.” 27 Emptiness must be curated in the same way as a room filled with artifacts. In this first phase, the emptiness of the space was “given architecture” through the presence of informational placards in various rooms throughout the building. Some of these placards included architectural ground plans that showed how, for instance, the basement torture space was set up at various times throughout the operation of the camp. O thers gave brief descriptions of what occurred within particu lar rooms. Most of the placards, however, displayed the direct testimony of survivors describing what they experienced in the place where visitors w ere standing as they read the testimony. In this way, curators contextualized these spaces for visitors by foregrounding the individual stories of survivors. During this period at ESMA, the testimony of survivors served as the predominant mode of knowledge transmission, given that so little archival documentation exists or has been made public by the military. Even the ground plans featured in various rooms had been drawn based on survivor testimony. This focus on the subjective testimony of survivors in the construction of an objective historical narrative increased the ability of visitors to identify with the site; by focusing on individual stories rather than dates and figures, curators heightened the affective experience of being in the space through strengthening visitors’ connections with the victims’ experiences. One way the curators of ESMA managed this affective encounter was by controlling how people navigated the traumatic space. In the first phase of the Officers’ Quarters at ESMA, visitors could not tour the grounds of the site on their own; instead, it was the job of tour guides to lead visitors through the space. Choices made by curators as they led visitors through the emptied site contributed to the filling of a more metaphorical empty space within the visitor, which may best be described as the gap between what Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memory” and some more direct form of empathy or affective identification with the victim. 28 Landsberg develops the term “prosthetic memory” to describe those memories that are not necessarily experienced
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personally, but that are publicly circulated to the extent that they become an effective part of one’s own experience and subjectivity, the same way that a prosthetic limb becomes a functional part of its operator’s body. For Landsberg, prosthetic memory is connected intimately with modernity and mass media, which have allowed for the generalization of specific, subjective experiences to the masses. For example, because of its centrality in countless films, stories, telev ision shows, and other media, the Holocaust has become a part of the prosthetic memory of many. Prosthetic memory is not something experienced purely subjectively; instead, it is a concept that describes how the memory of certain events, especially traumatic ones, can be transferred all over the world, even to t hose who have no direct connection to that event. Although prosthetic memory can do a g reat deal in connecting people through a shared awareness of certain historical traumas, the notion of prosthetic memory speaks more to an intellectual awareness than to a shared affective state that is felt in the body. A more affective, embodied identification with the past or with the victims is what Marianne Hirsch describes as a key goal for postmemorial artists—subsequent generations of traumatized groups who attempt to transmit the memory of their forebears to o thers. Hirsch, who focuses especially on visual artists, writes, “The challenge for the postmemorial artist is precisely to allow the spectator to enter the image, to imagine the disaster ‘in one’s own body,’ yet to evade the transposition that erases distance, creating too available, too direct an access to this particu lar past.” 29 We can extend this same description of postmemorial work to the curators of memory sites. Rather than working through images alone, these “postmemorial artists” are working through the medium of the site of atrocity itself, recomposing it in such a way that the visitor can experience a traumatic past in their own body. There is a point, however, where the individual can be allowed too direct an access to this memory, according to Hirsch. For her, it is essential that there always remain a distance between the postmodern subject and the past they are encountering, so as not to make the individual believe that they are themselves the one that has been victimized. The inevitable and persistent existence of this divide, however, does not mean that o thers should not attempt to cross or at least minimize this divide through postmemorial practices. This line between encouraging the affective identification of the visitor without taking away from the experience of the victim is one that all postmemorial artists, including the curators of memory sites, must walk. During ESMA’s first phase as a memory site, tour guides w ere an essential component in managing the relationship between visitors and the site, for two reasons. First, because trials against the former perpetrators who worked at ESMA and other clandestine detention centers are still in prog ress, the site itself was described by the IEM website and by guides at the beginning of every tour as a crime scene, the evidence of which must be preserved. According to the IEM website and published information of the memory space,
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“certain security measures are taken during the tour in order to preserve its interior, considering that it is material evidence in the judicial trials that are being realized in the federal sphere.” 30 Statements like this one and the ones made by the guides served a dual purpose: not only did they promote the preservation of the space, but they also attested to its authenticity, heightening the affective experience of the visitor. Unlike at former Nazi concentration camps, where the trials of most perpetrators ended decades ago, justice pro cesses are ongoing in Argentina, so the visitor to this site understands it not only as a historic space but also one that directly impacts the present—a fact that also emphasizes the present nature of resonant violence. Second, guides were essential for contextualizing the building’s emptiness. The Officers’ Quarters in ESMA did not “look,” on its own, like a place of terror. Without a guide to explain to visitors what happened within various rooms along the tour, it is unlikely that visitors could grasp the full horror of what had occurred within the walls of the place. The basement of the building looked like any old basement u ntil the guide described the forced slave l abor and torture that occurred t here. The stain on the ground just looked like a mark on a basement floor u ntil the guide revealed it to be a blood stain. The attic space looked like an attic space u ntil the guide described the packed rows of prisoners, all covered in hoods, that once filled it. Guides also accompanied e very visitor to make sure they understood the complexity of what occurred in the space. The organizers of the tours w ere (and remain today) unashamed of acknowledging that they have a message to convey, and the site administrators wanted a trained and educated person with every visitor to answer the questions that inevitably come up when people visit sites like this. According to IEM, the guides were there to tell not only how ESMA functioned during the dictatorship, but also how it fits into a larger “political, social, cultural, and economic context.” 31 Even in sites of mass atrocity that are far less empty and lacking in context, site curators can still elect for visitors to be led through the site, rather than experiencing it on their own. Alicja Białecka, curator of the new exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and longtime guide of the notorious site, explained in an interview that it is their goal that every visitor “be led by another human through the traumatic encounter” with the site. 32 One reason for this, according to Białecka, is the importance of an individual having positive h uman contact when they are encountering the pinnacle of inhumanity. Affect scholar Teresa Brennan might describe this as an example of sharing an affective burden with another person, through which the affective weight of the experience of visiting Auschwitz is made less oppressive. 33 It could also be an example of balancing the negative affect of the space with the positive affect of a caring individual who is there to comfort the person who feels negatively affected. But this curatorial choice is not just based on compassion; it is also practical. Having guides lead all visitors through the site
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allows for a direct form of crowd management. As the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum welcomed some 2.32 million visitors in 2019, most between the months of March and October, 34 the guides (who are called “educators”) serve to move groups along and keep various cramped quarters from becoming too full. But the final reason is to convey a part icu lar message to the visitors. Białecka says: here is a certain philosophy, there is a certain message that we want to T pass to the visitors. And our message and the story, the history we are presenting is not—I hope and I am very much convinced that this is the case—it’s the most objective, historical truth about what happened h ere. [. . .] We are presenting it from the most objective perspective as is possi ble. So t here are also some ideological reasons why we would like every body to be introduced the way we think is the most appropriate one. 35 Białecka acknowledges that, beyond the practical purposes that guides accomplish, they can also serve an ideological purpose of conveying a specifically curated message to the visitor. In the case of Auschwitz, this curated message aims for complete objectivity, although it is perhaps impossible to ensure whether e very single guide can prevent their own thoughts, opinions, experiences, and biases from influencing their tours. The reliance on trained guides also reveals the general distrust (or at least caution) regarding alternative modes of knowledge transmission like embodied and (especially) affective experience. The prizing of verbal and written modes of knowledge transmission at t hese sites reveals an impulse on the part of the curators to balance the subjective, affective experience of being in the site of violence with archival, historical information and survivor testimony— t wo forms of knowledge transmission that seem less unwieldy and less open to individual interpretation. This curatorial move reflects a traditional prizing of the archive over the repertoire, as described in the previous chapter. 36 Despite efforts to frame each visitor’s experience by providing curated historical information, at every memory site practices of visitation are also greatly influenced by what visitors themselves bring to the site in the form of knowledge and preconceived opinions. Visitors to t hese spaces rarely just happen upon them. Rather, they know at least something of the history of the site, and that foreknowledge pushes them to visit the place in person. Unlike the former Nazi concentration camp sites, where the vast majority of visitors to the sites are from outside of the country where the sites are located—at Auschwitz in 2019, for instance, only about 17 percent of the visitors were from Poland 37—the sites in Argentina are visited mostly by Argentinians. According to the website for Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos, more than 200,000 people visit ESMA each year, including u nion members, politi cal parties, researchers, and students ranging from grade school to the university level, along with a wide array of other groups and individuals. B ecause of
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the differing demographic makeup of visitors to the sites, as well as the differences in historical proximity to the events encountered within these spaces, the types of practices where visitors confront their own preconceived notions and foreknowledge are different in ESMA and other Argentine sites than in the former Nazi concentration camps of Europe. Unlike at Holocaust sites, where the primary goal of educators is to convey historical information of the Holocaust so that it remains relevant even as the last of its survivors are now dying, many who visit ESMA already know the history of the place in one form or another. In fact, as the dictatorship ended only in 1983, many people who visit this site lived through this period of repression themselves. B ecause of this, the types of preconceived notions visitors bring to the site are of a completely different nature. Whereas the historical factuality of the Holocaust is nearly unanimously acknowledged (aside from the assertions of a very small subset of radicals), the memory of this period in Argentina is still u nder construction. ESMA is a piece in the puzzle of creating a historical narrative regarding the past, but that narrative is still being written by academics, activists, artists, the military (which still operates u nder a code of silence regarding this seven-year period), the courts (where t rials against perpetrators are ongoing), and the government itself (whose relationship to memory changes depending on the political party in power). It can be difficult to find a person in Argentina who was not directly impacted by the dictatorship in some way, w hether they had f amily members or friends who w ere disappeared or they w ere part of a military family. Thus, the practices through which these expectations and preformed ideas are encountered are unique to the context. From the beginning of every tour, both in the first phase and in the more recent phase of ESMA, guides make it clear that not only should visitors feel f ree to ask questions, but they should also share the ideas and knowledge that they have. Whereas in the case of Auschwitz guides/educators are framed as the keepers of “the most objective” version of history, the exact opposite can be true in the case of ESMA. Because many visitors have a direct relationship to the violence of the dictatorship, guides look at visitors as potential sources of objective and subjective information that can aid in the mission of the space. This is especially true given that many of the guides are university students, and so did not personally live through this period of Argentine history, unlike many visitors. The IEM website stated that they do not only seek to inform visitors through the tour, but also to encourage “the participation, debate, and reflection of everyone who visits the place.” This openness to accepting different accounts of past violence contributes to the construction of a collective memory narrative, but it can also lead to conflict and discord. Despite potential disagreements, however, this philosophy acknowledges a central aspect of collective memory formation that other sites might try to ignore through the goal of presenting an objective truth. As memory scholar
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James E. Young writes, “Given the inevitable variety of competing memories, we may never actually share a common memory at these sites but only the common place of memory, where each of us is invited to remember in his [sic] own way.” 38 In general, Young eschews the idea of collective memory, instead opting for a notion of “collected memories.” Although Young tends to describe memory sites as places for individual reflection, the philosophy of the guides at ESMA demonstrates that they can also be spaces of encountering others and the memories they bring with them. In lieu of physical objects to fill ESMA, these conversations and debates among guides and visitors helped transform ESMA into a living embodiment of “memory u nder construction,” as Argentinian artist Marcelo Brodsky describes it. 39 Even as ESMA became a more traditionally curated memory site in its second phase, this spirit of active engagement with the past remains a focus for the site’s leadership. ESMA’s Second Phase One might argue that ESMA’s second phase as a memory site began in 2014, when the tripartite governance structure of the IEM was dissolved, and the entire management of the site was transferred to the national government—a move that was met with some level of controversy by human rights activists.40 More visibly, however, this phase begins with the opening of the first public exhibition in the Officers’ Quarters in 2015. Since this point, the Officers’ Quarters has been known as Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA (ESMA Memory Site Museum). Of course, the work of creating the exhibition that now fills the memory site began several years before its opening, in 2013. Consequently, the team responsible for the space’s curation began their work before the change in site management. The curators on this team included Naftal, the current executive director of Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA, and architect Hernán Bisman. According to Naftal, their work was largely unimpacted by the management change. For the purposes of this chapter, then, my distinction of the “phases” of ESMA has less to do with management entity than with what visitors encountered at the site. In designing the permanent exhibition, Naftal and Bisman w ere directly confronted with the challenges that have accompanied the evolution of memorial practice described in the previous chapter. They needed to decide what balance they would strike between creating an informational space and an affective environment. Contrary to some of the memorials described in the previous chapter, which seek to provoke an affective response in visitors partly because the site of the memorial itself has no direct connection to the violence it is representing, former sites of atrocity do not need to work as hard to produce this affective response. Because the site is already endowed with a certain level of “authenticity”—that is, with a genuine connection to the violence it represents—the affective work is largely done through visitors’ own knowledge of being present in such a space. The challenge for the curators, then, is
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balancing that affective force with the need to provide historical context and information. In Naftal’s words, the site needed to be a space not only for the transmission of affect, but also “the transmission of values.” 41 This approach was not a foregone conclusion, however. Naftal says: here w T ere many when we w ere making the present at ions [of the exhibition design], for example, a Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, who said to us, “I want the people who go to that place to suffer just as my son suffered, to feel hunger, to feel pain.” [. . .] We said, “No. We are not going to construct a concentration camp.” We must evoke, approximate an experience, but we must not allow the person to succumb to that pain, but to give them also a way out so that they can reflect upon what they have experienced.42 For Naftal, herein lies the distinction between presenting violence and representing violence. Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA has a mission to explain to visitors the human rights violations that occurred in the space in order that they not be v iolated again. If the space were to become only a site for the transmission of affect, whereby visitors feel as though they experience the pain that the victims experienced (as if that w ere possible), it could not also be a site for the transmission of the values the curators hope to communicate. Likewise, if it were only a space of information that failed to acknowledge or take advantage of the emotional experience of “being there,” it would also fail to utilize its inherent “power of place.” The curators of sites-of-atrocity-cum-sites-of- memory, then, are always taking part in a delicate dance between affect and information, utilizing both to achieve the site’s mission. In its first phase, ESMA was characterized by its emptiness; now, the permanent exhibition has filled that void with ample informational displays, multimedia present at ions, and objects to communicate the crimes of the dictatorship through the stories of what occurred within ESMA itself. The emptiness of the first phase required that visitors be accompanied by a guide to contextualize the emptiness. In the second phase, although guided group tours are still available, visitors are also invited to explore the site on their own. The newly curated exhibition was designed to do the work that the tour guide performed in the first phase, making the experience of visiting the site much more accessible, even if it lacks the personal interaction one had in the first phase. As with all memory sites, in determining what to display in ESMA’s permanent exhibition, the options w ere delimited by what the perpetrators destroyed and left b ehind.43 At the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, perhaps the most notorious component of the exhibition is its display of the so- called Evidence of Crimes. In this section of the exhibition, visitors encounter the objects stolen from Jewish victims before they w ere murdered, including their shoes, suitcases, eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, and even their hair. The
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sheer scale of the piles of objects communicates to visitors the scale of the vio lence wrought within the camps. For many, it is the most impactful aspect of their visit to Auschwitz. In the case of ESMA, however, the perpetrators did not leave such evidence behind. The military adeptly disposed of most physical evidence, including the human remains of its victims. Without such objects to fill the space, the curators needed to determine other ways to fill the emptiness of ESMA, and they have done so with text, images, and video. The first element visitors encounter on their tour of the exhibition is now an immersive film that introduces them to the historical context of the dictatorship. This film is not a documentary, however. It lacks a clear narrative, opting instead for flashes of headlines, clips of news broadcasts, jarring sound effects, and an affecting musical score. It is difficult to imagine that someone with no prior information would walk away from this film fully understanding the complex history of the Argentinian military dictatorship. Memory scholar Kaitlin M. Murphy describes the experience of watching the film: “With the sound and light coming from multiple a ngles, it was all but impossible to quickly skim through the words and images on the walls. Instead, the viewer was positioned to absorb the images and sounds as they came.” 44 This film, in other words, does not intend to educate; rather, it places the viewer in a certain emotional space to view the remainder of the exhibition. Following the film, visitors encounter the first few rooms of the exhibition, which use informational panels and photog raphs to provide a broad overview of the military dictatorship, including its historical precedents and the role played by foreign powers, like the United States and France. In subsequent rooms, panels with text and images, often including written descriptions from the testimony of survivors, explain what occurred in each room. Certain rooms also make compelling use of multimedia technology. One room, known as la Pecera, or the Fishbowl, was once the room in which items confiscated by the military were stored. Because those items have been lost, the curators opted to project images representing these items on the wall of this room. The projections alternate between piles of electronics, furniture, and other household items and valuables that were taken by the military—just one example of how the curators have creatively responded to the emptiness left behind by the perpetrators. One particularly impor t ant aspect of the exhibition, however, is the nature of the survivor testimony the curators use and the manner in which they use it. I mentioned earlier that, in the first phase of ESMA, tour guides began e very tour by describing the site as a source of evidence for ongoing trials. Now, in the second phase, the permanent exhibition makes an even more direct connection between the site of ESMA and the processes of transitional justice still in prog ress. As I w ill explain further in the next chapter, in 2005, after a two-decade period of impunity, the state reopened trials
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3.2. Permanent exhibition in Capucha, with a wooden walkway for visitors that protects the floor underneath. Photo courtesy of Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA
against the perpetrators of the dictatorship, and now over 1,200 accused perpetrators have been brought to justice. Many rooms in ESMA now feature telev ision screens that play the actual testimony of survivors during these ongoing court cases. In t hese video compilations, visitors see survivors on the witness stand describing their experiences in the room in which the visitor is standing. Unlike the survivor testimonies in phase one, which were simple quotations written on placards, these testimonies play a double role. First, they convey the victim’s experience to the visitor in a way that both informs and facilitates affective identification. Second, and simult aneously, they demonstrate the performativity of the site of ESMA, which is not only a memorial to past violence, but also a tool for justice in the present. Many sites of memory include videos of survivor testimony, but these videos are usually filmed in a more informal context. Survivors tell their stories to an interviewer for the express purpose of documenting their experience. The testimonies at ESMA, however, were given in a much more formal context. Their purpose was not merely to transmit memory, but to seek justice. The stories of the survivors of ESMA, then, are not wholly of the past. Rather, they continue to be activated in the present, asked to perform. In other words, the use of court testimony in the exhibition illustrates the resonating impacts of past violence and the manner in which the construction of sites of memory—a nd ESMA, in particular—contribute to its transduction.
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3.3. Audiovisual display in the Salón Dorado. Photo courtesy of Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA
The importance of the site as evidence is highlighted in both the physical and conceptual design of the exhibition. The physical design reinforces this point in that it does not in any way alter the physical structure of the building—a fact that is made clear both in the text of the permanent exhibition and by guides. According to the initial proposal for the permanent exhibition, the curators’ plan “is a proposal that does not touch the building. It intervenes upon it with lightness and respect. The building in itself contains a g reat communicational potential to be the only material testimony u ntil this moment.” Consequently, none of the informational displays appear on the walls themselves. Rather, everything in the permanent exhibition is freestanding and does not interfere with the building’s structure. Many of the rooms even have wooden walkways above the a ctual floor so that visitors do not touch the floor itself. The final room of the permanent exhibition makes this connection between the building and ongoing processes of transitional justice even more explicit. The Salón Dorado (Golden Room) is one of the largest rooms in ESMA and was once used as a ceremonial hall by the military (figure 3.3). It is now empty—much emptier, in fact, than most of the museum, free even of informational displays. Instead, it hosts an impressive audiovisual installation of the ongoing trials against military perpetrators who worked in ESMA during the dictatorship. The only objects in the room are a series of empty portrait frames resting on the floor on the side walls of the room. A fter visitors enter, the lights in the room dim and the presentation begins. Ominous m usic resonates
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throughout the large space, and the empty picture frames are filled with the projected images of military officers—perpetrators of the crimes of ESMA. Naftal explained to me that the decision to place the frames on the floor, rather than hanging on the wall, was a symbolic one, representing that these military officers are no longer celebrated with their portraits adorning the walls of ESMA. Taking them off the walls and placing them on the floor also alludes to the watershed moment in 2004 when Kirchner ordered the portrait of Rafael Videla taken off the wall of ESMA and, subsequently, opened the doors of the site to the public. The m usic suddenly stops, and visitors hear the amplified sound of typewriter keys as typed letters appear on the walls around them. Visitors read that the perpetrators projected into the frames are those who have been brought to justice. Text next to each portrait details the horrific acts each perpetrator performed. Finally, a white stamp appears across the face of each perpetrator describing the current status of each: CONDENADO (“convicted”) or JUICIO EN CURSO (“trial in prog ress”). The music starts again, and a new set of perpetrators fills the frames as this presentat ion continues through several more rounds of m usic and typewriter text. By ending the tour with this presentat ion, the curators of the site ensure that visitors do not see the violence of ESMA as fully past but understand its resonating impacts. The present at ion directly ties the story of ESMA and the factuality of the site itself to the ongoing processes whereby Argentina is confronting this past violence. Murphy writes, “This room is both the affective culmination of the tour and the bridge into the present. Because it comes at the end and registers on a different temporal and emotional key than the rest of the building, it significantly shapes the impression with which the visitor departs.” 45 Just as the violence of torture, detainment, and disappearance continues to resonate for the victims and their families, so too are its effects felt by the perpetrators as they reckon with their crimes, and by Argentine society as a whole as it accounts for this past violence by reinforcing the rule of law, ensuring that all perpetrators be brought to justice for their crimes. On a regular basis, these elements of the permanent exhibition are supplemented by creative temporary exhibitions that explore specific aspects of ESMA and its history. For instance, one temporary exhibition in 2018 dealt specifically with the connection between ESMA and the 1978 World Cup, which was hosted by Argentina. ESMA is located only blocks away from the soccer stadium that hosted the World Cup Final, which Argentina won. In fact, it was so close that survivors of ESMA testify to hearing the fans cheering from within the camp.46 This special exhibition explored how the military dictatorship used the World Cup to obscure the massive human rights violations that were occurring during the period. Their victory in the sporting event diverted global attention from the disappearances occurring amid the championship. We w ill return to this story later in this chapter.
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3.4. Example of revisions made to the permanent exhibition to include a gender-sensitive lens as part of the “Ser Mujeres en la ESMA” temporary exhibition. Photo courtesy of Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA
More recently, ESMA introduced an even more innovative temporary exhibition called “Ser Mujeres en la ESMA: Testimonios para Volver a Mirar” (“Being Women in ESMA: Testimonies for a Second Look”). As the title makes clear, this 2019 temporary exhibition focused on the experiences of women in ESMA, exploring the gendered aspects of the violence of the period. Rather than exploring this topic only within the bounds of the temporary exhibition, however, the curators challenged themselves to review the entire permanent exhibition, asking where the experience of women was diminished or omitted. Instead of simply revising and replacing the texts of the permanent exhibition to amend t hese errors, the curators decided to make them highly visible. They annotated the permanent exhibition texts much in the same way a teacher corrects a text—by crossing out, adding, and revising directly onto the panels (figure 3.4). All these proofreading marks w ere printed to look like handwriting in the color purple, the internationally recognized color for women. In some cases, the revisions w ere small, altering the masculine ending of words to also include feminine endings: for example, “torturados” was changed to include “torturadas.” On other panels, entire new texts or survivor testimonies were added to describe specifically gendered aspects of each room. For instance, new text was added in the entry hall that specifically stated, “Here, w omen w ere subjected to many forms of sexual violence only because of their gender,” a fact that had not been explicitly stated previously.
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This intervention into the permanent exhibition is import ant for a number of reasons. Most obviously, it illuminates the ways in which women suffered differently and specifically during the military dictatorship. There is also a broader importance to the intervention, however. The act of publicly revising a permanent exhibition that only opened several years prior acknowledges that memory always has its blind spots. Moreover, it is not something that is decided upon and then remains static. It is a process that continues to evolve as society itself evolves. Argentinian memory scholar Elizabeth Jelin asserts that a key feature of memory is its mutability, owing to its deep connection to the present time and place. As the present changes, so too does one’s relationship to the past. She writes, “[Meanings] attached to the past change over time and are part of larger, complex social and political scenarios.” 47 To their credit, this is a reality that ESMA’s curators acknowledged from the beginning. In their initial proposal for the permanent exhibition, they describe their proposal as “open and prolonged.” They write, “A museum is an institution in a permanent state of growth. It is additive, both in its form and content. This implies, in the future, the incorporation of new rooms, information centers, documentary sources, and other actions.” 48 The gendered intervention in the space is a living enactment of this claim. It demonstrates the liveness of memory, just as it teaches visitors that “dealing with the past” is an ongoing process, and one that we do not always “get right” from the start. It opens spaces for new interventions and explorations, and it asks visitors to interpret the space through their own eyes, turning them into agents who play a crucial role in the construction of public memory. Through curatorial interventions like these, visitors become not just visitors but actors in the creation of memory. They do not only encounter the past; they activate it. And the site of ESMA has provided a space for them to do so in many other ways as well, to which I now turn. Activating th e Past A memory site is more than a place for visitors to encounter the past; it is also a place for them to activate the past in the present through their own embodied practices. One of the ways this occurs is through spontaneous acts of memorialization. In former Nazi concentration camps, one of the most common of these practices is the placement of stones throughout the sites. Based on the Jewish tradition of laying stones on gravesites, visitors often create their own spontaneous shrines by placing small stones on various pillars, walls, or monuments within the memorial sites.49 Through a simple act, the placement of stones offers a way for visitors to alter the landscape of the memory site, consequently asserting a form of agency. Because the sheer immensity of the death that visitors encounter in these spaces leads to a feeling of helplessness in many, placing stones is a means of overcoming a sense of paralysis by honoring the victims and demonstrating an active commitment to remember. Furthermore, given that the placement of stones is a well-k nown
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Jewish tradition, those who place the stones also join in a communal act, identifying themselves not only with the Jewish victims of the camps, but also with Jewish visitors, past and present. The formation of such a community is one mode of overcoming the atomization that these camps made manifest when they were in operation. Memory sites can also host practices of memorialization that are less material and more embodied in nature. ESMA, in particu lar, opens up vast spaces for interpreting the past through embodied means. In fact, not only are creative, embodied practices of interpretation encouraged, they have been institutionalized. As I mentioned earlier, ESMA is a large complex with thirty-four buildings. One of those buildings, the Officers’ Quarters, is now the site of the Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA. When ESMA was reclaimed, however, decisions needed to be made about what to do with the thirty-t hree other buildings on the site. One of those buildings has become the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti (Haroldo Conti Cultural Center of Memory, hereafter, el Conti). Named a fter an Argentinian writer and professor who was disappeared in 1976, el Conti hosts an incredible array of artistic events and perform ances, including film screenings, theater, dance, concerts, and art exhibitions. Although many of t hese events and present at ions deal directly with the dictatorship, the only requirement for them to be hosted by el Conti is that they address the broader theme of memory in some way. The openness of this mandate leads to a diversity of perform ances and exhibitions. For instance, during a single month of my field research in Buenos Aires, el Conti hosted a video installation called Proyecto Genocida (Perpetrator Proj ect), which featured archival images of the victims of genocides and violent conflicts around the world; a theatrical perform ance called Cuerpo Quebrado (Broken Body), which followed the story of three w omen disappeared in the Chilean military dictatorship; a series of collages dealing with Nunca Más, the 1984 Argentine truth commission that investigated the crimes of the dictatorship; and a tango concert by a premier Argentinian tango singer. It may not be immediately clear what the purpose is of hosting a tango concert in this former site of torture and death—or, for many, w hether that is even appropriate. The mission statement of el Conti explains the reasoning behind t hese curatorial choices. Found on el Conti’s website, it states, “Transforming what was once an emblematic site of privation, exclusion, and death into an open space for the community is the greatest commitment and challenge to contribute to the construction of memory, truth, and justice.” According to this mission statement, then, exactly what the site hosts is less import ant than the very fact of opening the space to the public, which serves to re-present or re-sound the past in the present. In an August 2013 conversation with Eduardo Jozami, the then government-appointed national director of el Conti, he admitted that the process of opening a cultural center within the space of ESMA was not
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necessarily easy at the beginning. He stated: “In the beginning, working here posed a certain difficulty, in the first moments. It is a space that everyone enters with an attitude of prevention, of respect, of fear, with an almost religious attitude at times. [. . .] It was difficult in the beginning to think how the activity in the cultural center would develop.” 50 Here, Jozami evokes a consistent theme with sites of mass atrocity: the idea that they are sacred space. In fact, Jack Kugelmass has coined the term “secular ritual” to describe the practice of visiting former sites of atrocity.51 According to Kugelmass, those who visit these sites often speak in terms of the religious motif of pilgrimage, though the motivations for visiting are more directed t oward secular purposes, like reinforcing group solidarity, than any religious purpose. The “sacred” nature of t hese spaces is often tied to the fact that so many p eople died at t hese sites. Guides at Auschwitz, for instance, continually refer to the space as “the largest cemetery in the world.” The curators of these spaces must confront this attitude toward the sites, as it greatly influences the sorts of practices that can occur within the spaces—a point to which I w ill return later. Although there were always p eople who spoke against the inclusion of cultural activities in ESMA, asking instead that the space be only a memorial to the victims, Jozami said that, for most of the public, this attitude changed over time. He continued: It would not be v iable in the long run to maintain a place like this where people gather just to keep growing the grass. But moreover, the fundamental thing is that we want the cultural activities that are realized in places like this to be a testimony to the process of memory. And we know they are because the sites of memory across the country that do not have cultural centers . . . still host cultural activities. Because it is difficult to think of what other t hing could be t here.52 According to Jozami, for ESMA to be worthy of maintenance, it requires a certain level of activity. That hosting cultural activities is a proper direction for the site to take is proven by the fact that, even in former clandestine detention centers without cultural centers, cultural activities have become an essential aspect of their programming. Reshaping public space and the ways p eople engage with it is a key tool for both perpetrator regimes and those working to transduce resonant vio lence in their aftermath. According to the authors of Memorias en la ciudad, a book that documents over three hundred memory sites across the city of Buenos Aires, “The urban landscape has always been a field for the expression of social conflicts, and the State has intervened upon it at numerous opportunities, seeking to design it as a medium of control and discipline, in an effort to structure not only the space, but also the ways the space is used, thus regulating the practices and modes of inhabiting it.” 53 During the dictatorship in Argentina, public space became a battlefield upon which a greater social war
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was waged. The restriction of public space, the regulation of who could move through it and how, and the effort to conceal places where the worst crimes were happening was commonplace not only during Argentina’s last dictatorship, but in all repressive regimes. This shutting down of public space contributes to a breaking down of the social body, forcing it to fragment or atomize, as t here is no space within which the collective body can present itself. El Conti, then, is a way of refiguring that closed-down public space. ESMA has become a synecdochical symbol for all the crimes of the dictatorship, in much the same way that Auschwitz has become a symbol for all the crimes of the Holocaust. Not only was it a site of around five thousand disappearances and many more instances of torture and slave labor, but it was also—both before and a fter the dictatorship—a site that belonged to the perpetrators and was used for their own training and discipline. As such, it is both a space where crimes occurred and a space that was central in the planning and preparation of t hose crimes before the dictatorship and in the covering up of those crimes a fter the dictatorship ended. Now, with the institution of el Conti, the space has transformed into an active component of the public sphere. Various events are held six days a week at el Conti, and admission to everyt hing is completely f ree. It also has a cafe, where p eople gather for after noon meetings or for a coffee before a perform ance, and a bookshop, where people can purchase books on topics related to memory, Argentine history, and politics. Since its opening in 2008, this cultural center has become an active and vibrant component of city life in Buenos Aires. In essence, el Conti is a performative act of defiance against the destruction of the dictatorship. It is a revolt against the thousands of lives that w ere destroyed on the grounds of ESMA, not to mention the tens of thousands of o thers who were killed or imprisoned across the country. By filling this space of death with the vibrancy of the arts, along with the large audiences t hese exhibitions and perform ances attract, this once-restricted space has become, for the first time, truly public. By opening a space in the public sphere where p eople can interact, engage, debate, and remember, it undoes some of the force of resonant violence and its ability to isolate populations. The space resonates with the public in new ways, transducing resonant violence and re-attuning individuals’ relationships to a violent past. The artistic practices of el Conti are not the only instance of a vibrant response to such a somber past. Many of ESMA’s thirty-four buildings house various activist organizations, each with its own mission for the propagation and support of human rights. One of these organizations is the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which I mentioned earlier. Both branches of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo—A sociación de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora—have offices there, as does H.I.J.O.S., an activist group to which I w ill return in the next chapter. One building in ESMA houses the National Archive of Memory, which contains documents and audiovisual
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material relating to the dictatorship. Each of these organizations uses ESMA as a hub for carryi ng out its own specific set of practices that relate to the positive transformation of resonant violence into policies that promote and raise awareness for human rights in the present. Through their work, the affective force of resonant violence is transduced. Its very substance is altered. What was once destructive and isolating becomes, through the practices that take place on the grounds of ESMA, a source for community and the celebration of basic rights. Aside from t hese more institutionalized forms of activating the past, ESMA also hosts an array of formal and informal ad hoc events that recognize and respond to resonant violence. One such event, hosted by the IEM before its dissolution, took place in 2008 on the thirtieth anniversary of the 1978 World Cup Final, in which Argentina defeated the Netherlands to claim the World Cup. This match was more than a small moment of celebration amidst the repression of the dictatorship, however. It was an opportunity that the military junta used to show the world that all was fine in Argentina. As Alicia Herbón, member of the Argentine Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, puts it, “The perpetrators used soccer, that popular sentiment that we have always shared, as a way of showing the world that they were ‘right and humane’ [derechos y humanos, a play on derechos humanos, or “human rights”] and that the dictatorship was not repressive, that what was being said outside of the country was not true.” 54 Indeed, the public exaltation surrounding the World Cup victory did a g reat deal in distracting the world and Argentina’s soccer- obsessed population from the po l iti cal vio lence happening around them. In response to this historic event and in honor of the disappeared whose lives were taken from them at the same moment in which Argentina was cheering its national soccer team to victory, IEM hosted La otra final: El partido por la vida y los derechos humanos (The Other Final: The Match for Life and Human Rights), a symbolic soccer match to remember the thirty thousand disappeared. Thousands of p eople met at ESMA, including representatives from major human rights organizations and the government, as well as well-k nown figures in politics, sports, and the arts. The group unraveled a banner that stretched for several city blocks, featuring the photog raphs of thousands of disappeared people. Flanking both sides of the banner, the group marched from ESMA to the football stadium where the World Cup final was played thirty years prior. As the group marched into the stadium, the song “Otra Voz Canta” (“Another Voice Sings”) by Daniel Viglietti and Circe Maia filled the stadium, along with the supportive cheers of many who gathered in the stands of the stadium. One large section of the stands remained completely empty but for a huge banner that read “30,000 Detained-Disappeared: Present!” Likewise, the box seats where the junta leaders sat during the World Cup final w ere left empty and cordoned off as a symbol of condemnation. Two teams played an exhibition
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match of two twenty-five-m inute halves as the crowd cheered them on. The teams w ere formed by a variety of players, including three players from the 1978 national team, former political prisoners and detainees of the dictatorship, c hildren of several families that went into exile during the dictatorship, and the Argentine national youth (Under-20) league. The match was broadcast live on telev ision and the national radio station so people across the country could attend remotely. A fter the match ended in a 1–1 tie, there was a concert where several musicians performed for the crowd.55 La Otra Final is an especially intriguing practice because of the way it connects several affective states that seem, at first glance, to be contradictory. Tying the memorialization of thirty thousand disappeared individuals to the joy of a soccer match may seem to some an affront to the memory of t hose who w ere killed, but it is exemplary of an enduring tradition of memory practice in Argentina relating to the dictatorship—one that revels in making use of cherished cultural practices like soccer and m usic concerts to aid in the difficult task of remembering those who have been lost. Indeed, the organizers and participants in La Otra Final w ere quite aware of this contradiction. According to the organizers, “To reclaim all the victims of this planned massacre, it was decided that the activity of La Otra Final would begin with a march that connected t hese two extreme places, which synthesized at a tragically symbolic level the agony and the celebration of the people put down by state terrorism.” 56 While the dictatorship was using the soccer match to distract from the crimes happening simultaneously at ESMA, this march was meant to highlight the connection between t hese two places. In An Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich analyzes the deep connections between trauma and affect, challenging the idea that trauma can only be attached to affects of sadness and pain. Instead, she examines trauma “as a category that embraces a range of affects, including not just loss and mourning but also anger, shame, humor, sentimentality, and more.” 57 Cvetkovich argues that it is this range of affects that leads to the formation of new public cultures. These publics are created exactly through the transmissibility of affect and through the shared experiences and connections created through that transmissibility.58 Practices like La Otra Final acknowledge the multi- dimensional nature of trauma, embracing the fact that affects of despair can exist alongside affects of celebration—a nd that these shared affects can create communities. Juan Pablo Olsson, a participant in the match who was representing the group Hijas e Hijos del Exilio (Daughters and Sons of Exile), an organization of people whose families had to flee the country during the dictatorship, acknowledged these dueling affective states when he said, “The emotions were mixed. On the one hand, I had a lump in my throat, thinking of our history. But at the same time, I felt a profound sense of pride in representing the group Hijas e Hijos del Exilio in that event, together with the rest of the human rights organizations. I felt like many demons were being
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exorcised.” 59 Olsson highlights more than the ability for seemingly opposing affects to exist in the same moment; he also illustrates how this affect is experienced viscerally, through the body. The physical presence of the lump in his throat is how he describes the negative affect associated with his country’s history. But he also “feels” the sense of pride and the exorcising of demons through his bodily participation in the event. T hese individually felt affects extend outward to the social body as well. t hese contrasting emotional stances to exist alongside one Allowing another does more than “exorcise demons.” It contributes to the larger project of addressing resonant violence in ways that have become especially pertinent in the Argentine context. Practices like La Otra Final fill the vacuum left by genocidal violence—which works to destroy and isolate its victims—w ith vibrant forms of active living and modes of political engagement that might not have ever existed had it not been for the violence that sought to quell them. This first point resonates with cultural studies scholar Emily Klein’s notion of citizenship in the twenty-fi rst century. According to Klein, in con temporary, globalized society, citizenship “is increasingly being thought of and studied as an embodied act, a dynamic set of beh aviors, and a category of live (and lived) per for m ance.” 60 Thinking about citizenship as a performed mode of being rather than as a legal category provides a new framework for understanding public forms of engagement, dissent, and activism. Practices like La Otra Final, then, represent what Klein would call “spectacular citizenship,” a particularly conspicuous mode of engaged, civic participation that demonstrates the visibility of a people and a cause through spectacle. Spectacular citizenship, especially in cases that respond to the presence of resonant vio lence, is import ant because it allows for p eople to conceive of themselves outside of the role of the “victim-citizen,” a traditionally passive and powerless position.61 Instead, collectives resort to spectacular displays of public affect to reclaim the agency taken from them—both as citizens and as h uman beings. This level of public passion would be difficult to generate solely through negative affect, even if negative emotions like resentment and indignation have played a key role in countless processes of social and political transformation in the aftermath of large-scale violence.62 By allowing powerf ul positive emotions to exist alongside the negatively affective emotions of sadness and loss, however, participants in these practices create enduring connections among themselves. Furthermore, the spectacularly visible displays they create allow the resonating effects of their performed citizenship to extend beyond those participating directly to the wider public. A specific example of spectacular citizenship from La Otra Final is the act of carrying the banner with the photog raphs of the disappeared from ESMA to the stadium. According to one mother of a disappeared child who participated in the march, this act was “like taking our disappeared out of ESMA.”
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This statement, along with the reserved bank of seating at the stadium for the thirty thousand disappeared, recalls a constant theme in memory practices in Argentina relating to the dictatorship: the notion that the disappeared are not gone but still present. This notion was first articulated by the M others of Plaza de Mayo, who began the practice of calling out the names of their disappeared children, as the w hole group would yell, “¡Presente!,” as c hildren do during a roll call in school. For Taylor, this “¡Presente!” is more than an interjection; it is a performative calling-into-being of a community. She writes that it “conveys the ontological condition that one is/we are never fully present alone, and plurality always entails singularity.” 63 Declaring yourself present implies that t here is a community to whom you are accountable, just as it asserts your own individual presence and obligation to that community. When Argentinians today cry out that their thirty thousand disappeared brothers and sisters are “¡Presente!,” they refute the resonant violence that tears communities apart. No, not even the dead are truly gone. They remain part of a living community that is committed to honoring their memory by rooting out the negative effects of the resonant violence that contributed to their deaths. The defining slogan of the M others, “Aparición con vida,” through which the Mothers demand the return of their children alive, also evokes this idea that the disappeared are not dead and that practices like these serve to make their presence known. This message is echoed in the lyrics of “Otra Voz Canta,” the song that played as marchers entered the stadium, by Uruguayan poet Circe Maia and Argentinian singer Daniel Viglietti: Por detrás de mi voz— Escucha, escucha— Otra voz canta.
Behind my voice— Listen, listen— Another voice sings.
Viene de atrás, de lejos, Viene de sepultadas Bocas, y canta.
It comes from b ehind, from far away, It comes from buried Mouths, and it sings.
Dicen que no están muertos— Escúchalos, escucha— Mientras se alza la voz Que los recuerda y canta.
They say that they are not dead— Listen to them, listen— As the voice that recalls them Rises and sings.
Dicen que ahora viven En tu mirada. Sostenlos con tus ojos, Con tus palabras; Sostenlos con tu vida Que no se pierdan, Que no se caigan.
They say that they live now In your glance. You sustain them with your eyes, With your words; You sustain them with your life So that they are not lost, So that they are not fallen.
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No son sólo memoria, Son vida abierta. Continua y ancha, Son camino que empieza.
They are not only a memory, They are life ongoing. Continuous and wide, They are the journey that begins.
Cantan conmigo, Conmigo cantan.
They sing with me, With me they sing.
This song, written as a tribute to the disappeared, stresses that the dead are not dead at all. Their voices call out, declaring that they are still alive, that they have not been lost. In an emotional transposition of words, Viglietti says that the disappeared sing with him, but also that they sing through him, through his body (“Cantan conmigo / Conmigo cantan”). Similarly, La Otra Final is an example of a practice that re-embodies the dis appeared, presence- ing them, both through highlighting their absence (in the empty stands reserved for them) and by symbolically carrying them out of the place of their torture and death to a place of joy. They were unable to celebrate as their team won the World Cup Championship in 1978, but now there is another final being played (just like there is “another voice singing”), and this one is especially for them. This staging of conflicting emotions transduces the resonant violence produced in the past through a collective stand against such violence in the pre sent. Taty Almeida, one of the leaders of the group Madres de Plaza de Mayo— Linea Fundadora, beautifully describes the act of transducing resonant violence when she says, “I felt like we w ere going to clean the stadium.” 64 Through a collective, embodied practice, a spectacular display of joy and commitment, the stadium is expunged of its dirty past. It again becomes a place for community and passionate living. In other words, participants convert the enduring effects of resonant violence into new sources of power and agency. Embracing ambivalent emotions through practices of transduction also demonstrates that the transformation of resonant violence does not have to be only a painful act, but can be a pleasu rable one as well. With practices like La Otra Final and sites like el Conti, transforming resonant violence is more than a laborious task—it can be joyful. Filling spaces like ESMA with positive affect is a remarkably fitting response to the violence of the dictatorship, given that the affective life of the prisoners there was a particu lar target for the perpetrators’ wrath. For instance, in Club Atlético, another clandestine detention center in operation at the beginning of the dictatorship, perpetrators punished prisoners with isolated sequestration for exhibiting any form of emotion. Laughing, smiling, and crying w ere all impeachable offenses; in the continuing effort to destroy their humanity, prisoners were forced to remain completely without affect.65 Given this history of dehumanization through de-emotionalization, focusing on the cultivation of multiple forms of affect— mournful and celebratory—is a particularly appropriate mode of transducing the resonant violence such processes created.
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Disputing the Past Although La Otra Final and the festive affect surrounding it were met with g reat support and celebration nationally, not every group practice that involves ESMA has been so universally lauded. On August 31, 2013, a group from Argentina’s Secretariat of H uman Rights joined the h uman rights group H.I.J.O.S. in organizing a barbeque within and next to the building that has been allotted to the group on the property of ESMA. A street band (murga) played music to accompany the festivities. This event incited public outrage, especially because this barbeque was happening at the same time as a guided tour of the Officers’ Quarters. The building in which the barbeque took place was not a building where any of the h uman rights violations occurred, but the tour group did have to walk past this building on its way to the Officers’ Quarters. The subsequent debate sparked by this event was contentious. T hose who were against the barbeque argued that it served to banalize the space and disrespect the memories of those who died there. María Laura Bretal, a w oman who was on the tour of ESMA that day who was also an ex-detainee herself, stated, “In this re-encounter [with ESMA], a street band stopped me from relating with the disappeared that were denigrated, tortured, and murdered t here.” 66 For Bretal, the emotional environment created by the street band conflicted too greatly with the emotional environment that she desired from the memory site. T hese two polar sensations were too dissonant for her, and therefore could not live simult aneously in the same place. The group Asociación de Ex- Detenidos Desaparecidos (AEDD) went even further in its condemnation of the event. In a press release they sent out after the barbeque, they wrote, “The barbeques in ESMA have only one meaning: the burning of the corpses of our dead comrades in torture or resis tance in the moment of their sequestration.” 67 While the dictatorship did, on some occasions, dispose of victims’ bodies through burning them in what they would ironically call asaditos (“little barbeques”), the death flights were always the primary means of disposal at ESMA. This analogy between the barbeques and the crimes of ESMA, however, does not only recall Argentina’s own history, but also connects Argentina’s genocide with the Holocaust, where the bodies of millions of Jews and other prisoners w ere cremated a fter being killed. Some visitors made this same connection in an argument that broke out on the day of the barbeque with some attendees. T hose who defended the barbeque, however, argued that the building where it took place was not the site of murder or torture. When the state officials w ere questioned about holding the barbeque on the grounds of ESMA, one official replied, “You were horrified, but do you want us to leave 34 buildings empty?” One ex-detained person replied, “Do you know how many buildings t here are in Auschwitz?”
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To this, the official responded, “T here was extermination, but h ere no one was 68 murdered.” To be fair, the official was correct: during the dictatorship, t here is record of p eople being murdered and tortured only within the one building of this vast complex. These impulses to connect the crimes of the dictatorship with the crimes of the Holocaust, however, are not at all surprising. They exemplify what Michael Rothberg calls the multidirectionality of memory. According to Rothberg, a concept of multidirectional memory explains how memory is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing.” 69 The multidirectionality of memory allows it to cross borders and discourses, influencing and being influenced by the other discourses it encounters. Through these exchanges surrounding the barbeques in ESMA, it becomes clear not only how Holocaust memory has influenced the memory of the crimes of the dictatorship of Argentina, but also how Holocaust memory has come to be influenced by other events as well. No longer is it viewed as unique and incomparable, but rather as an event that resonates with many others and that can serve as a touchstone for emphasizing the deep emotions that are felt within other post-atrocity societ ies. In fact, this multidirectionality of memory is what allows me to speak about Holocaust memory sites and the former clandestine detention centers of Argentina alongside each other in this chapter. The universalization of Holocaust discourse in relation to other genocides or mass atrocities, in these cases, serves to create new connections and communities that had not previously existed.70 It was not only participants who defended the barbeque. Juan Cabandié, at the time a candidate for Congress and himself a child of disappeared parents who was appropriated and raised by a military f amily, said publicly that it gave him g reat joy to know such events were happening in ESMA. Cabandié said, “The spaces must be resignified, giving them life.” 71 The AEDD responded to these arguments for resignification, however, by calling it “resignification that feigns to forget the strugg les of our own p eople to construct a country without any form of oppression, exploitation, or dependency; a country for which 30,000 detained- d isappeared comrades gave their lives.” 72 The pro cess of resignifying this space of death into one of life seems at times to be as delicate as walking a tightrope. A fter all, Cabandié’s statement does seem to be supported by some of the other practices that occur absent of controversy within ESMA, particularly in el Conti. Without any fear of reproach, people can (and, indeed, often do) attend a tango concert in ESMA, having a beer and an empanada at the bar before or a fter the event. But the presence of the street band and barbeque at another building on the site proved much more polemical. It is also true that events like this would likely never be allowed to happen in a space like Auschwitz, a former site of atrocity that has seen its fair share of controversy over the years. U ntil 2000, the most infamous of t hese controversies involved the presence of a Carmelite convent next to the camp and the placement of a cross on the grounds of the site as a memorial to its victims.73
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Public attention to the memory site reached new levels in 2001, however, when a controversial event occurred in Oświeçim, the Polish town within which the camp lies. In 2000, a dance club called Disco System opened in Oświeçim, just over one mile from the former camp. Even though the historic site has a significant buffer zone around it that prohibits new development or alteration (as is required for any UNESCO World Heritage Site), and even though this dance club was located outside of this buffer zone, the opening of the club caused an international outcry, with dissidents claiming that the youth of Oświeçim w ere “dancing on the graves” of those killed in Ausch witz. Major news media outlets around the world covered this story, including the New York Times, CNN, and Newsweek (which “broke” the story with the headline “Auschwitz: Dancing on Old Graves”). The town of Oświeçim has a seven-hundred-year history, and it did not elect for a death camp to be built within its limits. Since the end of World War II, however, and u ntil quite recently, as the Polish economy has seen a general upswing, the growth of Oświeçim had been almost completely stifled, with the town’s economic development almost nil, causing many of the town’s youth to move away b ecause of the lack of both job opportunities and recreational activities.74 The dance club controversy represented another in a long line of examples of the international community, for whom Auschwitz has g reat significance, failing to make a distinction between the former death camp and the town around it, which existed long before the camp and which must still find a way to exist in the present. In the end, outcry was so g reat that the owner of the club relented, and it was shut down (although no one could find a legal reason for closing its doors). Instead, the location became the site for a commercial shopping center that features a plaque recognizing the memory of those who lost their lives in the camps.75 The fact that this event attracted such worldwide attention even when the dance club did not fall within the protected zone of the camp demonstrates how the world views Auschwitz as a sacred space. Needless to say, the idea of having a barbeque on the grounds of Auschwitz would cause an even larger uproar. But my sense is that hosting a more formal dance or theatrical perform ance t here could cause a similar outcry. According to sociologist Marvin Prosono, these disputes over spaces like Auschwitz and ESMA are tied to what he calls symbolic territoriality. “There is something talismanic in this preoccupation over the symbolic purity of the site,” Prosono writes, referring specifically to Auschwitz. Echoing the perspective of many p eople regarding the site, he continues, “Control the site, control memory, control how history is understood; therefore, the proper lessons w ill be drawn from the Holocaust and the tragedy itself w ill provide for the security of the Jewish people in the f uture.” 76 While the need to “control” the site and the history of that site may tend to be a bit more pronounced in the case of Holocaust sites, certainly those involved with Auschwitz and
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ESMA share a “preoccupation over the symbolic purity” of each space. The difference, of course, resides in how exactly that purity is preserved. In Auschwitz, the symbolic territoriality of the space seems a bit more aggressive, a bit easier to trigger. ESMA has its own sense of territoriality, and while it allows tango concerts and marches to soccer matches, it seems not to permit (or at least not so clearly include) holding barbeques on the site. This symbolic territoriality, then, becomes a starting point for determining where to draw the line between which practices are appropriate and which are disrespectful when it comes to the re-embodiment of t hese sites of atrocity as sites of memory. It should also be noted that this territoriality, like memory itself, is not at all a stable t hing; nor is the affect involved in sites like ESMA and Auschwitz something that is easily, if at all, “controllable.” Rather, as this territoriality and need for control constitute the catalyst for disputes over the embodiment of a space, they are also constituted and reconstituted through those disputes so that they evolve as time passes. This process is exemplified by the fact that, years a fter the Disco System controversy in Oświeçim, there is now another dance club in town, Dziupla Klub Muzyczny, which sits at almost exactly the same distance from the site of the camp as Disco System did. T here has been no international response to its opening. In thinking about the symbolic purity of memory sites, I argue that where this line of “appropriateness” is drawn is perhaps less important than the debate that evolves and revolves around the drawing of that line. Assmann makes a similar point when she writes that political and cultural memory are “permanently challenged and contested, and it is, to a large part, this very contestation that keeps this memory alive.” 77 When it comes to debates like the Disco System or the ESMA barbeque controversies, it can be fruitful to focus less on the particularities of these situations and more on the fact that these debates are happening at all. Their very existence represents an active engagement with the past and the way it presences itself. Consequently, t hese moments of contestation spotlight resonant violence and how it operates in the present, potentially opening new avenues for its transduction. In his publisher’s note to the book Memoria en construcción: El debate sobre la ESMA (Memory U nder Construction: The Debate over ESMA), which was published before the official opening of the site and which seeks to document all the conversations and opinions about how the space should function as a memory site, publisher Guido Indij writes: If this museum [ESMA] was not created 30, 15, or 5 years ago, it is because the social and political conditions for it w ere not present. This fact is sufficient to understand that the manner in which we view today what happened in the Clandestine Center of Detention and Disappearance of the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada is surely different than how we w ill view it in 5, 15, or 30 years. Given that h uman activity finds itself
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in a fluid state, calling ourselves to permanent debate and constant reflection regarding memory is the path to stop the coagulation that converts memory into merchandise.78 If Indij is correct, the very fact that debates exist over the types of practices that are fitting to occur within t hese memory spaces is, in itself, contributing to an active discourse relating to the past that prevents the “coagulation” of memory. Herein, then, lies perhaps the greatest practice housed within the fences that surround ESMA: the lively debate that ensues as a result of experimentation with differing forms of memory practice. Robert Musil famously wrote, “There is nothing as invisible as a monument.” 79 But if the physical presence of monuments themselves can serve to disappear the past that they are intended to represent, the embodied practices that occur within memory sites are much more difficult to make invisible. They also stand as especially meaningful modes of transducing the resonant violence of Argentina’s last military dictatorship. The most horrific crime of the juntas was to disappear bodies—to kidnap, kill, and dispose of individual bodies in a way that erased all evidence that they ever existed. It is at once poetic and logical, then, that the most effective way of responding to that violence would be through making the body as present and visible as possible. W hether this present at ion of the body leads to controversy or contentment does not take away from the fact that this presence of the body makes it ever more difficult to leave the past b ehind. C onclusion : The Conc e nt rati on Cam p and S ociety at Large Concentration camps as a phenomenon take their name from their objective of concentrating large groups of p eople into a single, confined area. Although the term most readily evokes the camps of the Holocaust, concentration camps have been a central tool of many genocidal regimes in the twentieth century, including those across Latin America, Bosnia, and Cambodia. Although the name does refer to the concentration of individuals imprisoned within t hese sites, t here is also a second, more figurative meaning of the term. In her analysis of the concentration camps of Argentina, Calveiro, who was herself a survivor of four concentration camps, including ESMA, addresses the function of concentration camps and the role they play across a society.80 According to Calveiro, a necessary component of the concentration camp is a society that willingly ignores its existence. In other words, for a concentration camp to exist, and for all the horrible t hings that happen within a concentration camp to occur, it requires a society that is willing to look away, to deny the camp’s existence. This willful blindness on the part of a society that knows wrongs are being committed but that refuses to see them, whether for their own protection or because seeing what is actually happening is simply too
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horrible, is what Taylor has called “percepticide.” 81 Percepticide is an essential f actor in allowing genocidal regimes to carry out their crimes. While percepticide can occur everywhere within an oppressive society, the performed blindness of seeing but refusing to see the concentration camp operates on a completely different level. The concentration camp is a mechanism of power, but its scope of control does not fall merely within its walls. Rather, it is a producer of resonant violence, as the physical acts of violence that occur within its bounda ries resonate far beyond its walls to affect the entire society. Calveiro writes, “The society that, like the disappeared person themself, knows and does not know [of the camps], functions as an echo chamber of the disappearing and concentrating power, permitting the circulation of sounds and echoes of this power, while at the same time being its primary addressee.” 82 According to Calveiro, the camp is not only in existence to dominate its prisoners. Those displays of violent force resonate outward to society at large, and they do so because that society permits the existence of the camp. Thus, society and the camp are not separate entities. Rather, they are mutually constitutive: the camp exists because of the society that allows it to exist, and the technologies of domination at play within the bounds of the camp are the same that are playing out in society as a whole.83 The difference—a nd herein lies the second, hidden meaning of the term “concentration camp”—is that these technologies of violence operating within the camp are more concentrated than t hose happening in society at large. The concentration camp is a produced environment where the world is made less complicated and easier to decipher, and therefore it is easier to determine who must be eliminated from it. It is a binary world, where t here is only “the good” and “the bad.” Calveiro writes, “The reduction of reality to two g rand spheres hopes finally for the elimination of differences and the imposition of a unique and total reality represented by a strong nucleus of power, the State.” 84 Totalitarian regimes also create this sort of binary world in society as a whole, seeking to annihilate the impure element once it has been identified. In the concentration camp, this process of dividing societ ies into two groups is at its most perfect, its most concentrated. In the camp there exist only the guards and the prisoners— those who (within the logic of the camp) are upholding and defending society, and those who are destroying society and must, therefore, be destroyed. Outside the walls of the camp, it is more difficult to know on which side of this divide each person falls; inside the camp, it is blatantly obvious. The concentration camp is the society that the perpetrators want to create. What is particularly fascinating and ironic about ESMA today, then, is that the memory workers operating within the space are actually attempting to continue this resonating power of the camp, but toward a different end. ESMA is not just a space of memory. If it were, it might not require a cultural center and a bar. It might not house a slew of activist groups and human rights organizations. The choice not only to open ESMA to the public but
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also to charge it with such a large mandate serves to make it a different sort of memorial space. ESMA is attempting to normalize this process of transducing resonant violence, to make it quotidian, and to extend it outwards into society at large. This mission seems appropriate, especially given the historical context of ESMA and Argentina in comparison to other memory sites. For instance, the concentration camps of the Holocaust w ere almost always built in remote locations, outside of the limits of major cities. Some camps, like Sachsenhausen outside of Berlin, w ere initially h oused in buildings within city centers, but they were quickly moved to locations that people did not pass on a daily basis, in an effort to conceal the crimes that were happening there. Likewise, today, these former camps that have now been converted into spaces of memory are not usually places p eople visit on a regular basis. They remain on the outskirts of life, far away from the realm of the quotidian. Furthermore, the mission of these sites is much more limited in scope. Visitors come to these sites to tour the grounds of the former camps, to commemorate those who were lost, to remember. In most cases, it is difficult to find a snack bar or vending machine on the grounds of the site, much less a bar where one could sit down to have a coffee and a conversation. A recent survey shows that p eople come to Auschwitz-Birkenau to obtain historical knowledge (33.2 percent), to remember the victims (19.6 percent), and to pay tribute to those who died there (13.7 percent).85 No one goes to Auschwitz to view an art exhibition, to see a play, or to meet a friend for coffee. Instead, it is a place where, according to the mission statement on the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum website, “one can have direct contact with the testimony and reminiscences of witnesses; and it is here that one can see with their own eyes the evidence of the Holocaust.” ESMA is also a place for memory, education, and commemoration. Tours of the Officers’ Quarters are offered explicitly to educate people about the mass atrocities that occurred during the dictatorship. But it also has a larger mission. According to the website for Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos, the umbrella organization for the entire complex, their mission is “to contribute to the understanding of how State terrorism was planned and carried out in Argentina and its consequences in the present, in order to contribute to consolidating a democratic culture and the full exercising of human rights.” This mission statement demonstrates that Espacio Memoria does not see ESMA as a site that only looks backward to the past, but as a place that is intended to have a direct impact on the present and future. This desire to influence the larger society is in line with the way the concentration camp functioned when it was a site of violence and terror. Unlike the Nazi concentration camps, ESMA and the other clandestine detention centers w ere deeply embedded in the urban landscape of Buenos Aires (and other cities across Argentina). These sites w ere not hidden in the outskirts of cities; rather, p eople passed them by every day. Not to know what was happening within the bounds
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of these sites required percepticide—a willful blindness—because the vio lence that was happening was so very visible. In Poland, no one had to pass by Birkenau to get to work in the morning. The same cannot be said of ESMA. As a result, ESMA the memory site is just as visible today as ESMA the concentration camp was during the dictatorship. And by including el Conti and so many organizations within its boundaries, it is attempting to be as much an influence on the greater society as it was from 1976 to 1983, albeit in a very different way. Calveiro writes, “The same mechanisms that we analyze inside of the concentration camps operate in all of society.” 86 Within the context of the dictatorship, this statement demonstrates how the binarization of the society into good and evil, as well as the legitimization of violence to destroy that which was deemed to be evil, were phenomena that w ere perfected in the concentration camp, but that also existed in Argentine society at large. But if this parallel between the inside and outside of the camp describes the harsh reality during the days of the dictatorship, it is perhaps the g reat hope of the site t oday. The organizations, artists, and individuals that operate in ESMA now are working for exactly this purpose: to make their mechanisms for the transduction of resonant violence present in daily life throughout Argentina, not solely within the walls of the site. If during times of violence the concentration camp represents a concentrated microcosm of the society as a w hole, today’s ESMA shows that, during times of peace and reconstruction, the concentration camp can represent a concentration of the sorts of productive, creative practices that could manifest in the whole of society as well. For, as Calveiro writes, “the concentration camp and society belong to each other. One is not explainable without the other. They reflect each other and they reproduce each other.” 87 While the mutually constitutive nature of the concentration camp and society is a sad reality during times of violence, it is also the silver lining for t hose who spend their lives working for the transformation of resonant violence in post-atrocity societ ies, for the fact that ESMA now operates as the sort of memory space that it is signifies, constructs, and supports the sort of society within which the genocidal violence of the dictatorship cannot recur. In their edited volume Places of Public Memory, which analyzes memory sites across a number of cultural contexts, Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott break down some characteristics of memory sites. According to these scholars, one key feature of these sites is that “they fashion themselves rhetorically to distinguish themselves from the everyday.” 88 Although this certainly seems to be true in many cases (like Auschwitz, for instance), this assertion does not extend to ESMA as a memory site. In fact, through the myriad ways curators manage and activate this space, those involved seek to erase the line that distinguishes this space from the everyday. Of course, the space is still set apart, still marked as exceptional by what has occurred t here. Perhaps it would be better to say that, rather than distinguishing itself from
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the everyday, ESMA is attempting to slowly but surely influence and expand into the everyday. In d oing so, however, it does not seek to become less import ant as it becomes quotidian; instead, it is seeking to make the quotidian more important, highlighting the way that this past violence has and does influence daily life. As a result, the transduction of resonant violence can become a collective work that occurs not only within the boundaries of ESMA and other former sites of mass atrocity, but throughout the entire social landscape.
C hapte r 4
Embodied Justice h.i.j.o.s., p r ac t ic e s of t r a n s -ac t ion, a n d biop oe t ic s i n p o s t- d ic tator s h i p a rge n t i na As I described in the previous chapter, from 1976 to 1983, the people of Argentina lived u nder one of the most repressive and violent military dictatorships of the twentieth century. Over this seven-year period, the right-w ing military juntas carried out what they called the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorg an iz ation), colloquially known as el Proceso, which sought to eliminate everyone deemed to be a subversive, leftist element across the country. As in most totalitarian regimes, during Argentina’s last military dictatorship, the population lived within a tightly controlled environment managed largely by fear. This reliance on violent affect to suppress populations and to advance a sociopolitical project is characteristic of most every instance of genocide. T hese affective forces of genocide extended far beyond mass killing. They show that genocide does not only affect the direct victims of the physical violence of murder; it also has enduring effects on the social composition and attitudes of entire societ ies. Diana Taylor writes of the dictatorship, “A new sense of communal identity was simult aneously forged and undone around a shared terror.” 1 The juntas created this terror through the ways they performed their violence. One could be deemed a subversive merely because one owned a copy of a certain book or wore one’s hair too long. Anyone had the ability to report suspected subversion to the authorities, even without real evidence to substantiate such claims, which led to a pervasive environment of distrust due to what Hannah Arendt has called “the ubiquity of the informer,” an overwhelming sense of suspicion and anxiety that is present in most repressive regimes. 2 Furthermore, the military machinery sometimes kidnapped people in broad daylight for everyone to see. They purposefully made the violence visible so that the act of kidnapping a single individual would terrorize an entire population. A sense of powerlessness and a fear of being disappeared themselves led observers to watch this violence yet pretend not to see. This process of self-blinding, which Taylor has called “percepticide,” is what helped “to atomize the 122
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victimized population and to preclude the possibility of solidarity and mobilization.” 3 If, as Arendt argues, power can only emerge when a group of people act in concert and without the use of physical force,4 the military leadership’s central objective was to prevent such concerted action by creating a population of completely atomized citizens, too fearful of each other to mount any form of communal resist ance. Anthropologist Michael Taussig has famously referred to such regimes as a “nervous system,” 5 a term that highlights the authoritarian centrality of control that the military maintained, as well as the affective energy—t he nervousness—generated by such violence. Although the juntas were largely successful in initiating and sustaining an affective environment of terror that kept such collectives from forming, they did not succeed completely in keeping citizens from organizing and mobilizing against their systems of control. Roughly one year a fter the military coup d’état, a group of mothers whose children were disappeared met each other while waiting in a government office to inquire about their missing c hildren.6 This initially small group of women went on to form one of the most impor tant and successful human rights organizations in the world, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo). Since 1977, the Madres meet every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo, the central square of Buenos Aires, and march in a circle, demanding the return of their disappeared c hildren. Their weekly occupation of the Plaza de Mayo—which is surrounded by the symbolic centers of political power (the presidential palace), economic power (the national bank), and clerical power (the city cathedral)—brought international attention to the human rights abuses occurring within the country, while at the same time revealing to other citizens the chinks in the armor of the regime. Moreover, the weekly marches of the Madres led to the development of a completely novel “repertoire of contention,” to borrow a phrase from Charles Tilly,7 that would go on to inspire the creation of numerous other human rights organizations. Indeed, the “traumatic meme” initiated by the Madres—a group of mothers gathering in a public space to demand the return of their children alive—h as now traveled around the globe.8 Throughout the dictatorship, the Madres faced incredible odds and outright violence, but ultimately succeeded in making the human rights abuses of the regime international news. A fter the regime fell in 1983 and the country returned to democracy u nder the presidency of Raul Alfonsín, the Madres continued their work, demanding that the state answer for its past crimes through means of memory, truth, and justice. T hese first years of democracy brought some of the most revolutionary state efforts for dealing with a violent past that the world has seen. Weeks a fter taking office, Alfonsín established the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, or CONADEP), which is regarded by many as the world’s first truth commission.9 In 1985, the orchestrators of el Proceso were put on
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trial in the Juicios a las Juntas (the Junta T rials), one of the first times in history that former heads of state faced justice in a domestic court. The newly established democratic government was unstable, however. A fter several new coup attempts, Alfonsín and his administration felt that the only way to keep the fragile peace with the military was to promote a national policy of reconciliation—a policy that ultimately meant complete impunity for the perpetrators of this Argentine genocide. By 1986, the combined passage of two laws—la Ley de Punto Final (the Law of Full Stop), which set a date beyond which no legal cases could be brought against the military, and la Ley de Obediencia Debida (the Law of Due Obedience), which made it illegal to prosecute a military officer for following o rders—m ade the prosecution of perpetrators a virtual impossibility. Still, the Madres, along with many other human rights groups, continued their work, calling for justice—not only in the form of punishment of perpetrators, but also social and economic justice for the w hole of Argentina. As the state continued its national policy of forgetting and an expansion of the neoliberal economic regime u nder the presidency of Carlos Menem, however, a new organization emerged in the spring of 1995 with a mission related to that of the Madres, but an entirely novel means of achieving it. H.I.J.O.S., an acronym for Hijos e hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio, or Sons and d aughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence, was formed in the city of Córdoba during Easter week of 1995 by a group of about seventy young adults whose parents were disappeared during the dictatorship. Within a few months, the organ ization expanded to some 350 members in 14 cities across Argentina.10 As the organi zation grew, it took on an array of projects, each of which responded to a three-pronged cry for truth, memory, and justice. H.I.J.O.S. approached their mammoth task by sub-organizing into numerous committees, each of which responded to a specific mission of the organ ization.11 For instance, the Comisión Identidad, or Identity Committee, worked to uncover the truth of those who w ere disappeared and the causes for which they fought, while the Comisión Arte y Política, or Art and Politics Committee, worked to find alternative, artistic ways to spread the group’s message. But the most visible and well-k nown committee of H.I.J.O.S. was the Comisión Escrache, which ultimately codified a completely novel mode of pol itical protest, activism, and represent at ion that contributed significantly to a sea change in the way both the p eople and the government of Argentina related to its past. In the remainder of this chapter, I expand on current literature on the escraches of H.I.J.O.S.12 to demonstrate three specific things that the escraches—as an example of a broader subset of group, embodied practices— have done and can do when it comes to the collective processing of resonant vio lence: they disorient and re orient existing structures, including bodies, spaces, and power relations; they create intersections of multiple temporalities,
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4.1. The first mobile escrache, which traveled to the home of multiple perpetrators, December 11, 1999. Photo courtesy of GAC
which work toward performing a specific vision of the f uture; and they constitute new collectivities around the phenomenon of shared affect. Escrache is the unique form of public activism developed by H.I.J.O.S. to respond specifically to the lack of formal justice and punishment for former perpetrators of torture, detainment, and genocide during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and ’80s. The word “escrache” comes from the slang verb escrachar, when means to uncover or to bring something to light. The goal of the escraches of H.I.J.O.S. was to do just that: to make the public aware of the unpunished perpetrators who were living amongst them and, in lieu of the formal punishment that the state was unwilling to execute, to levy a different type of justice, which they called a condena social, or a social sentence. The escrache itself was a loud, theatrical, and spectacular event. Unlike traditional street protests, which are typically underscored by affects of anger and indignation, the escrache was a playful, celebratory event. This affective environment was deeply curated through the use of upbeat music played by murgas (street bands) that accompanied the escraches, along with other tools, like large, colorful puppets and joyful singing. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people gathered at a central meeting place, from which they marched through the neighborhood streets, playing music, singing songs, and chanting, u ntil they reached the home of an unpunished perpetrator. At the home, the music and chanting continued. Escraches often entailed actions that walked the line between irony and whimsy; for instance, at the 2002 escrache
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4.2. Escrache of Luis Donocik, December 14, 2002. Photo courtesy of GAC
of Luis Donocik, participants dangled pizza boxes on fishing poles over the barricades guarding the house while chanting to the perpetrator, “You would kill your own m other for a pizza.” During many of the escraches, H.I.J.O.S. was joined by the theater group Etcétera . . . , which performed satirical, morbidly comic dumb shows of the crimes committed by the targeted perpetrator. (More on this later.) Fin ally, leaders of H.I.J.O.S. delivered a speech, articulating the crimes of the perpetrator and announcing his social sentence. Meanwhile, participants marked the h ouse with brightly colored paint that let everyone know that a murderer lived in that place. By the end of the escrache, the house was spattered with red splotches from the paint-fi lled eggs that had been thrown at the façade, and the street or sidewalk in front of the h ouse was covered with a statement like “AQUI SE ESCONDE GENOCIDA SUELTO,” or “Here hides a f ree genocidaire.” A fter all this, the participants marched away from the perpetrator’s home, leaving the neighborhood to act upon this new knowledge they had received. While the escrache has its place in the broader context of global social movements13 and the more specific context of Latin American political protest,14 it is also unique in a number of ways, especially in how it fits into the narrative of violence, memory, truth, and justice as it relates to Argentina. The escrache represents a mode of responding to resonant violence that is primarily characterized not by the verbal or the archival, but by the positioning of the h uman body in public space with other h uman bodies. As such, the escrache is an example of a co-embodied practice.15
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Previous chapters in this book have focused on co-embodied engagements with resonant violence at sites that have been specifically set aside for the memory of that violence. The existence of such dedicated memory sites requires a society that has, to some extent at least, recognized the presence of the past and the need to engage with it. Often, however, post-atrocity societ ies can be reticent to undertake such large-scale recognition, as political leaders can view it as a threat to consolidating their own power.16 Before governments initiate policies in response to the damaging effects of resonant violence, it is typically civil society that demands such action. Political and social processes of dealing with the past, then, are very often initiated from the grassroots, even if many of the components of transitional justice (truth commissions, criminal prosecution, reparations, and institutional reform) ultimately require state buy-in. In contrast to the previous two chapters, which investigate spaces of memory as a form and venue through which societies process past violence that they have already recognized, this chapter and the following focus on the essential role that co-embodied practices of activism and protest play in transforming a society’s relationship to resonant violence, pushing them to acknowledge its existence and respond to it. In many cases, without such activist practices, the institutionalization of the sites of memory described in earlier chapters would not be possible. The escrache represents a specific subset of t hese co-embodied practices that I call co-embodied practices of trans-action. This denomination is a broad category that I am using to provide a lens through which to view practices that share certain characteristics. I use the term “trans-action” to emphasize two aspects of t hese practices. First, through the ways that they move across, beyond, and through literal and figurative space, t hese practices exemplify all the directionality and intentionality implied through the Latin prefix trans-. Practices of trans-action do not place primary focus on the occupation of a certain, contained space; rather, they migrate or cross through physical space. They also cross less literal spaces, like generations or time—a point to which I w ill return later. Second, as embodied practices that manifest the full political potentiality of their participants, these practices exemplify the perform ance of action, in the way Arendt conceptualizes the term in The Human Condition.17 As opposed to labor—which Arendt sees as the biological activity of the body to maintain life—a nd work—which she sees as the activity of humankind t oward the creation of material objects— Arendt describes action as all the activity that happens through the interaction of h uman beings, which highlights their plurality and which constitutes them as political, social beings. According to Arendt, it is through the action of a group working in concert that all true power emerges.18 The escraches of H.I.J.O.S., with their transitory focus on multiple sites within neighborhoods and cities, the communal engagement involved in their preparation, and H.I.J.O.S.’s own theoretical conceptualization of their specific form of activism, offer a prime example of a practice of trans-action.
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According to the Oxford Eng lish Dictionary, the prefix trans-refers to certain directionalities “with the sense ‘across, through, over, to or on the other side of, beyond, outside of, from one place, person, thing, or state to another.’ ” Co-embodied practices of trans-action, then, are group actions that represent any or all of these directionalities. The trans-nature of the escrache is made manifest in a vast number of ways. First, the escrache is a practice in transit. It crosses space b ecause it is delocalized. As one member of H.I.J.O.S. has said, “Our [space] is [. . .] the entire country! Indeed, ours is not a fixed space . . . t he space of the escraches is a mobile space, a space that is created every time that one wants to go make the escraches.” 19 Unlike, for instance, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who are so associated with the occupation of a single space that it appears in the name of the group, H.I.J.O.S. garnered power through mobility. Even though e very escrache focused on one dwelling, the escrache as a phenomenon was always moving, never settling down. Indeed, it generated part of its power from this restlessness, as former perpetrators who had not yet faced the social condemnation of an escrache never knew when their day might come. More concretely, however, it is a practice in transit because participants in the escrache literally traveled through the streets of their city to reach the house of the escrachado—t he perpetrator against whom the escrache was being directed. T hese acts of crossing the city reshaped and realigned the bodies of individuals, as well as the body politic. In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed pulls from phenomenological theory to explain how social norms are constructed and perpetuated, as well as how collectivities are formed around t hese norms.20 Ahmed understands the body as an entity that is orientated in specific ways—both within spaces and toward certain objects. As societal expectations and norms develop, the body of an individual within t hese contexts “gets directed in some ways more than others.” 21 Ahmed understands social normativity as the result of multiple bodies following the same path, all the time reproducing the lines of that path and, in the process, more firmly demarcating that path as the “right” one, the one of least resistance.22 This understanding of normativity corresponds to what Margaret Wetherell calls affective ruts, a concept I outline in the first chapter. 23 Not all bodies choose to stay “in line,” however, and when the body deviates from the normative path, it slowly produces alternative lines of possibility and new potential modes of being.24 For t hese deviations to become engrained themselves, however, they require more and more individuals to choose t hese alternative “paths.” H.I.J.O.S. emerged from a political environment that had normalized the “lines” of forgetting and silence; as citizens w ere oriented toward the future in a way that did not allow them to look back at the crimes of the past, the politics of impunity and reconciliation w ere often taken for granted or naturalized. Through their perform ances of the escrache, H.I.J.O.S. veered off these lines endorsed by the state, and asked others to follow their new paths.
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Susana Kaiser supports this assertion when she writes, “Escraches have disrupted the process of ‘normalization’ of living with major criminals by telling people: ‘Torturers and assassins surround you. How are you going to react to this horror?’ ” 25 Diego Benegas draws on Pierre Bourdieu to frame the escraches as an “identitarian intervention” that works to alter a social habitus or disposition to the past. 26 The escrache is a disruptive event; as its participants deviate from the engrained lines of impunity and silence, the familiar is made strange again. In a move that echoes Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, witnesses w ere alienated from their tendency to “leave the past behind” and w ere pushed to question how their silence contributed to a culture of impunity. Ahmed writes, “Deviation leaves its own marks on the ground, which can even help generate alternative lines, which cross the ground in unexpected ways.” 27 For H.I.J.O.S., these lines led straight to the doorsteps of the f ree perpetrators, from whence the activist group forged a new path of accountability for Argentine society. Ahmed writes that orientation is “about making the strange familiar.” 28 H.I.J.O.S. saw that the p eople of post-d ictatorship Argentina had been orientated to make the strangeness of having kidnappers, torturers, and murderers living among them, unpunished, seem normal. The escraches, then, served as a disorienting tool that brought to the foreground what the government wished to keep in the background—n amely, the presence of t hese criminals living largely in anonymity next door to the population they had terrorized only fifteen years prior.29 The participants in the escraches initiated this disorientation and the disruption of social norms by literally taking control of the streets—the streets that had been so tightly controlled by the state u nder military rule— a nd moving through them, playing music, singing songs, chanting. Their goal was to let all the neighbors know of their own presence and the presence of t hese perpetrators. Consequently, the escraches bestowed on the citizens a new sense of agency, alerting them that they did not have to accept the state’s policy of reconciliation and impunity for these criminals. Ahmed writes, “Migration could be described as a process of disorientation and reorientation: as bodies ‘move away’ as well as ‘arrive,’ as they reinhabit spaces.” 30 The small-scale migration of H.I.J.O.S. through the city not only disoriented, then, but also reoriented p eople toward what was being denied. Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence: the name of the group has within it both the negative—what they are disorienting from—a nd the positive—what they are reorienting toward. Unlike some political protests, the escraches were quite clear about their goals, offering both a shared rejection of the status quo and new directions toward which “we” should collectively head. An escrache was never a spontaneous event; it was deeply planned and meticulously org an ized. Preparation began with the búsqueda de información, or “search for information,” during which H.I.J.O.S. combed through archives
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and interviewed journalists and other knowledgeable parties to find where the perpetrators lived and confirm the crimes they had committed.31 Roughly one to one-a nd-a-half months before the public event, members of H.I.J.O.S. went into the neighborhood of the chosen perpetrator to announce the upcoming escrache, usually with a street mural or some graffiti. Committee members traversed the neighborhood by going door-to-door, explaining to the neighbors who the perpetrator was, where he lived, and what he had done. They posted stickers and signs throughout the neighborhood that listed the perpetrator’s name, address, and telephone number.32 They collaborated with an art collective called Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC), who warned passersby how close they were to the perpetrator’s home by posting fake traffic signs throughout the neighborhood that featured statements like “Attention! Murderer at 500 meters!” 33 In all t hese ways, participants crossed the neighborhood as they cultivated potential participants for the climactic event of the escrache. Aside from the literal crossing of the city to distribute information and denounce the perpetrator, escraches crossed in many other ways. Their efforts served to transect—a word that denotes not only the crossing of space, but the dividing of space as well. Through their extensive preparatory work, H.I.J.O.S. divided the neighborhood, and these acts of division can all be seen in the documentary film H.I.J.O.S.: Mesa de Escrache, which documents the entire process of planning and performing the 2002 escrache against Luis Donocik, a former military police commissioner who was eventually found guilty of multiple crimes and sentenced to life in prison a fter a trial in 2010. 34 H.I.J.O.S. divided those who supported their work from those who did not. The film shows young, twenty-something members of H.I.J.O.S. approaching numerous p eople in the neighborhood, most of whom are middle-a ged or elderly. When these passersby hear that they are living next to this free perpetrator, their responses range from complete support of the group, as listeners commit to attending the escrache, to complete debasement, as they tell the young activists that their work is e ither useless—as t hese people w ill never be punished—or inflammatory. According to one former participant, Federico Zuckerfeld, this process of dividing the neighborhood was an essential component of the escrache. In one conversation he said, “The escrache has the quality, the interesting quality, of perturbing, disturbing the society. . . . Because you are with it or against it.” 35 For Zuckerfeld, the escrache purposefully created a binary in the neighborhood, forcing people to decide how they would align themselves. This binary mirrored the binary logic of the former military dictatorship, as described at the end of the previous chapter. Argentinian scholar and survivor Calveiro writes, “Totalitarian logics are binary logics that conceive of the world as two large opposing camps: theirs and the o thers.” 36 Just as the violence of the dictatorship was characterized by the sort of “us-them thinking” that allowed for a simplification of the world, which in turn allowed for the clear
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identification of “the e nemy,” 37 H.I.J.O.S. worked to separate t hose who supported the escrache—a nd consequently those who supported justice for past crimes—from those who did not. Whereas the binary logic of the perpetrators supported the centralized power of an authoritarian state, H.I.J.O.S.’s binary logic empowered the p eople themselves, thus creating a new source of political capacity that might influence the state to act differently. To understand the type of power that was generated by the escrache—a nd by any number of other forms of political protest and collective action—it is useful to note that Spanish, like most other Latinate languages, has two dif ferent words for power: poder and potencia. The distinction between these two words has been well articulated by Colectivo Situaciones, the “activist research” (investigación militante) group who worked closely with H.I.J.O.S. throughout the period in which they made the escraches. According to them, poder refers to more fixed forms of power, like the power of the state, while potencia refers to an individual’s or a group’s capacity or potential. 38 Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza put it another way in the introduction to their translation of Colectivo Situaciones’s work when they write: Generally speaking, we could say that poder defines power as “power over” (the sense it has, for instance, when it refers to state or sovereign power) and potencia defines “power to,” the type of capacity expressed in the statement “I can.” To continue with the generalization, it is possible to say that poder refers to static forms of power, while potencia refers to its dynamic forms. Potencia always exists in the “here and now” of its exercise; it coincides with the act in which it is effected. This is because potencia is inseparable from our capacity—indeed, our bodies’ capacity—to be affected. This capacity cannot be detached from the moment, place, and concrete social relations in which potencia manifests itself. 39 While the power of the state that was keeping the perpetrators from justice and promoting an environment of impunity and forgetting is a clear example of poder, the power of H.I.J.O.S. and the escrache represents potencia perfectly. The escrache is a manifestation of the capacity of individuals to rally together against more static (state-ic) forms of power in order to influence them. Whereas poder manifests itself through structures and institutions, potencia emerges from the body itself. As Holdren and Touza put it, it is “inseparable from our capacity . . . to be affected,” thus highlighting how the potencia of the escrache is not only an embodied power, but also an affective power that is transmitted across bodies in the “here and now” of their action. If poder is a monumental power that reigns over or surrounds us, potencia is the power that transects poder, crossing through it, dividing it, and consequently altering the way it functions. The notion of power exemplified through potencia is similar to what Arendt articulates through her concept of power that emerges through action.
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According to her, action represents the pinnacle of h uman activity because it can only emerge through togetherness. It is at once interdependent and intersubjective. Arendt writes that one of the key goals of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is the atomization of the population—the isolation of each individual in a way that prohibits collective action.40 This assertion resonates with Argentinian sociologist Guillermo O’Donnell’s understanding of the violence of Latin American dictatorships. The atomization of the population that occurred during the military dictatorship exemplifies what O’Donnell has called the silencing of Argentine society’s collective vertical voice. According to O’Donnell, who himself draws inspiration from economist Albert Hirschman, there are two different “voices” when it comes to responding to any pol itical authority.41 Vertical voice refers to the act of someone of a lower social status speaking to t hose in positions of political power. While the exercise of vertical voice can be quite benign (e.g., writing a letter to the head of a company), it can also be risky (like when a political subject addresses a powerf ul ruler with a complaint). Horizontal voice, on the other hand, describes the act of p eople who feel themselves to be on the same “level” (socially, politically, economically, etc.) speaking with each other to org an ize around shared ideas in order to form a collective “we.” When this new group, which has been formed through the power of horizontal voice, collectively addresses their thoughts and feelings to t hose in political power, they are exercising collective vertical voice. For O’Donnell, a society can only describe itself as truly democratic when it places no restrictions on horizontal voice and, subsequently, on collective vertical voice.42 Although the military dictatorship occasionally allowed citizens to use vertical voice to speak to those in power, they did not allow for that vertical voice to be exercised collectively. The use of horizontal voice, moreover, was completely forbidden; during this regime, groups of every kind were suspect, whether they be political parties, music or theater collectives, or even a gathering of people chatting at a street corner.43 Without collective vertical voice, Arendtian action is an impossibility. Arendt writes, “Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.” 44 Indeed, what a dictatorship seeks to do through its power to atomize and its efforts to silence collective vertical voice is exactly to deprive people of their capacity to act, for what emerges through the togetherness of action is pure potential (note the connection with potencia). The consequences of action are unpredictable and limitless. Arendt writes, “Action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new pro cesses.” 45 The power of action is that it brings something new into the world—a concept that Arendt calls natality. Natality is not always positive, and action does not always lead to good things. What authoritarian regimes hate about action,
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however, is its inherent unpredictability and uncontrollability, for what is born through collective action can, indeed, be revolutionary in the way a society functions and the way power is oriented within it. Through exercising potencia in the making of the escrache, H.I.J.O.S. acted. And while they did divide communities against each other, their ultimate goal was not to create divisiveness. On the contrary, they would have much preferred that the entire neighborhood transcend their differences in order to join their collective effort and thus increase their capacity to create change, to amplify their collective vertical voice.46 H.I.J.O.S. did, however, hope to create a different sort of division: the division of the perpetrator from the rest of the community through the issuing of a social sentence. Julieta, a twenty-eight-year-old member of H.I.J.O.S. whose father, aunt, and u ncle were all disappeared, explains this form of division very eloquently in the film. She states: Given the absence of a legal sentence, there must exist a social sentence. What we pursue is to build this social sentence with the neighborhood and the neighbors. Obviously, we are for prison. We want to see them in jail. We want the Law of Full Stop to be declared invalid. We also believe in justice, but we believe the escrache itself is an act of justice made in that moment. It is also to create, little by little, a conscience in the people. What we pursue is that [the perpetrator’s] own house becomes his jail, that his own neighborhood and neighbors sentence him in the daily things, in his daily life of going out to buy or get the newspaper. The social sentence makes the baker decide not to sell him bread any longer, the taxi driver not to take him. We want him and his past to stop being a mystery to the neighborhood.47 The slogan of H.I.J.O.S. was “Si no hay justicia, hay escrache”—“If t here is no justice, t here w ill be escrache.” Julieta demonstrates here how the escrache was more than an act of protest; it was itself performing the act of judgment that the state was refusing to perform. The escrache represented the issuing of a social sentence that must then be carried out by the people of the neighborhood. Thus, the event of the escrache was only the beginning of a much larger process in which H.I.J.O.S. did not take part. This process of condemnation was left to t hose most directly affected by the presence of this perpetrator: those living alongside him. Through their co- embodied practice, H.I.J.O.S. drew a line in the sand that divided this criminal from the rest of the community. It was then up to the community to decide whether they would remain on their own side of the line by carryi ng out the social sentence issued by the escrache or cross that line by continuing to ignore the unpunished crimes of their neighbor. Whatever decision they made, they could no longer use ignorance as an excuse.
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The preceding examples of the transitory acts of the escrache have stressed the more literal trans-qualities of the action, but there are also more metaphorical acts of trans-action that are just as essential to this practice. For one, the escrache was an act of transtemporality. As a radical street perform ance that recalled the past in the present to alter the future, the escrache manipulated and refigured the public’s relationship to time. For H.I.J.O.S., this project was deeply connected with a resist ance to the linear temporality of neoliberal capitalism. The military dictatorship was very much born of a Cold War mentality, and the “subversive elements” that w ere disappeared by the right-w ing regime w ere those deemed socialist or leftist. When a democratic regime replaced the military regime in 1983, the physical terror of disappearance ended, but the systemic violence and inequality of the neoliberal economic policies of the dictatorship remained almost completely intact—a nother aspect of resonant violence. This economic violence continued to impact Argentinians, and in many ways still does to this day. For example, many of the villas miserias, or shantytowns, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires today were formed during the dictatorship a fter military leaders forcibly removed large swaths of Argentinians from the city center to make way for highways and other development projects.48 Residents of the villas miserias continue to live with little-to-no infrastructure, including paved roads, plumbing, and electricity. H.I.J.O.S., through the escrache, always worked to reinforce in the minds of participants and observers the connection between the past dictatorship and the economic policies that were still present. In a speech during a 2002 escrache against Ernesto Frimón Weber, a commissioner of the Federal Police who was later found guilty of crimes against humanity, H.I.J.O.S. said, “Impunity lives in each one of t hese p eople, repressors, torturers, kidnappers, genocidaires, ideological authors of the mass extermination of thousands of popular activists that fought against the privileged and against inequality, that same inequality that today is the supreme law of the Argentine Republic.” 49 In this speech, the speakers present t hose disappeared by the dictatorship as fighters for social equality, and the inequality against which they fought is framed as still present through the laws and policies that both include and extend beyond impunity for past perpetrators. In response, the escraches offered a conception of time different from that offered by capitalism. Colectivo Situaciones writes: For [capitalism], the past is already gone, only existing as a passive memory, like Nunca Más.50 We experience the f uture as a far-off and imprecise promise that does not depend on us. For this reason, our present is weak, sad: we are alone, and waiting for a miracle. In the escrache, on the contrary, the past acts with force, the disappeared live as an a ctual project; it is a past that declares: it is the past of the present. On the other hand, the future has already arrived, because it is none other than the one that we
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are building, which depends on us: it is the future of the present. In this way the escrache establishes a decisive present, full of potential. The escrache is a practice that can neither wait nor resign itself. It springs forth today and is for now.51 The post-d ictatorship democratic regime invested heavily in maintaining the economic model of neoliberal capitalism, and therefore devoted itself to a temporality that frames the past as a distant era to be forgotten and moved beyond. Likewise, capit ali st conceptions of the f uture place it forever ahead of us, never to be reached. The only t hing capital can do is produce more capital. It is not interested in a utopian world of humanist values like equality or sustainability; unimpeded growth is its only goal. According to H.I.J.O.S., this model of time does not allow for a meaningful reckoning with past violence, nor does it offer a vision of an achievable future with more justice, equality, and prosperity for all. It is an expansive temporality where the past and f uture are both incredibly distant, while the present is a nondescript no-m an’s-land in-between the two. The escrache, however, collapsed this expanded temporality. In the escrache, H.I.J.O.S. performed both the past and the future in the present moment. The past was obviously present as the participants went to the h ouses of past perpetrators, chanting for justice, calling for recognition and retribution for their past acts. But, as Colectivo Situaciones puts it, the past was also present because the activism of H.I.J.O.S. was working to keep the political project of the disappeared thousands alive. The past was therefore positioned as both a negative temporal space—a space in which this horrible violence occurred—a nd a positive space—a space in which thousands fought for social justice and equality. Likewise, H.I.J.O.S. made the f uture present: the escrache did not only call for some formal, state justice in the future, but actually performed its own alternative form of justice in the moment of the escrache. The escrache did not just call for a trial; it was the trial that had not happened, through which they declared the (social) sentence that the state had failed to issue. Furthermore, within this collapsed and concentrated temporality where the past, present, and future all intersected, power was transferred from its traditional bearers—those within the halls of government—to the p eople at large, whose role it then was to carry out the new social sentence. In fact, it became the job of the community to extend the affective environment created in the moment of the escrache; if they took up the challenge handed to them, then this affectively charged present moment, activated by the past and f uture, would be sustained. This transtemporality of the escrache created what Arendt calls a space of appearance. According to Arendt, the space of appearance is the literal or figurative space where people come together toward a larger political purpose. It is a space of potential energy, and it only exists for as long as individuals put
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4.3. G AC posting a sign at the escrache of Jorge Vidal, December 27, 2003. Photo courtesy of GAC
their speech or deeds toward the fulfillment of a shared goal. She writes, “The space of appearance comes into being whenever men [sic] are together in the manner of speech and action.” 52 The space of appearance, then, is a space of co-embodied practice, and it is also a space for the creation of new forms of Arendtian power. Arendt is quick to qualify, however, that the space of appearance is fragile and temporary. It only remains in existence for as long as people come together toward a common purpose. Within this space of appearance, a transaction occurs. It is not a monetary transaction, but another sort of exchange altogether, through which an inadequate past is exchanged or even converted into a more promising f uture. Or, more specifically, the inadequate past is exchanged for new forms of power, which are generated from the coming together of individuals within the space of appearance. All these modes of trans-action contributed to the overall performative nature of the escrache, which ultimately used t hese instances of migration and division to produce new sources of agency that refigured the way power functioned within society. Through the escrache, H.I.J.O.S. transduced the resonant violence that had led to a culture of impunity, transubstantiating that negative affect into Arendtian power and new political agency exemplified through the exercise of collective vertical voice. These new forms of agency emerged in a number of ways within and around the escrache. For instance, t here w ere several groups that, over the years, worked alongside H.I.J.O.S. to make their own contributions to the co-embodied practice of the escrache.
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4.4. G AC’s street signs to represent clandestine births (left) and death flights (right), now on display at the Parque de la Memoria of Buenos Aires. Photos courtesy of GAC
Grupo de Arte Callejero (Street Art Group, or GAC, for short) is a group of visual artists that developed the use of street signs to alter the visual landscape of a neighborhood, foregrounding the violence that had been obscured through impunity. GAC’s artistic practice emerged organically out of their engagement with the escraches. A fter participating in several escraches, the members of GAC approached H.I.J.O.S. to propose that they create some signs to denounce the escrachados as a means of supporting the escrache. GAC explains how they decided to create the iconographic language for which they became known: From the beginning we chose to use the aesthetic of signage, using facsimiles of street signs [. . .], subverting their meaning and purpose: maintaining the colors and icons and changing completely their meaning. [. . .] These signs functioned to intervene in the space of the city, becoming lost and being discovered among the visual pollution of daily life, attempting to infiltrate the fabric of urbanity.53 Before and during the escraches, GAC installed street signs that denoted how far one was from the home of an unpunished perpetrator (figure 4.3). Resembling a yellow, diamond-shaped warning sign, these markers announced the name and address of the perpetrator, in a way that both directed attention toward him
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and advised neighbors to keep their distance. Like a traffic advisory warning d rivers of a dead end or a slippery road, t hese signs used an iconic language of the state to perform the role the state was refusing to perform. Beyond the signs that listed the information of specific perpetrators, GAC also developed a library of other street and traffic signs, each of which features an icon that graphically represents an aspect of the dictatorship’s crimes. One warning sign, for instance, displays the silhouette of a pregnant w oman b ehind bars—a reference to the five hundred pregnant women who were disappeared and whose babies were appropriated by families aligned with the military. Another features the graphic outline of an airplane, inside of which, created through negative space, is the outline of a person. This sign visibilizes the clandestine “death flights,” on which disappeared persons were drugged and thrown from planes into the river to drown (figure 4.4). The cover of this book is adapted from one of GAC’s signs, designed to represent the outlines of the 30,000 bodies disappeared during the dictatorship. The silhouettes evoke the chalk outlines of a crime scene, overlapping, resonating outward: the echoes of their absence. Signs like these dotted the cityscape of Buenos Aires, creating new cartographies of memory to encroach upon the daily lives of viewers.54 These visual markers of past crimes remained in place long a fter the event of the escrache came to an end, reminding viewers of t hese violent acts and of their responsibility to continue carrying out the social sentence. In effect, the signs of GAC visually depicted resonant violence and, through the iconography of a traffic advisory, warned of its persistent presence. “Caution!,” the signs decried. “The past is not past. The violence is not over. It never w ill be, as long as t hese perpetrators remain unpunished.” While GAC contributed their skills as visual artists to the escrache, a group of theater artists developed a particularly interesting mode of performing identity that transected several literal and figurative lines in the escrache. Etcétera . . . is an artistic collective that was started by a group of politically engaged teena gers in the mid-1990s. Some of the members of the group, like Zuckerfeld, one of its founding members mentioned e arlier in this chapter, had members of their family who had been disappeared, so they were also involved in H.I.J.O.S. A fter participating in one or two escraches, Zuckerfeld and his compatriots approached H.I.J.O.S. with a novel idea for their contribution to the escrache. The source of the idea came about some five or six years before the escraches began, when an eleven-year-old Zuckerfeld was walking through Belgrano, an upper-m iddle-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires where his family lived. Many military families lived in Belgrano, so it was not totally unsurprising when Zuckerfeld came upon a discarded military jacket and hat in a trashcan. When he brought the old uniform home, Zuckerfeld’s father, a Trotskyist, was furious and told him to get rid of it immediately. The mischievous boy kept it, however, and it would later serve as the inspiration for Etcétera . . .’s work with H.I.J.O.S.
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During the escraches, Zuckerfeld and his colleagues assembled in front of the perpetrator’s h ouse dressed in military uniforms, including the one he had found in the trash as a boy. Etcétera . . . then performed short plays in which they acted out the crimes that the perpetrator had committed. Drawing heavily from theatrical traditions of the grotesque and theater of the absurd, the perform ances of Etcétera . . . served, first and foremost, to contribute to the positive morale of the demonstrators and to distract the police officers during the event; the exaggerated style of their perform ances drew the officers’ attention, giving the other protestors the chance to throw paint bombs at the house of the perpetrator. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they served as another means for “marking” the escrachado as a criminal. For example, during the escrache against army doctor Raúl Sánchez Ruiz, one of the first escraches in which they participated, Etcétera . . . designed a perform ance to represent the crimes of Ruiz. Among his most horrific crimes was his involvement in the appropriation of c hildren. Ruiz and several doctors u nder his leadership stole the newborn infants of detained mothers immediately a fter they gave birth to them in the camp. The babies were given to military families or other families who were friendly to the regime and who wanted a child. These appropriated children w ere then raised with no knowledge of their a ctual parents. To demonstrate Ruiz’s involvement in these heinous acts, one actor in Etcétera . . . d ressed as a caricatured version of an army officer; in addition to a military uniform, the actor wore dark sunglasses with an exaggerated nose and a dark handlebar mustache. Another actor dressed as Ruiz himself, in a white operating uniform, prepared to deliver a baby, while another played the role of the disappeared m other. When the military officer came to Ruiz looking for a baby, the actor playing Ruiz called the midwives, who brought the actress playing the pregnant mother, who had a balloon u nder her shirt to simulate a pregnant belly. Ruiz rammed his hand into the prop belly of the m other, which let out a huge POP. He pulled a doll from the mother’s belly as the m other collapsed to the ground. The midwives took the woman away as another actor sounded a trumpet to mimic an ambulance siren. This performance of Etcétera . . . demonstrates yet other forms of trans- action that occurred within the context of the escraches. For one, this perfor mance enacted a transgressing of identity. In assuming the identity of the perpetrators being denounced and judged, Etcétera . . . transgressed the bound aries between victim and perpetrator, between empowered and disempowered, and between protestor and the object of protest. Rather than only protesting the acts of Ruiz, Etcétera . . . opted to perform the acts in a way that at once highlighted their horrific nature and ridiculed them. The grotesqueness with which Ruiz exploded the pregnant belly of the disappeared woman, along with the joy he seemed to take in ripping the baby from the womb, depicted Ruiz as a sort of monster. The other actors also approached their parts in a highly exaggerated style. Their gravelly voices and overstated movements
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came straight out of the “theater of the ridiculous” tradition, and therefore underscored the idea that the a ctual people being represented through the per form ance were, themselves, worthy of ridicule. Etcétera . . . succeeded at making the crimes of the perpetrator simultaneously horrifying and absurd, striking the perfect balance for what the escraches were trying to accomplish: to at once awaken a complacent public to the criminal living among them and to alienate the unpunished perpetrator from that newly awakened public. The perform ances of Etcétera . . . were more than just an act of transgression, however. Their power extended beyond the juvenile pleasure that can come from playing the archetypal role of “the villain.” What also took place within their perform ances was a transversion of roles. More than just an inversion, where the world is flipped, the act of Etcétera . . . t aking on the role of the perpetrator represented a substitution that entailed a crossing of lines: it crossed the traditional lines of decency by representing the genocidal acts of the perpetrators as comedic, but it also reached across the wide swath of space that separated the military from these h uman rights groups in order to make the perpetrator present. According to Zuckerfeld, this was the underlying intention of Etcétera . . .’s work. Describing the group’s decision of how to contribute to the escraches, Zuckerfeld says: We say, OK, we want to collaborate with the activity. What can we do? Nobody knows. So we propose to make the first theatrical represent at ion because we understood that everything is about representation. [. . .] We are representing the victims [through the escrache], but we wanted to represent the victimizers, those responsible for that victimization. [. . .] So we arrived to the [first] escrache and we said to the guys [. . .] we w ill do one perform ance, and we w ill represent the bad guys, not the good ones. Exactly to stimulate, to push the p eople to catharsis. While the act of the escrache was a form of representation for the victims, Etcétera . . . acknowledges that, for the escrache to be a true trial for the perpetrator, that perpetrator must also be represented in some way. German per for m ance scholar Erika Fischer- Lichte argues that something peculiarly powerful occurs in perform ance through the way it foregrounds the body’s presence. She writes, “Presence makes the ordinary remarkable and lifts it into consciousness.” 55 In the case of the escrache and the perform ance of Etcétera . . . , this presence was twofold. For one, it was the copresence of the bodies of the actors and the spectators, the performers from Etcétera . . . and the demonstrators. Through this copresence, the affective energies of the performers and spectators interacted and contributed to the creation of the aforementioned space of appearance. But Etcétera . . . a lso chose to make pre sent the perpetrators, albeit in a very part icu lar way. Through presenting the perpetrators in grotesque, exaggerated form, they made what had become ordinary and acceptable into something remarkable. Through representing
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the perpetrators, both their work and the escrache in general served to “lift into consciousness” and alienate that which had been willfully forgotten by Argentine society at large. Furthermore, by performing the crimes of the perpetrator in a way that made the perpetrator present at his own “trial” but that also ridiculed him, Etcétera . . . took the agency of the perpetrator—t he agency that allowed him to perform these crimes in the first place—a nd turned it against him. The escraches may have been a trial through which a social sentence was levied, but the perpetrator always refused to attend his own escrache. The work of Etcétera . . . , then, provided the perpetrator’s testimony, given that he himself refused to speak. But it provided that testimony with a twist, for the crimes staged by Etcétera . . . were designed to highlight the escrache itself as the final act (or at least the next scene) in their dark play. This fact was highlighted in the escrache against Ruiz when the actor playing the military officer, still speaking in the gravelly voice of his character, examined his newly appropriated infant and said, “Él tiene recuerdo del vientre colorado.56 Él tiene recuerdo de su madre, su vientre” (“He has a memory of the red womb. He has a memory of his m other, her womb”). With these words, the actor foreshadowed what was to come when that baby grew up and discovered his origins—when he even joined in the fight of H.I.J.O.S. for justice and punishment for the crimes that had taken him from his biological parents. Then, at this final moment of the perform ance, the actor playing the military officer turned to the crowd and, still using the exaggerated voice of the officer, said, “Now, comrades: what they did not imagine is that H.I.J.O.S. might come back to seek them out. And so: Ready! Aim! Fire!” On his command, the protestors let loose their paint bombs, which covered the façade of Ruiz’s house with red splatters of paint. For this final moment of the per for m ance, the actor, still embodying the military officer, used the well-k nown military phraseology of “Ready, aim, fire!” to call for the perpetrator’s own firing squad. What was launched at the perpetrator w ere not bullets, however, but the red paint bombs that marked his h ouse and converted it into the prison cell inside of which the state refused to put him. More than representing the perpetrators, however, Zuckerfeld says that these perform ances aimed “to push the people to catharsis.” Although this is a term first articulated in this sense in Aristotle’s Poetics to describe the emotional release that the audience experiences toward the end of a tragedy and that makes way for renewal and growth, Zuckerfeld seems to be using the term to mean something a bit different, and perhaps in a way that seeks to recuperate the act of catharsis from its potentially damaging effects, as articulated by Brazilian director Augusto Boal in his Theatre of the Oppressed.57 In his critique of western drama, Boal understands catharsis as a pol itical tool that provides audiences with the emotional release that subsequently shapes and reinforces their actions to align and conform with conceptions of “good citizenship.” In other
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words, according to Boal, when the audience sees and empathizes with a tragic hero who reaches his tragic end b ecause of some fatal flaw—pride, for instance, or a rejection of the laws of gods and men—the catharsis seeks to reinforce in the audience the need to eliminate this flaw from their own lives. For Boal, catharsis is an act of purgation through which a “morbid or disturbing ele ment” is removed from the spectators.58 Accordingly, Boal calls traditional, Aristotelian drama a “coercive system of tragedy.” The catharsis that Etcétera . . . sought is different, however, in that it was not directed inward. At the end of one of Etcétera . . .’s perform ances at an escrache, the spectators were not asked to look within and conform themselves to some higher standard. Rather, this catharsis was directed outward. It created a shared, affective moment among the demonstrators that was then directed t oward the escrachado. Immediately at the end of the per for m ance at the escrache of Ruiz, just a fter the demonstrators had seen this burlesque of the horrendous crimes of the perpetrator, the actor yelled, “Ready! Aim! Fire!,” and the demonstrators released their emotions and paint bombs on the ere in no way conforming to traditional standards of house of Ruiz. They w citizenship; rather, they were rewriting and performing what “good citizenship” looks like. In this way, it was not the demonstrators here who required the act of purgation that catharsis traditionally generates. Instead, this cathartic impulse was directed toward the state and society as a whole. They were the ones who needed to be purged, first of this perpetrator, who remained f ree, and, second, of the impulse to forget and move forward without acknowledging and seeking to repair the crimes of the past. Etcétera . . . a nd H.I.J.O.S. directed their words and their deeds—for Arendt, their actions—toward the formation of this space of appearance and the generation of new modes of power. Arendt writes, “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.” 59 The escrache, along with all the words, deeds, and perform ances it entailed, was doing exactly this: establishing relations among individuals in order to create new realities that confronted the past in order to better the future. Some may question whether the escrache, in fact, does enact brutal deeds to perform a form of vigilante justice. It is worth mentioning that, throughout all my fieldwork and archival research into the escraches, I have never found an instance where anyone was physically harmed in any way. As I w ill explain, the affect of the escrache much more closely resembled a festival than a lynch mob, and its central intention was far more concerned with creating community than destroying it. At the intersection of these multiple lines of crossing, division, and colliding temporalities, then, resided a concentrated and unique moment of power. Borrowing from Argentinian poet and philosopher Julián Axat, I see this
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moment of power as the birth of a new form of biopoetics. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault outlines his theory for a specific type of power of the modern era through which the individual and collective bodies of a population are controlled and maintained via governmental structures.60 This sort of power over life, which Foucault calls “biopower,” operates on two levels: first, through the disciplining of individual bodies to behave in certain ways—what he calls “anatomo-politics of the human body” or, elsewhere, “governmentality”—a nd second, through the management of entire populations (the body politic) in all manners of birth, death, and health—what he calls “biopolitics of the population.” 61 Authoritarian regimes enact a particularly aggressive mode of biopolitics that plays out upon the bodies of e very citizen in one way or another. This biopolitical power is much more overt than that which exists in, say, a demo cratic society; it is hard to experience it as unnatural, as the perpetrating regime is usually quite forthright in its objectives. It does lead to a stranglehold of control, however, that places additional levels of discipline on individual and collective bodies. Bodies are orientated in specific directions, and the lines they must follow are drawn with an iron fist. During the Argentine military dictatorship, the country underwent just such a heightened state of biopolitics through the Process of National Reorg an iz ation. The population was so tightly controlled that wearing the wrong clothing or hairstyle could lead to a person’s disappearance. In such an intense state of domination, the possibility of deviating from the norm is dangerous, even life-threatening. Even so, groups like the Madres de Plaza de Mayo emerged from within this state of control, offering a collective voice that called out for people to follow other lines. H.I.J.O.S. did not form u nder an outright state of domination like this. They did see, however, in the politics of reconciliation and impunity of post-d ictatorship Argentina, another kind of biopol itical power asking people to walk the lines of forgetting, silence, and “moving forward.” In response to Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics—t hese disciplining forces that regulate and manage populations—A xat has developed a complementary theory, which he calls desobediencia biopoética (biopoetic disobedience), to describe some of the acts of resistance that emerge from within the extreme biopolitical control of dictatorial or genocidal regimes like that of Argentina from 1976–1983. Axat, who is the son of two disappeared parents and is himself a founding member of H.I.J.O.S., writes that the term “biopoetic disobedience” serves as an “escape from the zones of criminalization and death” by recovering these spaces from authoritarian governments, paramilitary groups, or t hose who use terror and fear as their governing principles. In doing so, t hese acts “construct new spaces of sociality and citizenship,” as well as “generate levels of conscience” and “contaminate in an activist manner the social sectors that, before, confronted each other by separating themselves one from the other.” 62 These acts of recovery, construction, generation, and
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contamination all occur through creative, poetic uses of the body that work largely on the level of the symbolic. Axat first developed this theory to describe the poetic disobedience of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, whose use of symbols like the pañuelo—t he white headscarf (originally a cloth diaper) covering the head of e very M other—a nd the Plaza de Mayo itself were powerful enough to bring worldwide attention to the human rights abuses of the dictatorship, ultimately contributing to its downfall. Axat writes: What the dictatorship of 1976–83 could not foresee w ere those unprece dented acts [of the M others], the overwhelming force of the desperate mother facing the disappearance of a child. [. . .] Nothing can stop a m other who denounces power. No pack of hounds, no herald can stand against the headscarf of a Mother. Horses neigh backwards, bucking before the pañuelos.63 In this quotation, Axat positions the embodied poetics of the Madres against the biopolitical forces of the regime. The hounds, heralds, and horses of the military are all made powerless by a fragile headscarf, because that headscarf represents “the overwhelming force” of a mother who has lost her child. According to Axat, it is partly the absurdity of this confrontation—a group of middle-aged housew ives against the Argentine military—that is constitutive of the biopoetic act. The dictatorship was able to destroy all forms of resis tance during its reign of terror—f rom activist groups to student movements to Congress to political parties. In the face of such obstruction, the only hope for successful resist ance became the “demented obstinacy”—demented because of the craziness of thinking it might actually work—of the Madres.64 Biopoetic resist ance, then, represents the coming together of poetry and human rights as a tactic for the disadvantaged or those without traditional access to power to liberate themselves from the extreme biopolitics of domination.65 Although Axat focuses largely on the Madres as his example of biopoetics, I argue that the escraches of H.I.J.O.S. also represent an instance of biopoetic resist ance for several reasons. First, by marching through the city streets, the escrache participants acted to reclaim space that was traditionally seen as u nder the control of the state in order to “create new spaces of sociality and citizenship” that centered on the perform ance of an alternative Argentine f uture. Second, the escrache placed a g reat emphasis on poetic symbolism. For instance, through the painting and marking of the h ouse of the perpetrator, the participants began the transformation of the dwelling into a prison; they were marking the space in a way that could not be ignored, and thus putting pressure on the neighborhood to do its part in carryi ng out the social sentence of the escrache. H.I.J.O.S. and GAC put up traffic signs that warned people of the criminal in their midst; in this way, they “officialized” their message by using one of the tools of the state to perform a function the state chose not to
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perform. Third, the escrache was a self- consciously absurd per for m ance, derived from the traditions of street theater, m usic, and carnival to carry out a very serious task. By drawing from the tropes of carnival, the escraches also evoked the historical significance of carnival in both the positive and negative sense. Historically, carnival was a time when the rule of law ceased to be enforced, just as H.I.J.O.S. saw the Argentine government as failing to enforce the laws that would hold past perpetrators to task for their crimes. But carnival was also a time when the weak and the strong switched places within a society. The escrache was an example of the disempowered masses taking control from those in power and redesigning the “law” in a way that disempowered t hose who had been protected from prosecution and retribution. During my conversation with him in La Plata, Argentina, in August 2013, Axat explicitly connected the escrache to the tradition of carnival, describing the escrache as “the carnivalization of the pol itical.” 66 He said that all of the ele ments of the escrache—the music, the chants, and the celebratory atmosphere— “must be seen as doing in the people’s terms exactly what the state does not want to do. [. . .] In this way the escrache is a farce of justice. It is a parody of justice.” 67 Axat’s observation here ties directly to the performance studies concept of surrogation, as developed by Joseph Roach. According to Roach, surrogation occurs in cultures when “actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric.” 68 He continues, “Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure, I hypothesize, survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates.” 69 In the case of the escrache, there are two vacancies that the activists fill. First, H.I.J.O.S. are standing in as surrogates for their own disappeared parents, many of whom were disappeared b ecause of their activism or political involvement. Their participation in the escraches stands in for the activism that got their parents dis appeared in the first place. The continued presence of the disappeared through the embodied act of the escrache is emphasized through the rallying cry yelled out at each escrache: “Trenta mil detenidos-desaparecidos: ¡Presente! ¡Ahora y siempre!” (“Thirty thousand detained- d isappeared: Pre sent! Now and Forever!”). Second, the escrache serves as a surrogate for the official justice of the state, the absence of which, at least in the eyes of the participants, has disrupted “the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric.” Axat points out, however, that the escrache is not a perfect surrogate. It does not, in fact, replicate justice: it mimics justice. It is a “parody of justice.” Roach quotes Homi K. Bhaba as writing, “Mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.” 70 In fact, that H.I.J.O.S. understand the escrache as an imperfect form of justice is a menace. The idea that “ justice” can be performed on the streets by a crowd of demonstrators troubles the state. The literal messiness of this form of justice, which leaves the streets full of graffiti and the beautiful homes of perpetrators spattered in bloodred paint, evokes the specter of vigilantism, even if no violence occurred in the atmosphere of
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the escrache. Roach explains that this mimicry serves as a menace because “even as parody, perform ances propose possible candidates for succession.” 71 The escrache, as a surrogate of true justice, challenges the state to play its rightful role as provider of justice. Unless it does, the much more unstable and unpredictable crowd w ill play that role. Nevertheless, the escrache could not be the end in itself. It acted as a calling out not only of the perpetrator, but of the state that allowed the perpetrator to remain free. In the wake of the escrache, then, it was both the neighborhood that was called to perform the social sentencing of the perpetrator and the state that was called to alter its policies in relation to the past. In challenging the inaction of the state, however, the escrache may have served as a surrogate for justice, but it was never a wholly sufficient one. There is a reason the slogan of H.I.J.O.S. was “If there is no justice, there w ill be escrache.” The slogan recognizes that the escraches are not, in themselves, justice. They are a placeholder for justice. Once true justice steps in, the need for the surrogate disappears. The surrogate itself is insufficient. This, too, fits into traditional understandings of carnival. As Mikhail Bakhtin writes in his seminal analysis of the social phenomenon, “Carnival celebrated a temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.” 72 According to Bakhtin, carnival is always a temporary phenomenon, meant as a hiatus in the perform ance of the ordinary power structure of a society. Likewise, the escrache could not be (nor was it meant to be) a permanent solution, but rather a road to a bigger structural change. Bakhtin continues, “Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal.” 73 Herein lies the true power of the escrache as well. Like all carnival, it represented a moment of becoming. In the case of the escrache, this “becoming” had several layers: the “becoming” of a new popular front, the “becoming” of a neighborhood united against a perpetrator, and, perhaps most important, the “becoming” of a society transforming into one that would actively address its own criminal past. Roach writes that “surrogation rarely if ever succeeds.” 74 He continues, “The fit cannot be exact. The intended substitute e ither cannot fulfill expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus.” 75 In the case of the escraches, there was always a deficit of justice. Not everyone participates in the levying of the social sentence once the escrache is over. In many cases, the baker continued to sell the perpetrator his bread, just as the taxi driver continued to transport him. Justice was incomplete. Despite this insufficiency, however, one could also argue that the escrache produced an excess as well: an excess of affect. That affect continued circulating in the aftermath of the escrache, colliding with the affective energies of other activist groups of the time, and ultimately crescendoing in a social reckoning. When that affect is so pervasive, it becomes impossible to ignore. Perhaps it is
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at this moment that the state is forced to act. The energy of the grassroots becomes so g reat that it fin ally moves the heft of state bureaucracy. This process of becoming, of affective proliferation, is connected to one final trans-that describes the acts of H.I.J.O.S. and their escraches: transmission. The term “transmission” is especially important because it describes both the coming into being of H.I.J.O.S. and their ultimate political project. First, H.I.J.O.S. is nothing if not a beautiful example of the intergenerational transmission of affect, memory, and trauma. As illustrated by Axat’s reliance on the Madres to articulate his concept of biopoetics, H.I.J.O.S. is a direct byproduct of the civil disobedience and embodied practices of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. This point is outlined especially well by Taylor’s concept of “the DNA of perform ance.” 76 Using the case of the h uman rights movements of Argentina as her examples, Taylor develops this concept to explain how traumatic memory is transmitted across generations. Speaking of the Abuelas, Madres, and H.I.J.O.S., Taylor writes, “They have contributed to human rights efforts by successfully transmitting traumatic memory from one generation to another and from the Argentinian political context to an international public that did not live the violence firsthand. Those acts of transfer prove vital to an understanding of cultural agency.” 77 Oftentimes the intergenerational transmission of trauma is theorized as a painfully unavoidable byproduct of mass violence, the legacy of pain that subsequent generations must endure. H ere, however, Taylor offers a different perspective. Although it would certainly be better for the initiating violence never to have taken place, the transmission of memory in the case of Argentina has produced a level of human rights activism that might have never existed. This transmission of traumatic memory has led to new understandings of agency, which is exercised by H.I.J.O.S. in ways that at times mirror the acts of the Madres and Abuelas, but at other times contribute to embodied practices and sources of intersubjective power that w ere previously unheard of. This transmission of memory is what leads to the transduction of the negative affect of that memory. Taylor writes, “By emphasizing the public, rather than the private, repercussions of traumatic violence and loss, social actors turn personal pain into the engine for cultural change.” 78 In the face of the damaging affective force of resonant violence, which operates to destroy the collective horizontal voice and to push people out of the public sphere, H.I.J.O.S. represents a reversal of that force. Through their refusal to break apart and experience the pain of intergenerational traumatic memory in silence and isolation, the negative affect is transduced into something else: into “the engine for cultural change.” This sentiment was confirmed in one conversation I had with Taty Almeida, a prominent member of Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora. When I asked her what moved her to political activism in the face of the pain from losing her son, she responded, “Actually, that pain, that rage, what they did to us did not leave us with hate. No! We transformed it into love
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for our children and into a fight—a peaceful fight.” 79 The co-embodied practices of the Madres and H.I.J.O.S. do not simply transmit the memory of a violent past; they transform it into something altogether different, more positive, and potentially preventive of f uture violence. This transmission of memory is occurring not only within the generations of victims in Argentina; rather, the escraches are a co-embodied practice that has transmitted this memory to a wider public outside of the country’s borders. This transmission of memory has been a bidirectional force. While they first served as a means for drawing the attention of the international community to the impunity being granted to perpetrators of genocidal acts within Argentina, the escraches have now become a practice that other groups have taken up both within the country and abroad. This fact is exemplified by the continued evocation of the escrache in other contexts and locations, despite the fact that H.I.J.O.S. as a group no longer organizes escraches. H.I.J.O.S. continued to make escraches against former perpetrators into the early years of the 2000s, keeping true to their word that if there was no justice, then the escraches would continue. The 2003 election of Nestor Kirchner as president, however, was a watershed moment for the population of Argentina and its relationship to the violent past of the dictatorship. Within the first year of his presidency, Kirchner led the charge to nullify the Law of Due Obedience and the Law of Full Stop, thus removing the legal shroud that had been protecting the unprosecuted perpetrators of the dictatorship. In 2005, the Supreme Court of Argentina reopened the t rials against the perpetrators, and since their reopening, over 1,200 military officers have faced trial, including Rafael Videla, the first president of the military junta, who was convicted and died in prison in 2013. Soon after the trials began, escraches against the former perpetrators began to peter out, before stopping almost completely by the end of 2006. The escrache as a tool, however, began to spread, and the sociopolitical situations to which it has been used to respond expanded as well. The process began with the installation of the Mesa de Escrache Popular, a group that took over the planning of the escraches in 2000 and 2001; their purpose was to make the escrache into a tool used by all p eople, not just the members of H.I.J.O.S.80 Despite the change in management, the escraches of Mesa de Escrache Popular had the same goals as t hose of H.I.J.O.S.: to reveal the perpetrators living freely within a neighborhood and to levy a social sentence for those p eople by bringing the neighbors together against them. Beginning with Argentina’s catastrophic economic collapse in 2001, however, a process that has been called “the generalization of the escrache” commenced.81 Neighborhood assemblies began to protest in front of businesses or banks, calling t hese protests “escraches.” The practice also spread to other countries, most notably Spain, where it is a common practice still being performed against politicians today. Although H.I.J.O.S. and Mesa de Escrache Popular
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have not seemed excessively territorial over the use of the term to describe t hese other protests, t here does seem to be a fear that the generalization of the term could lead to a neutralization of its real power. According to one member of Mesa de Escrache Popular: If the dictatorship came to impose certain types of values—t hose of social discipline—a nd if it succeeded in breaking social ties, [. . .] then what the escrache does is to recuperate those ties and to generate new values. For me it is fine that the word “escrache” is being used by all sides, but the principle risk is that the escrache is politically instrumentalized. Because the escrache is not just another form of politics: it is the height of social protagonism.82 This statement highlights the performativity of the escrache; it defines the practice by what it accomplishes—n amely, the reparation of the broken social bonds brought about by the forces of resonant violence. According to the speaker, the circulation of the term is much less problematic than the potential dilution of the practice’s power, as evidenced through its ability to bring people together. It is perhaps ironic that these groups are brought together through a practice that works to transect and divide, a fact that demonstrates that, during the height of the escraches in the late 1990s and early 2000s, what practices of trans-action like the escrache w ere actually transecting was not a space or a group of p eople, but the damaging, affective force of resonant vio lence itself. The escrache, along with other co-embodied practices, transduced the negatively affective force of resonant violence, transforming it into new forms of affective power and agency. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart develops the term “ordinary affects” to describe the sentiments and emotions of the everyday that circulate among us and have effects on our interactions with the world and with o thers.83 She writes: “Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies. [. . .] Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of.” 84 If Stewart’s project theorizes the inconspicuous, quotidian, and, well, ordinary affects that circulate almost completely unnoticed e very day, and yet have an immense effect on the lives of those touched by them, resonant violence is a way of conceiving of the extraordinary affects that come to be woven into the social fabric of a society a fter a period of genocidal violence. Perhaps one of the reasons the affective force of resonant violence is so damaging, however, is its ability to seem ordinary and inconspicuous, existing in the realm of the felt-unfelt.85 Like ordinary affects, resonant violence becomes both the “public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation” and “the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of.” But when the detrimental power of the extraordinary is accepted as
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ordinary, it becomes all the more difficult to convert it into something more productive. And yet the escrache, too, is an example of extraordinary affect, in this case being gathered and mobilized toward revealing not only the unpunished perpetrator living freely within a neighborhood, but also the extraordinary power of resonant violence that has been made to seem ordinary for too long. The affective power of the escrache, as stated above, was never supposed to end when the escrache itself was over. The momentum generated through the escrache had to carry over toward the perform ance of the social condemnation by the neighborhood. Moreover, the escraches worked to propagate their new forms of extraordinary affect, which began to circulate more and more with the perform ance of each new escrache. H.I.J.O.S., Mesa de Escrache Popular, and all the many other participants in the escraches openly sought to make the extraordinary affect of the escrache into something ordinary and quotidian—something that circulated openly and freely, affecting daily social interactions and the way people related to the past. And so, although the escraches themselves have ended, at least in their original form, the affective environment created through the escraches is still performing today. The energy of the escraches and their mandate for justice have now been taken up by the state, which continues to hold t rials against former perpetrators. Although the subsumption of the work of the escrache—or any social movement, for that m atter—w ithin the framework of the state most certainly leads to an entirely separate set of complications when it comes to thinking about the directionality of power within a society, it also clearly represents the normalization of the affective environment of the escrache. At least one facet of the extraordinary affect of resonant violence has been made to seem extraordinary again; at the same time, the extraordinary affect of the escraches and H.I.J.O.S. has become ordinary. In Everything in Its Path, a study of collective trauma, Kai Erikson writes that a collectively experienced horror “makes p eople doubt whether there is order in the universe at all, and, further, it makes people distrust the workings of their own bodies.” 86 If this is true, then biopoetic resistance and co- embodied practices of trans-action exemplify the ways in which people learn to trust the workings of their own bodies again, discovering the power and agency that reside within a single individual, and how that power can be pooled with others to confront the most oppressive forces, bringing order again to the universe. Through their perform ance, what has been made to seem ordinary comes rightly to be seen as extraordinary, while the extraordinary power of positive affect can lead to the founding of a new normal—a less damaging “ordinary.” As bodies trans-act, magnificent and poetic t hings can, and indeed have, occurred.
C hapte r 5
Occupying Space, Amplifying Affect t h e a m e r ic a n i n di a n occ u pat ion of a l c at r a z i s l a n d Most of the 1.4 million p eople who visit Alcatraz Island each year are not g oing there to learn about the occupation. Some have forgotten about it. Some have never heard of it. E ither way, when they board one of the Hornblower Hybrid ferries that w ill take them to the 22.5-acre hunk of rock in the m iddle of San Francisco Bay, there are most certainly more people thinking about Capone and the Birdman than Richard Oakes and the Indians of All Tribes. Even as the ferry pulls up to the island’s dock, where visitors are greeted with the remnants of graffiti from the occupation, declaring, “Indians Welcome” and “Welcome to Indian Land,” it is the prison that draws them. Bypassing the tiny, secluded room that offers information on the occupation, visitors watch the obligatory historical video about the prison, then head for the headsets. As they tour the cellblock, the gruff voices of former prison guards bark terse imperatives through the earbuds, telling them where to go, what to do: “Walk forward to cell number 24!” “Turn left and enter the next room!” The guard-g uides speak of wardens and convicts, gangsters and jailbreaks. They speak of the fourteen times prisoners conspired to escape from the island. They do not speak of the one time, over fifty years ago, when a group of p eople plotted to break into the fortress, to take it over, and to stay there for over a year-a nd-a-h alf. For twenty-n ine years Alcatraz operated as the most infamous prison in the U.S. imaginary. But it was only after the prison closed down that a group of people would sequester themselves on that uninhabitable rock and, in d oing so, push forward the wheels of political change in a way that the prison’s former inhabitants could have only dreamed. The American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island of 1969–1971 was not the first occupation of the island. That took place in March 1964, about a year a fter the prison closed. Five Lakota-Sioux Indians chartered a boat and landed on the island, citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed by the United States’ government with the Lakota-Sioux nation. With this treaty, the Sioux were granted the Black Hills of South Dakota as their reservation—that is, u ntil less than a decade l ater, when settlers discovered gold t here. Article VI of 151
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the treaty noted that any surplus federal land occupied by Indians for a certain period of time would automatically revert to Indian ownership. When the federal prison of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, California, was decommissioned and declared surplus federal property in 1964, these young American Indian activists saw an opportunity. According to Troy R. Johnson, one of the first scholars to write on American Indian activism of the period, the occupiers “signed a formal claim statement to be filed with the Bureau of Land Claims in Sacramento, held a victory dance, and on the advice of their lawyer, Elliott Leighton, left the island.” 1 Rather than a long-term occupation, this political action was meant to garner media attention for the cause of Bay Area Indians, and it succeeded in doing so. Adam Fortunate Eag le, one of the future occupiers of Alcatraz later that decade, writes, “Of course, the 1964 action was never meant to be an occupation, and it wasn’t. [. . .] But important things managed to get said, and the reporters listened. As a result of the media’s interest, the protests of Indian people in the Bay Area got much more public attention than they could have garnered with yet another protest meeting.” 2 Perhaps the most important t hing the 1964 occupation did, however, was to inspire other American Indian activists of the possibilities of what could be done in the future. Fortunate Eag le writes, “What t hose Sioux really did was begin a dream. [. . .] Alcatraz was a dream, a dream that just had to become a reality.” 3 The following month, in the wake of the U.S. government “buying” sixty-five million acres of Native land in California for a measly forty-seven cents per acre, Leighton filed a petition with the General Serv ices Administration (GSA), offering to buy Alcatraz Island at the same rate—somewhere around $10.00 for the entire rock.4 The GSA disregarded their petition and began accepting proposals for what to do with the island. The American Indian Foundation submitted their idea of building a university and Indian cultural center on Alcatraz. Their proposal received little attention, however, as it was overshadowed by one submitted by Lamar Hunt, a Texas oil tycoon who proposed turning Alcatraz into a center for commerce and tourism that included “a park commemorating the U.S. space program, illuminated gardens, an underg round museum, restoration of the prison for tours, and construction of a shopping center that would recreate 1890s San Francisco.” 5 Though Hunt’s proposal intrigued the GSA, it infuriated the general public. As the GSA considered how to proceed, Alcatraz remained vacant and unused for years, u ntil one event provided the figurative and tragically literal spark that would catalyze the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island and the Red Power Movement. On October 10, 1969, the San Francisco American Indian Center—a central hub of social engagement and aid for the thirty thousand Native p eople living in the city—burned to the ground. To this day the true cause of the fire remains unclear, but many believed it to be an act of arson and, therefore, a deliberate attack against the American Indian population of
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San Francisco. Less than one month a fter the fire, on November 9, 1969, a group of roughly fifty Bay Area Indians made their first attempt to occupy Alcatraz, claiming it as “Indian Land.” This chapter examines the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island—which lasted from November 1969 u ntil June 1971—as a co-embodied practice of occupation that sought to respond to and transform the affective force of resonant violence, which has continued to present itself through centuries of persecution of Native p eoples. The chapter demonstrates how the occupation of Alcatraz Island—a nd consequently all practices of occupation— can transform resonant violence, first by reassembling social groups, then by resignifying the literal and figurative public spaces those groups occupy. I show how the effects of the occupation amplified and emanated outward in order to exemplify how this and other co-embodied practices of occupation create an echo chamber for affective transmission that can have effects that far exceed the physical bounda ries of the occupied space. Although the affective energy of t hese practices can be difficult to maintain for long periods of time, when that energy becomes routinized,6 it can lead to larger-scale systemic reform through its institutionalization. Ove rview of th e Occ upati on The events of the occupation of Alcatraz Island have been detailed by many scholars,7 and several of the participants have documented their own experiences and interpretations of the occupation in writing or through interviews.8 Given the detailed descriptions of the occupation that already exist, I w ill only briefly outline the timeline of the occupation before moving on to analyze its performativity, focusing less on what the occupation entailed and more on what it enacted. The nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island began with a few failed attempts. The first came on November 9, 1969, when, a fter a month or so of planning, a group of Native American activists arrived at San Francisco’s Pier 39 to find a g aggle of reporters ready to document the activists’ landing on Alcatraz Island—a nd none of the boats they had chartered to take them there. As one member of the group distracted the press, another went off in search of a boat captain who would be willing to take the group to the island. One captain agreed to sail fifty people around the island a few times, but not to drop them off, as his boat was too large for the island’s dock. When the boat approached Alcatraz, however, five activists jumped overboard and swam through a nasty current to reach the island. It was only a few hours before t hose five were forced to leave. L ater that night, a smaller group tried to land again. This time fourteen people made it onto the island, and they managed to stay the night, before being removed the following day. But one of the fourteen, Richard Oakes, was committed to going back and staying. Over the next week and a half,
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Oakes visited local universities and convinced young activists to join him in a new attempt at occupation. On November 20, 1969, Oakes and seventy-eight other American Indians passed a Coast Guard blockade and made it to Alcatraz, beginning an occupation that would last over a year and a half. When the occupation began, there were seventy-n ine American Indians on Alcatraz Island. Excitement for the successful takeover and the desire to participate in such a historic event quickly led to more Indians joining the force. By the end of the weekend, t here were more than one hundred occupiers.9 At first, at the orders of President Richard Nixon, the Coast Guard instituted a blockade, which consisted of a few Coast Guard cutters in the Bay attempting to prevent people and supplies from reaching Alcatraz. The occupiers found ways to evade the Coast Guard cutters, however, and the blockade garnered enormous public sympathy and support for the occupation, leading the Coast Guard to drop the blockade a fter only three days.10 Over the course of nineteen months, the number of occupiers fluctuated wildly, probably reaching its highest point within the first few weeks of the occupation, on Thanksgiving Day of 1969, when somewhere between four hundred and seven hundred Indians gathered to observe the holiday together on Alcatraz. In an ironic inversion of a holiday that has come to represent, for many, the beginning of the destruction of Native life in what is today the United States, occupiers rejoiced in the endurance of Native culture and fellowship. A local restaurant donated meals for the event.11 Such public support was far from unique. Within the first week of the occupation, p eople had donated $4,000 to the American Indian Center—roughly the equivalent of $30,000 t oday.12 The occupation gained support from churches and activist circles around the country. Many celebrities and public figures began speaking out in celebration of the occupation. Fortunate Eag le writes: Individuals and groups from all over gave their support. Minority groups and churches collected donations; celebrities like Dick Gregory donated money. The folksinger Malvina Reynolds donated money and the royalties of one year from her song, “Alcatraz,” about the occupation. Local rock groups immediately began benefit concerts to raise money, and I was asked to speak all over the Bay Area in support of the cause. The word spread like wildfire, much to the government’s chagrin.13 The band Creedence Clearwater Revival even bought a boat, dubbed Bass Tub I, for the occupiers to shuttle people and supplies back and forth.14 By January 1970, supporters had donated over $17,000, or about $126,000 in con temporary terms.15 This outpouring of support put the U.S. government in a very tricky position. They did not want to give up the island to a bunch of Native American protestors, but they were also limited in how they could respond. The occupation was taking place while the highly unpopu lar Vietnam War was
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raging. The My Lai Massacre of 1968 and the Kent State shooting, which occurred during the occupation in May 1970, all contributed to anti- government sentiment. The last thing Nixon and his administration wanted was another massacre on their hands. In one interview, Bradley H. Patterson Jr., the executive assistant to Leonard Garment, counselor to Nixon, described the administration’s approach to resolving the occupation in a way that reveals an interesting self-awareness of the state’s genocidal past: In a word . . . our policy was restraint. Kent State had just happened that spring in 1970, and it could very easily happen again. Jackson State happened right a fter that. You could have the law enforcement in such a way that you could have a Kent State out t here in Alcatraz, and we just d idn’t think people would stand for that, with killing Indians. We’d done eren’t enough killing Indians in the last two hundred years and we w about to do any more. Our policy was restraint and negotiation and talk and try to work out some alternatives, and so forth.16 Government officials tried to negotiate with the occupiers, but t hese negotiations would always stall, largely because the government never had the intention to relinquish Alcatraz. In the beginning, the occupation was highly org an ized, and Alcatraz was transformed into its own functioning mini-state. The occupiers immediately established a government called the Indian Council, which comprised seven elected officials from the occupation who met every Friday to make major decisions regarding life on the island. Council members went up for re- election every ninety days.17 Under the structure of the Council were a handful of committees (including health, security, public relations, ways and means, food supply, etc.), each of which dealt with managing important aspects of daily life on Alcatraz and spreading the message of the occupation.18 On December 11, 1969, the Big Rock School opened in an old movie theater on the island. Two occupiers who were also teachers ran the school, which taught children from first through sixth grades. The local government offered its own show of support by accrediting the school.19 On December 22, 1969, the occupiers began broadcasting their own radio show, Radio Free Alcatraz, which was hosted by John Trudell. In January 1970, they began publishing the Indians of All Tribes Newsletter.20 The broadcast and newsletter gave the occupiers an opportunity to spread their message without the concern of censorship. The thoughtful and comprehensive organi zation strategy of the occupiers got the occupation off to an impressive and impactful start. Unfortunately, this level of organization and cooperation began to unravel as time passed—a point to which I w ill return later. Regardless, for the first few months of the occupation, the activists’ organ izational structure was truly impressive. Having laid out a brief description of the composition and daily realities of the occupation, I w ill now turn to its performativity. The occupiers
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themselves were doing a g reat deal of very concrete things through their co-embodied practice. At the same time, the occupation was doing t hings of its own, both on the literal and symbolic level. Namely, it was responding directly to the resonant violence that began with the colonialization of the Americas and that led to the destruction, isolation, and repression of Native Americans in the United States. The violence faced by Native Americans manifested both through state policies and more quotidian displays of social discrimination and racism. The act of occupying Alcatraz Island, however, marks a turning point for American p eople, both Indian and non-Indian. Through this act, t hose most directly feeling the damaging effects of resonant violence began to transform that violence into new forms of agency and power that initiated from a small island but ultimately grew to influence the entire country. To understand how this transformation occurred, I begin with the clearest indication available of how the occupiers themselves understood the occupation: the proclamation they made to the public on the day the occupation began. Th e Proclamati on, or Bui l di ng a Native Ame rican Utopi a As mentioned previously, the first attempt at occupation got off to a rocky start when the occupiers arrived at Pier 39 on November 9, 1969, to find a bevy of press representatives but none of the boats they had arranged to shut tle them to Alcatraz. While one org an izer, Fortunate Eag le, went in search of a captain who would lend his serv ices to the cause, a young American Indian activist named Richard Oakes distracted the press by reading the proclamation that the occupiers had collectively created and ratified in the days and weeks preceding the occupation. It was in this moment that Oakes was anointed by the press as the “leader” of the occupation, even though Oakes and the occupiers maintained that theirs was a leaderless movement. It was also in this moment that the occupiers told the world who they were, what they were doing, and what they wanted. The proclamation is a fascinating document, especially in the way it plays with contradictory affects to communicate with the larger public and, therefore, to respond to the affective force of resonant violence. Its mix of deep sincerity, dripping irony, and gallows humor disarms the reader/listener with its unexpectedness. Although the proclamation is quite lengthy, it warrants a close reading to highlight all the mechanisms it is using to present the cause of the occupiers to the world. The focus of this book has been and continues to be the embodied responses of groups to the damaging effects of resonant violence. Although the document of this proclamation is not technically an embodied act, I consider it to fit within the framework of this chapter and the book more broadly for a number of reasons. First, following the work of
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scholars like Shoshana Felman, 21 all speech acts are, in fact, embodied acts because speaking is an act of the body. The proclamation exists now and is presented here in written form, as it is found in Fortunate Eag le’s account of the occupation.22 It was first delivered through the spoken word, however; the proclamation first reached the public through the embodied speech act of Oakes. Second, I examine this proclamation not only as a primary-source text, but as one of the clearest examples available of how the occupiers themselves thought about their own embodied practice of occupying Alcatraz Island. Following the contention of Margaret Wetherell that the most productive way of analyzing and understanding affect is through focusing on the way affects “unfurl, become org an ized, and effloresce with particu lar rhythms” through embodied practice, 23 I see affective practice as inseparable from discursive formations, as both influence and constitute the other. Affective practice is, at its core, a form of meaning making, and how pract it ioners articulate their own practice can offer import ant insight into the motivations and aspirations of affective practice. Through a close reading of the text/per for m ance, I highlight the ways in which this co-embodied practice was already theorized and understood by its pract it ioners. The proclamation can be divided into three distinct sections. The first section, or preamble, relies largely on dark humor and irony to introduce the cause of the occupation to the non-Indian public: To the Great White Father and All His People: We, the Native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery. We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty: We w ill purchase said Alcatraz Island for 24 dollars ($24) in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for t hese sixteen acres is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we know that land values have risen over the years. Our offer of $1.24 per acre is greater than the 47¢ per acre the white men are now paying the California Indians for their land. We w ill give to the inhabitants of this land a portion of that land for their own, to be held in trust by the American Indian Government—for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea—to be administered by the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs (BCA). We w ill further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We w ill offer them our religion, our education, our life-ways, in order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with all white men. 24
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The proclamation begins with a greeting that both does the traditional work of a salutation—clarifying the intended addressee of what follows—a nd sets up the at once caustic and humorous nature of what is to come. Here, the “Great White Father” refers to the president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. The term “Great White Father” is one developed by the colonial powers as a means of speaking (read: condescending) to Native peoples in a way that used their own perceived social and linguistic customs. The image of the president as the “Great White Father” was something that the federal government itself encouraged as a means of building trust in treaty negotiations. By beginning the proclamation with a call to the “Great White Father,” the occupiers connect Nixon and the modern presidency with the more blatantly violent Indian policies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, the occupiers use the language of their oppressors to highlight their two-faced nature. It is, in fact, the “Great White Father and All of His People” who have taken from the Indians their land, leaving them in the state that necessitated the occupation. By using this language, the occupiers evoke the history of paternalism and broken treaties that has led to this moment. This playfully ironic instrumentalization of history continues in the text of the preamble. First, the occupiers lay claim to Alcatraz Island “by right of discovery.” The irony of the phrase is obvious, given that these occupiers in no way discovered Alcatraz Island. The occupiers opt to use the same claim to the island as the original colonial powers used for the entire continent; in doing so, they highlight the absurdity of the European colonial powers’ historical claims to the Americas as a whole. Next, the occupiers do what the U.S. government did to them many times before: they offer a treaty with the promise of being “fair and honorable” in its execution. Just as Peter Minuit is remembered as purchasing Manhattan Island in 1626 from the Lenape for beads and glass valued at $24, the occupiers offer the same price to purchase Alcatraz Island, stressing that, given the significantly smaller land area of Alcatraz, they are actually paying a much higher price than the Lenape received. This offer of purchase does not only reference the past, however. It also cites the much more recent case in which a number of California tribes were forced to give up 64 million acres of land for $29.1 million, a cost of roughly 47 cents per acre.25 By connecting these two events—one in 1626, the other in 1963—t he occupiers stress the continued persecution of American Indians and the ongoing settler colonial project to take their lands. The occupiers then offer to the United States the same “concessions” that they have been offered for centuries. First, they commit to constructing what is basically a “reservation” on Alcatraz Island for its non-Indian inhabitants. This land, though, w ill not be given directly to t hose inhabitants, but w ill be held in trust by a Bureau of Caucasian Affairs, just as the U.S. government did through its Bureau of Indian Affairs. Next, mirroring the paternalism of the
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“Great White Father,” the occupiers commit to “civilizing” the non-Indian inhabitants of the island, just as the colonizers and U.S. government sought to do through proselytization and “re-education” to assimilate Native p eoples into the “American” way of life. In fact, when the occupiers arrived at the island a fter first reading the proclamation, they encountered Alcatraz’s only permanent inhabitant, its white government caretaker. When the caretaker warned the group that they were trespassing, Oakes responded in a way that reiterated the humorous pledge of the proclamation’s preamble. He asked for the caretaker’s cooperation, promising that, should they receive it, the occupiers would establish a Bureau of Caucasian Affairs and name the caretaker its director.26 The second section of the proclamation continues the use of irony to emphasize the raw deal that American Indians have received time and again. As Fortunate Eag le states, “In the next section of the document we used gallows humor and a little tongue-in-cheek exaggeration to make some impor tant points we wanted the government and the public to take to heart.” 27 But it also ends with a heaping dose of sincerity, communicated through two sentences of beautiful prose that break away from the biting rhetoric that predominates the text u ntil that point: We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable as an Indian Reservation, as determined by the white man’s own standards. By this we mean that this place resembles most Indian reservations, in that: 1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation. 2. It has no fresh r unning water. 3. The sanitation facilities are inadequate. 4. There are no oil or mineral rights. 5. There is no industry and so unemployment is very g reat. 6. There are no health care facilities. 7. The soil is rocky and non-productive and the land does not support game. 8. There are no educational facilities. 9. The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others. Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the g reat lands once ruled by f ree and noble Indians.28 The first part of the second section is much less about laying out any practical claim to the island than it is about articulating the unlivable conditions that most American Indians faced on reservations. The proclamation highlights the lack of resources, health care, education, and basic utilities that was a
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reality of reservation life. According to a report released by Lehman Brightman (Sioux), then president of the United Native Americans, American Indians in 1968 suffered an array of horrific conditions: Unemployment at 70 to 80 percent; average income in 1966 at $1200 per year; death from tuberculosis at seven to eight times the non-Indian rate; infant mortality at double the rate for whites; one-fi fth of Indian deaths the result of preventable diseases; life expectancy at fifteen to twenty years shorter than the national average; suicide rate at one hundred times the national average; 90 percent of housing on reservations was substandard; a tremendous rate of alcoholism stemming from the frustrations of their conditions.29 As a final jab, the list of problems with the island ends by referencing the island’s most recent use as a federal penitentiary, claiming that living in a prison w ill not be anything new for the occupiers. This darkly humorous list, however, is followed by a statement of pure poetry. Just as the Statue of Liberty served as a symbolic beacon for the millions of immigrants who came to the United States through New York Harbor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the occupiers call for Alcatraz to serve as another symbol for those coming to the United States through San Francisco Bay. They offer that their occupation of the island would illustrate the “true history” of the country—before Columbus and before the European onslaught of guns and disease. The occupiers flip traditional notions of “prog ress” that depict society as always improving as it moves forward. For the occupiers, it is in the pre-Columbian historical moment that America was truly free. Through occupying Alcatraz, the activists almost propose the creation of a new utopic space. Just like the original Utopia in the pages of Thomas More’s famous sixteenth-century text, their utopia would also be an island in the “New World,” set apart for egalitarian living and kinship. Indeed, we can think about co-embodied practices of occupation like the occupation of Alcatraz as utopic projects that attempt to create a new, more perfect world within the world. The Proclamation of the Indians of All Tribes is a spectacular example of the articulation of what perform ance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz, a fter Ernst Bloch, refers to as a concrete utopia. Muñoz writes, “In our everyday life abstract utopias are akin to banal optimism. Concrete utopias can also be daydream-like, but they are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is one who dreams for many. Concrete utopias are the realm of educated hope.” 30 Unlike the “banal optimism” of abstract utopias, concrete utopias are at once historically situated and specific. They hope large, but they also hope for something specifically. Much more than “banal optimism,” the Proclamation of the Indians of All Tribes is the written aspiration for the emergence of a new collective, namely a united American Indian
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population that can rally around the cause of undoing the centuries of resonant violence experienced by Native peoples in the United States. The first two sections of the proclamation situate this utopia within the historical context of the centuries of harm brought about by the settler colonial project. The final paragraph of the second section envisions a beautiful new world that recognizes and honors true freedom and equality, rather than the façade of “freedom and equality” that the United States has boasted since its founding. The third section of the proclamation then goes on to articulate what exactly the occupiers are hoping for. Through the final section, the utopia of the activists is made concrete. It moves away from poetry and irony toward utter practicality. Fortunate Eag le writes, “Then we got to the heart of the m atter: the way we wanted to use Alcatraz if we could persuade the government to turn it over to us. There was nothing funny about this; it was all very straightforward”: What use w ill we make of this land? Since the San Francisco Indian Center burned down, t here is no place for Indians to assemble. Therefore, we plan to develop on this island several Indian institutions: 1. A Center for Native American Studies w ill be developed which w ill train our young people in the best of our Native cultural arts and sciences, as well as educate them in the skills and knowledge to improve the lives and spirits of all Indian peoples. Attached to this Center w ill be traveling universities, managed by Indians, which w ill go to the Indian Reservations in order to learn from the people the traditional values which are now absent from the Caucasian higher educational system. 2. An American Indian Spiritual Center w ill be developed which w ill practice our ancient tribal religious ceremonies and medicine. Our cultural arts w ill be featured and our young p eople trained in music, dance, and medicine. 3. An Indian Center of Ecology w ill be built which w ill train and support our young people in scientific research and practice in order to restore our lands and waters to their pure and natural state. We w ill seek to de-pollute the air and the water of the Bay Area. We w ill seek to restore fish and animal life, and to revitalize sea life which has been threatened by the white man’s way. Facilities w ill be developed to desalt sea water for human use. 4. A Great Indian Training School w ill be developed to teach our peoples how to make a living in the world, improve our standards of living, and end hunger and unemployment among all our peoples. This training school w ill include a Center for Indian Arts and Crafts, and an Indian restaurant serving Native foods and training Indians in culinary arts. This Center w ill display
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Indian arts and offer the Indian foods of all tribes to the public, so that all may know of the beauty and spirit of the traditional Indian ways. 5. Some of the present buildings w ill be taken over to develop an American Indian Museum, which w ill depict our Native foods and other cultural contributions we have given to all the world. Another part of the Museum w ill present some of the t hings the white man has given to the Indians, in return for the land and life he took: disease, alcohol, poverty and cultural decimation (as symbolized by old tin cans, barbed wire, rubber tires, plastic containers, etc.). Part of the Museum w ill remain a dungeon, to symbolize both those Indian captives who w ere incarcerated for challenging white authority, and those who w ere imprisoned on reservations. The Museum w ill show the noble and the tragic events of Indian history, including the broken treaties, the documentary of the Trail of Tears, the Massacre of Wounded Knee, as well as the victory over Yellow-Hair Custer and his Army. In the name of all Indians, therefore, we re-claim this island for our Indian nations, for all t hese reasons. We feel this claim is just and proper, and that this land should rightfully be granted to us for as long as the rivers shall run and the sun shall shine. 31 Although this section of the proclamation is the clearest and most direct, t here are several part icu lar moments that are worth highlighting. First, all five points are framed as necessary because of the burning down of the San Francisco American Indian Center. The text states, “Since the San Francisco Indian Center burned down, t here is no place for Indians to assem ble.” Each of t hese five uses for the island, then, is first and foremost meant to create a space of assembly. As I have stated elsewhere in this book, the primary result of resonant violence is the atomization of populations. According to Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the end goal of all terroristic regimes is to bring about isolation and impotence in the subjects of totalitarian power. 32 Although the United States is not a totalitarian government by any traditional definition of the term, it is certainly one that has used terror and violence against American Indian (and other minority) populations. Two significant effects of that sustained violence were the displacement and isolation of Native American groups. This violence was made manifest through several distinct periods in which the policy of the United States government toward Native American p eoples developed. Beginning in the early 1800s, one of the earliest policies of the United States was one of outright removal. Following the signing of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians33 were forcibly removed from the American Southeast
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and forced to walk westward to what was then outside the territory of the United States. These org an ized acts of ethnic cleansing, now known as the Trail of Tears, w ere just a portion of countless examples in which the U.S. government uprooted tribes from their homelands and forced them into territory that was—at that moment, at least—u ndesirable to the United States. Thousands died on these walks, and many tribal groups w ere split apart, not to unite for many generations. 34 As the doctrine of Manifest Destiny brought the United States farther westward, American Indians faced new waves of oppression that further isolated and disempowered them. 35 First, tribes were forced into reservations— parcels of land devoted specifically to certain tribes. Soon, U.S. government policy transitioned, with the end goal being to “civilize” the American Indians. The General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act, allowed for the president, at his prerogative, to break apart any Indian reservation into smaller parcels of land to be allotted to individual Indians and their families. Indians w ere encouraged to assimilate into “Western” civilization by taking up American modes of agricultural practice. T hose who took advantage of the allotments were no longer considered to be American Indian, and they were granted U.S. citizenship. In practice, the land allotted to Indians was hardly arable, if at all. Good farmland was usually granted to white frontiersmen. As a result of the Dawes Act, then, entire tribal groups were broken apart from communal ways of life, and an incredible amount of land acreage was lost in the process. It was in this same period that the United States’ government began taking Native c hildren from their parents to put them into re-education boarding schools. At t hese schools, children were trained in practices of assimilation. Young Indian boys w ere forced to cut their hair, which traditionally represents a source of personal and spiritual identity for many Native p eoples; all children had to wear “American” clothing; and children were beaten when they spoke any language other than Eng lish. The goal of these schools, as articulated by Richard Henry Pratt, one of the founders and champions of the re-education movement, was to “kill the Indian in him and save the man.” Such practices of what Raphael Lemkin would call “cultural genocide” were standard government policy for over a century. T hese boarding schools remained in operation in the United States into the 1970s. The official government policy toward Native Americans changed in 1934 with the passage of the Indian Reorg an iz at ion Act (IRA), which put an end to the provisions of the Dawes Act. The federal government began recognizing the authority of tribal governments, but all American Indian land was held “in trust” by the U.S. secretary of the interior. Although this period represented pro g ress on some fronts, the federal government still treated Native Americans as people who were unable to govern themselves. The 2008 report by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
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puts it this way: “From the IRA onward, most reservations came to have the feel of branch offices of the federal government, with decision making dominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and its mana gers and with tribal governments typically totally dependent on BIA programs and funds.” 36 This period also represents the beginning of a shift t oward what David Reed Miller has called definitional violence against Native groups within the United States. 37 Definitional violence describes the sort of violence done by having categories of identity imposed on Indians by non-Indians. This brand of bureaucratic offense “did violence to many Indians’ cultural autonomy and social systems.” 38 As Miller points out, when tribes do not have a say in how their own membership is determined, they face a constant threat of ethnocide by bureaucratic means. It did not take long for this form of bureaucratic violence to grow into something even more sinister. Beginning in the 1950s, the government transitioned to its next policy, which threatened the existence of the very category of “American Indian.” This new policy was called “termination,” and the realities introduced by the policy were exactly as damaging as the name forebodes. Congress began to disband tribes, completely terminating their status as pol itical and legal entities. Throughout this period, more than one hundred tribes were terminated. All federal aid to t hese groups ceased, leaving them in even greater poverty than they already were. 39 The termination period also brought about a program to remove Indians from reservations and relocate them (yet again) to urban centers. More than one hundred thousand Native Americans were moved to cities, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Denver, and San Francisco. They w ere relocated to impoverished neighborhoods and given little to no financial aid to start their new lives. Furthermore, the state made no effort to relocate Indians from the same tribe to the same areas, contributing to an even greater sense of atomization and isolation of Native populations.40 If, as Arendt writes, terror is “the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control,” 41 the onslaught of federal policies that served to break apart Native American families and communities was certainly experienced by its victims as terror. On the subject of terroristic regimes that seek to atomize populations, Arendt writes, “It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men [sic] who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.” 42 From removal to allocation to reorg an iz ation to termination, the policies of the federal government t oward Native American individuals and groups since the country’s founding have served to disable and break apart Native American peoples. Despite the goals of these policies, however, the irony is that this final policy of termination and urban relocation contributed to the concentrated population of Native Americans in San Francisco, some of
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whom would go on to occupy Alcatraz Island in 1969. As the Harvard report states, “The socioeconomic, cultural, and political dislocations of the termination period set the stage for the dramatic transformations that followed.” 43 The fact that the five points outlined in the third section of the proclamation focus on creating spaces of assembly at once highlights a recognition on the part of the occupiers of the power of resonant violence to atomize and isolate and a brazen attempt to undo that isolation by creating spaces like a school, a spiritual center, and a museum, all of which could serve to reu nite a disjointed population. Through their occupation and the planned transformation of the island, the Indians of All Tribes converted Alcatraz into a space within which positive affect could be produced and transmitted, transducing the negative affective energy of resonant violence into a force that unites. The second important element of these five points to stress is that these five planned establishments are not meant to cloister away the cultural knowledge of Native peoples, keeping it on the isolated island in the San Francisco Bay. A university, a spiritual center, a museum, an ecology center, and a training school—each of these is intended to spread that knowledge outward, to share it with a broader public. T hese five institutions represent an important characteristic of all co- embodied practices of occupation: they are never meant to impact only the space being occupied. Rather, the act of occupation is intended to resonate outward, to amplify. To understand how Alcatraz created this sort of affective force that would resonate outward, I w ill first explain how practices of occupation like the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz respond directly to resonant violence and its ability to confine public space and atomize populations. Pe rformativity of th e Occ upati on The occupation of Alcatraz Island is an example of a co-embodied practice of occupation. Like all co-embodied practices, it represents a moment when a group of people come together in public space and act in concert. What distinguishes co-embodied practices of occupation from other forms of co-embodied practice is that they are centered on a single space that serves as a symbolic source of strength undergirding the practice. Unlike, say, the escraches of H.I.J.O.S. in the previous chapter, which w ere constantly moving around, the occupation of Alcatraz—just like the many instances of activist occupation that came before and a fter it44 —chose one space to act as the physical site of the occupiers’ perform ance. The selection of such a site always has symbolic meaning that extends far beyond the practical necessities of a space to gather. When students held a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest the racial segregation of such spaces, the counter was both practical—it was a public space where protestors could be seen and where the effects of their protest could be felt—and symbolic—that single lunch counter stood in not only for all lunch counters around the American
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South that w ere denying the right of Black Americans to sit, but also for all public spaces that were segregated. Similarly, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina chose to hold their weekly marches, in which they demanded the return of their disappeared children, in the Plaza de Mayo both because this main square in Buenos Aires was a highly visible and centralized space, and also because it sat within the center of the presidential palace, the headquarters of the national bank, and the cathedral of Buenos Aires. T hese three spaces represented the three institutions that were collaborating to carry out the violence of the dictatorship—executive, economic, and clerical/ religious powers. The space of an occupation is always meant to act as a kind of synecdochical metaphor that at once demonstrates the power relations against which the occupiers are acting and attempts to refigure that space and t hose relations. Social scientist Steve Pile offers two useful concepts for thinking about the spaces created through co-embodied practices of occupation.45 First, he uses the term geographies of domination to describe the ways that a regime or system of authority expresses that authority through the management of space. T hese geographies of domination manifest in any number of ways, including the parceling or breaking apart of public space, the regulation and control of borders, the use of architectural scale to assert authority over subjects, and the management of how bodies are allowed to move through physical space. All genocidal regimes create geographies of domination. In fact, their goal is to transform the entire country into a geography of domination by controlling not only the public sphere and how p eople move through public space, but also the private sphere. Arendt puts it this way: “By pressing men [sic ] against each other, total terror destroys the space between them. [. . .] It destroys the one essential prerequisite of freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space.” 46 Arendt draws a connection between freedom and the capacity for movement—a connection that is especially relevant given the relationality between affect and vibration that has been highlighted across this book. Affect also moves and, through its vibrationality, moves us. The freedom to move, then, is also the freedom to feel, to be affected and to affect. Resonant violence creates geographies of domination, which strive to foreclose the possibility for counter-a ffects to amplify and transmit to others. Even when violent regimes come to an end, the geographies of domination that they created do not dissipate completely. The resonant violence that at once produced such geographies and that is produced by them uses such spaces as resonance chambers that reproduce and amplify its affective force. In the case of Native Americans in the United States, instances of t hese geographies of domination are plentiful and easily visible. The most obvious, of course, are the reservations on which many Native Americans live. T oday in the United States there are 326 Indian reservations, according to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Beginning in the nineteenth century with the
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ere forced to live passage of the Indian Removal Act (1830), Native people w in specific areas granted to them by the United States government. T hese areas were most often t hose that w ere undesirable to the United States, owing to their lack of resources. While some reservations are only a few acres in size, others are quite large. For instance, the reservation of the Navajo nation is roughly the size of West Virginia.47 Even so, reservations represent geographies of domination in that peoples who, u ntil the creation of the reservations, lived without the restriction of controlled and administered borders were forced by the United States’ government to live within the confinement of such borders. At the time of the occupation of Alcatraz, standards of living on the reservations w ere significantly lower than those experienced by most Americans. Indians living on reservations had less access to education, health care, and government support, all of which led to a massive increase in disease, infant mortality, and alcoholism and a marked decrease in things like literacy and life expectancy.48 During the termination period, Indians were moved off these reservations and relocated to urban centers, which became their own geographies of domination. Relocated Indians were moved into slums and ghettos where their access to basic serv ices was no better than on the reservation. Worse, however, was that they w ere now without the community of other tribal members that the reservation provided. In the cities, then, the geographies of domination were experienced in isolation, rather than collectively, making their damaging effects potentially even greater. Indeed, the entire United States may represent a geography of domination to many Native people. This domination is visible everywhere, but perhaps particularly in the way that the land that once belonged to Native Americans, that was taken from them, still bears the names given to it by Indigenous groups. From Manhattan Island to the Mississippi River, from Lake Tahoe to Niagara Falls, each of these places takes its name from local Indigenous languages, as do countless cities across the United States. Most Americans, however, go about their daily lives with no knowledge of the etymology of the geography surrounding them. Of course, the site of the Indian occupation itself, Alcatraz Island, represents a geography of domination. Ironically, the earliest known use for Alcatraz Island was as a geography of domination by the local Ohlone Indians. The Ohlone used the island as a place to send ostracized members of their tribe. By the mid-n ineteenth century, however, the island was taken over by the U.S. military and administered as a military prison for both soldiers and civilians (including a number of Native Americans).49 In 1933, the island became the site of the most famous American federal prison, which h oused such infamous criminals as Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly. During each of these periods, the island represented a geography of domination, especially through the use of its isolated location, which served to separate its occupants
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from public life. The Indian occupation of the island, then, could be seen as the first attempted exorcism of the ghosts of domination and social violence that haunt this space as far back as history records.50 With the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island, this geography of domination was transformed into what Pile refers to as a geography of resistance. According to Pile, geographies of resist ance are spaces opened up within geographies of domination that “occupy, deploy, and create alternative spatialities from those defined through oppression and exploitation.” 51 Through the opening of these new spaces, existing power relations are at once highlighted, averted, and, potentially, transformed completely. In language that fits particularly well within the context of a group of people fighting against the violence of colonization that is still present (however much people talk about post-coloniality), Pile writes, “Resistance . . . cannot simply address itself to changing external physical spaces, but must also engage the colonized spaces of people’s inner worlds.” 52 Indeed, it is the decolonization, or the reclaiming, of both public space and “people’s inner worlds” (through the tools of affective transmission) that co-embodied practices of occupation are attempting. By creating geographies of resist ance, they seek to refigure the geographies of domination within public space and, in the process, to undo the power of resonant violence to atomize and isolate individuals. Through creating new geographies of resistance, the American Indians on Alcatraz Island were nullifying the ability of resonant violence to atomize its victims. Over the centuries, U.S. government policy first forced Native Americans on to reservations, isolating them from other sectors of society and from other Native American groups with whom, u ntil that point, they may have interacted. The policy of termination in the 1950s and ’60s took this one step further; when Native Americans w ere relocated to urban centers, they were isolated even from each other, as the housing they were given was never near the housing of other members of this group. One of the most revolutionary ideas of the occupation of Alcatraz Island was the uniting of Native American groups as a single group, which they called Indians of All Tribes. It is not completely clear where the name Indians of All Tribes came from, but it is almost certain that it emerged from the collective planning sessions leading up to the occupation. Fortunate Eag le writes that the name of the group of occupiers was important for distinguishing it from the 1964 occupation. He writes: We wanted to find some designation that would proclaim our unity. The 1964 invasion had been an exclusively Sioux action because it took place u nder the terms of the Sioux Treaty of 1868, but this was different. This protest involved people from many Indian nations. Tlingit, Iroquois, Blackfoot, Chippewa, Navajo, and virtually every other Native American tribe was represented among the thousands of Indians in the Bay Area.
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Fin ally, we agreed on a name we could use to structure the occupying force and sign the proclamation—“Indians of All Tribes.” 53 By calling the group of occupiers the Indians of All Tribes, the activists w ere attempting to erase any sense of division that might exist between different tribal groups. They were presenting themselves to the wider public as a united front with a common cause. Perhaps more important, they were creating for themselves a connecting bond that undid years of the atomizing force of resonant violence. Of course, it is important to recognize that this new designation also represented an intere sting sleight of hand. Throughout history, most Native tribes had no connection with most other tribes, with some exceptions due to physical proximity of tribal lands. To equate Cherokee Indians with Apache is a feat of historical imagination that plays on the tendency of non- Indigenous Americans to lump all Native people together as a homogeneous whole. As much as the creation of the Indians of All Tribes was serving to undo years of social atomization, it was also creating a completely new entity that did not exist before—one in which the participating Native peoples opted to ignore the differences that separated them to band together for a greater cause. As I w ill describe later in this chapter, however, this ability to look beyond tribal differences was not unproblematic or easily maintained. Still, the willingness of participants to give over to the new sense of unity forged through the creation of the Indians of All Tribes is especially evident in the ways that occupiers speak and write about their own experience of the occupation. It is worth including here a series of quotations from several occupiers describing their own affective experiences of the occupation and its power to counteract centuries of isolation: LaNada Boyer (Shoshone-Bannock): It was a wonderful feeling when we arrived. We got off the boat and we were all there together as a united group. We were going to make a stand and we w ere doing it on behalf of 54 our people. John Trudell (Sioux): When I got off that boat and got on the island, here’s all t hese Native people. I d idn’t know any of them, but yet, I did. It was like going home.55 Edward Willie (Paiute-Pomo): When we got to the island, it seems like we should have been scared or something, but we weren’t. T here was [sic] just Indians. We had been living in the city and w ere kind of isolated and lost from being Indians. So it was good to see all these people and that’s what made it comfortable.56 Earl Livermore (Goshute/Blackfoot): One of the most beautiful t hings that came out of the occupation of Alcatraz was the fact that, because we have so many problems in the Bay Area and many of the Indian organ izations were not really in communication; one t hing came about was the fact that all Indian organizations banded together.57
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Each of these speakers highlights the occupation’s ability to bring people together. While this unity is in itself revolutionary in its power to undo the effects of resonant violence, the occupation of Alcatraz did not only bring people together. It took t hings one step further, as is well articulated in a quotation by Lenny Foster (Navajo): One t hing that impressed me about Alcatraz was that the people w ere all searching for something: a spiritual identity as Indian people. John Trudell 58 named this group Indians of All Tribes b ecause, although the people w ere from all parts of the country, a sense of unity and brotherhood was evolving. Alcatraz was a place where urban and reservation Indians w ere coming together and examining the U.S. government’s failure to honor its treaties and its obligation to Indian people. We were becoming Indian activists, and it was time to reclaim our Indian dignity. The Indian Nation had awakened.59 Alcatraz was not only a place where an atomized population came together. Through this coming together, it became the birthplace of something new— what Foster calls “the Indian Nation.” In fact, that rocky island, occupied by the unifying force of the Indians of All Tribes, became an echo chamber where the negative force of resonant violence was first transduced, and then amplified and multiplied. Through their co-embodied practice, they transformed the negative affect of resonant violence into new forms of agency and power. Affective Transm i ssi on and A m p l i fi cati on Resonant violence is affect. More specifically, resonant violence is the negative affective force that both produces and is produced by genocidal vio lence and that continues to perform—to resonate—long after the physical violence of genocide ends. As demonstrated in the first two chapters of this text, what gives resonant violence its resonating power is the transmissibility of affect. The affective force of resonant violence is transmitted through interactions among p eople and within environments.60 In the case of the United States, the way non-Indigenous Americans have treated and related to Native American populations through practices of exclusion and outright persecution represents a proliferation of this affective force. The negative affect of resonant violence not only affects Native Americans, however. It also circulates among non-Indigenous Americans, encouraging negative attitudes toward Native groups and promoting stereotypical viewpoints that paint Native Americans in an unfavorable light. For example, in 2018 the First Nations Development Institute published a study conducted as part of the Reclaiming Native Truth project.61 Their report included the findings garnered from focus groups, interviews, and surveys of nearly fifteen thousand p eople across the United States, as well as the analysis of nearly five million social media posts. Their findings highlight a
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deeply ambivalent relationship with Native culture in the United States. For instance, their report finds that, for most non-Indigenous Americans, Native peoples are invisible in the present, with 62 percent of Americans reporting that they are unacquainted with a Native American person.62 The researchers write, “Into this void springs an antiquated or romanticized narrative, ripe with myths and misperceptions,” that depicts Native Americans as of the past, not of the present.63 The study also finds that non-Indigenous p eople consistently “hold concurrent yet conflicting views” about Native p eoples, including that they are:
both poor and flush with casino money; both spiritually focused and struggling with alcohol and drugs; ■ both resilient and dependent on government benefits; ■ both savage warriors and noble savages; ■ both caring of the land and living in trash-fi lled and polluted reservations; ■ both separate from and part of U.S. culture.64 ■ ■
Clearly, ambivalence and contradiction lie at the core of contemporary U.S. understandings of their relationship to Native p eoples. It is this same contradiction that led Ojibwe author David Treuer to call reservations “the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-fi rst c entury.” 65 Such contradictory views of Native people, which at once disappear them from public life and depict them in unflattering ways in the public imaginary, are part and parcel of the transmission of resonant violence. Sara Ahmed describes the transmission of affect in another way. Ahmed (who opts for the term “emotion” rather than “affect”) writes, “Emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies. Bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and others.” 66 For Ahmed, emotions do not exist within subjects or objects, but between them. They are about the interaction and relationship between p eople, or between people and things. She writes, “Emotions are relational: they involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to such objects.” 67 Ahmed develops the concept affective economies to understand affects and emotions not as t hings that reside within people or objects, but as forces that circulate among people and t hings and that are actually produced through their circulation. Ahmed’s model of affective economies is deeply illustrative of my theory of resonant violence. Resonant violence produces certain orientations in the world, creating relationships of what Ahmed refers to as “towardness” or “awayness,” but what genocide studies scholars or social scientists might more readily refer to as “us-t hem” or “in-g roup/out-g roup” relationships.68 Indeed, Ahmed’s work focuses especially on four specific affects that are integral to and constitutive of resonant violence: pain, hate, fear, and disgust.69 One aspect that is essential to Ahmed’s theory and to the theory of resonant
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violence is that these affects are not at all constant; rather, they accumulate over time. In the case of resonant violence, this accumulation corresponds to the amplification of the negative affects discussed. To clarify, in discussing specific affective states, neither I nor, I believe, Ahmed espouse a reliance on a theory of basic affects, where all affective states can be boiled down to a single word like “hate” or “fear” that is somehow universal and lacking in cultural and circumstantial specificity. (My critique of this brand of affect theory can be found in the second chapter.) Rather, according to Ahmed, t hese affective categories denote a certain orientation t oward other people and objects. In this sense, t hese words are more indicative of the directionality of power relationships than they are an attempt at categorizing and delimiting the complexity of affects experienced by individuals and groups across an array of affective practices. Importantly, Ahmed’s theory also steers away from concepts of “emotional contagion,” such as those modeled a fter the work of Silvan S. Tomkins. According to Ahmed, the idea of “contagion” implies that through the process of transmission, the affect itself does not have the potential to change. For instance, if someone is sick with a cold, they may be contagious, which means that another person may catch exactly what the original person has (namely, a cold). The other person is not at risk, of course, of catching the flu or chicken pox. Affective transmission does not work this way, however, b ecause affect can transform through the process of transmission. When one individual is happy, it does not necessarily mean that every ill “catch” their happiness. The one who they come into contact with w original person’s happiness could also lead to the depression of another, or to their anxiety. Therefore, for Ahmed, the idea of “contagion” is not reflective of reality b ecause the transmission of affect does not occur on a one-to-one scale. Similarly, resonant violence can be experienced negatively by some, while it may contribute to positive outcomes for others; it all depends on each subject’s relationships to other people and objects. Resonant violence is surely something that can “catch,” but how it manifests within individuals or groups depends on their orientation to others and the world around them. Resonant violence is not the only affective force that is transmissible, however. As Brennan points out, the transmission of affect involves both its “enhancing and depressing energies,” 70 and, as everyone who has experienced positive affects like joy and love knows, positive affect is also powerf ul and transmissible. Furthermore, these positive affects can have a debilitating effect on negative affects. Affects affect us, it is true. But affects can also be affected by us, and herein lies the hope and potential when it comes to resonant violence. Aside from the symbolic significance of the occupation of Alcatraz Island, the occupiers were also doing something very real and—if we are to accept Brennan’s argument that affect affects us physiologically—t angible: they were creating an affective crucible, producing different forms of affect to counteract and transform that of resonant violence. Anna Gibbs writes, “Bodies can
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catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear—in short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion.” 71 The occupation of Alcatraz ignited an affective fire that spread not only among participants, but across the United States. The performativity of the affect produced through the occupation extends far beyond the mere undoing of social atomization that results from the very togetherness of the occupation. I argue that this new affect transformed the damaging, continual effects of resonant violence into something completely novel, namely, new modes of agency and power through a process of transduction. As I discuss throughout this book, transduction is a term that exists in several fields, though my specific use of the term comes from literature on sound theory. Simply put, transduction is “the transformation of one form of m atter or energy [. . .] into another.” 72 In the case of resonant violence, the type of energy that is being transduced is the damaging and enduring negative affect of genocidal violence. Through co-embodied practices in which groups of p eople come together in the public sphere and act in concert, this affect, which normally serves to destroy social bonds and create inequality and discrimination, can be transformed. Co-embodied practices demonstrate that genocidal violence does not have to be perpetually destructive. It can also create communities. In the case of genocide, victims who share experiences of pain become a sort of community. People who experience similar forms of loss can mourn collectively and publicly, creating what Lauren Berlant calls an “intimate public sphere.” 73 Furthermore, wider sectors of the public can become motivated by a sense of productive indignation when they see the rights of another group so consistently v iolated, leading to newfound networks of support and identification.74 In the case of the Alcatraz occupation, this phenomenon is clearly visible in the outpouring of public support at the beginning of the occupation, when non-Indigenous Americans provided supplies and money to the cause of the occupiers. It is essential to recognize, however, that while such acts demonstrate the sociality of pain, they also exemplify the uneven nature in which it is experienced. Ahmed notes, “Stories of pain involve complex relations of power.” 75 Such displays of compassion and sympathy, then, also highlight the privilege of t hose being compassionate or offering sympathy, who, in offering to feel for t hose in pain, can never quite feel with or like them. Although the formation of communities around experiences of pain can have positive effects, there exist some real dangers when pain becomes the primary basis for the identity of a group. To elaborate on this point, Ahmed evokes Wendy Brown, who decries a certain “fetishization of the wound in subaltern politics.” 76 Groups who define themselves only by the wounds inflicted upon them have a vested interest in keeping these wounds open.
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Consequently, defining one’s identity through victimhood too often takes away the agency of wounded subjects to define themselves in new ways. Giving up this fetishization of the wound does not mean forgetting it altogether, however, but rather remembering in new, productive ways both the wound and the processes that caused it. For instance, in place of the ever-open wound, Ahmed promotes the notion of the good scar: “A good scar is one that sticks out, a lumpy sign on the skin. It’s not that the wound is exposed or that the skin is bleeding. But the scar is a sign of the injury: a good scar allows healing, it even covers over, but the covering always exposes the injury, reminding us of how it shapes the body.” 77 In cases of genocide and resonant violence, hate and pain work to isolate and unify, shape and break apart certain groups. In the presence of these forces, it becomes the unfair burden of the groups most negatively impacted by violence to determine how to alter that negative affect in a way that does not negate the fact that it exists or has existed, but that disallows it from performing its continued acts of violence in the present and the f uture. It is this act of prevention—of the active formation of a “good scar”—that I argue the occupation of Alcatraz Island was working to accomplish. Political theorist William E. Connolly provides one model for understanding the affective echo chamber created by the occupation of Alcatraz Island. In his book Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, Connolly develops a theory for what he calls the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine.78 In an attempt to explain the varied and numerous ways that evangelical Christ ianity and neoliberal capitalist politics have coalesced and come to work together, Connolly asserts that social entities and phenomena, like religion and politics, are not at all self-contained. On the contrary, they can often blend and trespass upon the territories of each other. When at least two of t hese entities come to share “a fundamental disposition toward the world,” 79 however, a huge shift occurs. A resonance machine is created, whereby the modes of expression of one of the entities amplifies and contributes to the expression of the other, and vice versa. The initial shared “existential ethos” of the two entities “infiltrates, inflects, and intensifies a host of perceptions, institutionalized creeds, economic interests, alliances, loyalties, enmities, and political priorities.” 80 As a result, Connolly writes, “each of these elements in turn recoils back upon the ethos, modifying it in this way and intensifying it in that. The cumulative result is a resonance machine.” 81 Connolly’s model also works to describe how resonant violence functions. Resonant violence is a resonance machine that manifests through its intermingling of state agencies, civil society, and everyday p eople to perpetuate and perpetrate different forms of violence against groups. I argue that what is resonating in Connolly’s resonance machine is affect, which does not reside within individual subjects or objects, but which circulates among them, gaining momentum and force as it does. As I argue in chapter 1, the presence of
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this resonating affect often exists below the threshold of consciousness, in a region that I call—borrowing from J. Martin Daughtry’s concept of the audible inaudible82 —t he felt unfelt. When resonant violence exists in the felt unfelt, it does its damaging work while at the same time going completely unrecognized, accepted as “normal.” This naturalization of resonant violence is not inevitable or inalterable, however. When individuals and groups acknowledge the way resonant violence functions, they have an opportunity to transduce its affect into more positive forms of political energy. In the face of a damaging resonance machine, Connolly finds the most hope in the idea that a counter-resonance machine might be assembled. Co- embodied practices like the occupation of Alcatraz Island are exactly part of the counter-resonance machine that Connolly envisions. By using the same basic tools as the resonance machine of resonant violence—n amely, the circulation of affect—this counter-resonance machine works to disable and dismember the efficacy of resonant violence. When one examines the social environment out of which the occupation of Alcatraz emerged, this c ounter resonance machine becomes even more easily discernible. The occupation and the subsequent Red Power Movement that it ignited w ere born out of the same historical moment as the hippie movement, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, the anti-Vietnam protests, and political groups like the Students for a Democratic Society. Even if the goals of each of these movements and groups were distinct, they are all part of the same counter-resonance machine, emerging as a response to issues like the paralysis of white, middle-class, post- WWII society; racial segregation and white supremacy; and the ever-g rowing military-industrial complex. Indeed, this c ounter resonance machine was not only apparent in the United States, but was equally connected to a 1968 wave of worldwide student protests across Europe and Latin America.83 While each of these movements certainly had its own context, motivating factors, and goals, it can be useful to think of them as connected, if only to show the enormous power of affective transmission. One group working for the transduction of resonant violence may encourage others to recognize the way some present, but unrecognized affective violence is operating in their own lives— and then to act against it. The affective nature of this counter-resonance machine is evident in the way scholars of the occupation and the occupiers themselves discuss their actions. For instance, one 1968 article from the first militant pan-Indian newspaper in the U.S., Warpath, highlights the affective state of Indigenous Americans that would ultimately lead to the occupation: The “Stoic, Silent Redman” of the past who turned the other cheek to white injustice is dead. (He died of frustration and heartbreak.) And in his place is an angry group of Indians who dare to speak up and voice their
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dissatisfaction at the world around them. Hate and despair have taken their toll and only action can quiet this smoldering anger that has fused this new Indian movement into being.84 I have italicized the emotionally valent words in this quotation to show just how large a role affect played in the ignition of the occupation and the movement that followed it. While it was this overabundance of negative affect that fin ally mobilized a group of activists to take Alcatraz Island, that affect did not, in fact, stay on the island when they took it over. Just as the title of an essay by Lenny Foster states, “Alcatraz is not an island.” 85 Even as Alcatraz Island became an echo chamber for new, positive affect that was transmitted among the participants of the occupation of the island, that affect did not remain only on the island. It resonated outward. More than that, through the power of the counter-resonance machine, it amplified as it spread, and this amplification is what ensured that Alcatraz would not remain an isolated location. Even as the occupiers themselves stayed within the bounda ries of that rock, they did several t hings to ensure that both their message and the affective force of their practice would spread outward and grow. From the moment the occupiers successfully landed on Alcatraz on November 20, 1969, organizers of the occupation concerned themselves with the amplification of their movement. On the day of the landing, Fortunate Eag le was in Minneapolis at the National Conference on Indian Education. When he got word that the occupiers had taken the island, he asked to be recognized by the chair of the conference. He explained to all the attendees what was happening and the goals of the occupation. As soon as he finished speaking, wild applause erupted in the auditorium. Fortunate Eag le handed out copies of the proclamation for attendees to take back to their home communities to gain further support. Fortunate Eag le remembers the event: Months earlier I had confidently predicted that waves of protest would spread outward from the pebble we tossed into the San Francisco Bay. I had hoped the waves would ultimately reach the national Indian community, and my wishes came true. The conference transformed our remote little Indian activity into a national movement with national support.86 ere, Fortunate Eag le uses the metaphor of r ipples from a pebble thrown into H a pond transforming into waves, but one can just as easily envision (or hear) the sound metaphor of resonant violence and the counter-resonant power of the occupation: the affective waves of the occupation echoed outward, amplifying as they bounced off surfaces and objects, becoming a roar that no one could ignore. This focus on amplification continued in several ways. From the beginning, one of the main goals of the occupation was to garner the support of
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non-Indians around the United States. According to Johnson, “One of the very first things the council did was set up an ad hoc emergency committee of non- Indians and Indians to elicit non-Indian support throughout the country.” 87 To do so, the occupiers used multiple forms of media to their advantage. Within hours of beginning the occupation, the group sent out a press release, which was picked up by newspapers and reported widely. The press release began: “Indian people are on Alcatraz in support of their assertion that they have the right to use the land for their benefit. They went onto the island this morning with little hard supplies. They are g oing to stay.” 88 The release then went on to ask for supplies like canned goods and bread, as well as money, both to support the occupation and to go toward a fund to build up the island with the facilities they desired. Press releases like this increased public support, and this support was then amplified even further when various celebrities got involved, encouraging their fans to support the occupation as well. In December 1969, the occupiers began Radio Free Alcatraz, a radio program broadcast from Alcatraz Island over the airwaves of KPFA-FM Berkeley. They also received fifteen minutes of f ree airtime every day at 7:15 p.m. from the Pacifica Foundation to broadcast on KPFK in Los Angeles and WBAI in New York City. T hese three stations together put them in direct touch with over one hundred thousand listeners.89 During one broadcast of Radio Free Alcatraz, Richard Oakes made a statement that exemplifies the work of amplifying affect that the occupation was doing: “As many people understand now, Alcatraz is not only here on the island, but it’s a part of every reservation, it’s a part of e very person.” 90 According to Oakes, even though t here w ere only a limited number of Native Americans actually occupying Alcatraz Island, the occupation was not just taking place t here. Every individual could be a part of the occupation, and they did not even need to come to Alcatraz to do it. These affective practices were all directed toward obtaining a better future for Native peoples in the United States. As such, they all represent an embodied optimism. According to Berlant, another scholar of affect, optimism always involves an object of desire, and that object represents “a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us.” 91 This object can take any number of forms, including t hings, p eople, places, or ideas. In the case of the occupation, the object of desire is quite clearly Alcatraz Island itself. For the occupiers and supporters of the occupation, the island became the container for the promise of a better future for Native Americans, and the occupation’s proclamation details a physical manifestation of how that f uture might look. By demanding the construction of an American Indian haven on Alcatraz Island, the occupiers w ere asking for a “cluster of promises” that the U.S. government could make possible for them. Of course, the history of post-Columbian America is littered with examples of promises made and broken by colonizing forces to Native tribes. Most of t hese promises, however, were motivated by the optimistic objects of desire of
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the colonizers. In the case of the occupation, that historical relationship was reversed; through it, the Native Americans asked for the succession of land or, rather, the return of it. In the case of optimism, Berlant writes, “the subject leans t oward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with the object.” 92 Here, Berlant evokes the special temporality of optimism. It exists within the present moment, but it is all about promise, which is always f uture oriented—a fact that is demonstrated in the etymology of the word, which comes from the Latin pro-, meaning “forward,” and mittere, meaning “send.” Through the occupation, the activists were asking the state to send forth the land of Alcatraz as a symbolic gesture of redress in order to send them forward into a more promising f uture of self-determination and equality. In this way the occupiers hoped that this symbolic exchange of property would be the beginning of a more favorable relationship between American Indians and the U.S. government. Berlant writes, “Optimism, even u nder the racial mediations of experiencing entrenched capit alist inequalities in the United States, involves thinking that in exchange one can achieve recognition.” 93 On a more cautionary note, however, she continues, “But, one must always ask, recognition of what?” 94 In truth, Berlant is wary of optimism and what it promises—so much so that she develops a concept of cruel optimism to highlight the dangers of this affective state. Berlant writes that cruel optimism “names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.” 95 In the case of cruel optimism, the desiring group becomes so attached to the object of desire that, even in the face of its inevitable loss, that desire cannot be relinquished. Instead, the group clings tenaciously to the optimism attached to that object out of fear that “the loss of the object or scene of promising itself w ill defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything.” 96 The pessimist could read the occupation of Alcatraz Island as a practice of cruel optimism. In its inception, the occupation received widespread support, and the potential that the government might actually give the island over to the occupiers seemed v iable, even if, in hindsight, it turned out to be only a pipedream. In the first few months of negotiations, the government offered a number of concessions to the occupiers, but only u nder the condition that they leave the island. The occupiers refused to do so, as they ( justifiably) saw their presence on the island as their only bargaining chip.97 As the occupation carried on, however, public interest and support began to wane, and the positive atmosphere that characterized the initial weeks of the occupation began to sour. As more and more p eople joined the occupation, an increasing degree of what is often described as “factionalism” began to emerge. From the beginning, the occupation was intended to be a leaderless movement. The media and government, however, refused to accept such claims, quickly anointing
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Oakes as the leader. Although many occupiers supported Oakes, others, including elder participants, resented the authority granted to this young Indian.98 Furthermore, despite the effort of the group to remain united u nder the Indians of All Tribes moniker, participants began splitting off, only associating with their own tribal members.99 Two specific moments mark the turn from what Johnson has called the “days of exaltation” of the occupation to the “months of turmoil.” 100 The first occurred in January 1970, when Oakes’s thirteen-year-old d aughter Yvonne died a fter falling down a stairwell.101 According to Oakes, “Yvonne’s death cast an air of gloom over the whole island. It was like a symbol of all the doubts we had hidden from ourselves during the w hole Alcatraz experience. There had always been the possibility of failure as t here is in every movement, but we had to suppress this idea in order to survive. This time was the test.” 102 Some thought the fall was an accident. O thers report evidence of Yvonne being pushed as a way of getting at Oakes. Either way, her death irrevocably changed the occupation, most especially because it led to the departure of Oakes and his wife, Anne, from Alcatraz. The second event occurred on June 1, 1970, when a fire engulfed the warden’s house on Alcatraz Island, damaging the neighboring lighthouse, along with several other structures.103 The government used the fire to bolster its case for removing the occupiers, while the occupiers insisted that it was vandals, possibly hired by the government, who snuck onto the island and set the fire.104 Indeed, there is now evidence that the FBI was monitoring and infiltrating the occupation and the American Indian Red Power Movement that would follow it, though it is still unclear how this part icu l ar fire started.105 Either way, the damaging of the lighthouse allowed the government to use a discourse of “public safety” as grounds for removal. In January 1971, two oil tankers crashed outside San Francisco Bay. The fact that the damaged light house had nothing to do with the crash did not stop the government and the public from blaming the occupation for the disaster, which spilled eight hundred thousand gallons of crude oil into the bay. From that point forward, public support for the occupation waned significantly, allowing the government more leverage in the actions that they could potentially take.106 According to some participants, the t hing most damaging to the occupation was not a single event but the growing feeling of boredom that resulted from being confined within such a small space for so long. Richard DeLuca writes: “As the occupation wore on, boredom also increased, and as one result, the island’s security force (called the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs) became more vocal and militant. Pointless vandalism began, reporters were occasionally harassed, and the proclaimed ban on liquor and drugs was openly v iolated.” 107 Participants were leaving the occupation in droves. What began as such an exciting event was carrying on for so long that the initial excitement of activism was giving way to the humdrum reality of daily life. On the one-year anniversary of the
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occupation, only two of the original occupiers w ere still t here. By the end of winter 1971, fewer than thirty p eople w ere on the island. In the end, armed federal marshals came to the island and removed the remaining fifteen occupiers on June 11, 1971, meeting no resist ance. The occupation that lasted some nineteen months was over in about thirty minutes.108 Roughly two years later, in October 1973, Alcatraz Island was opened to the public as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Many may read this disappointing ending to the occupation as an instance of Berlant’s cruel optimism, a foiled effort the conditions of which w ere at long 109 last understood “to be impossible, sheer fantasy.” The term seems to describe perfectly t hose remaining fifteen occupiers who w ere so attached to the object of their desire, Alcatraz Island, that they could not let it go, even as the majority of the country was moving past the occupation or had already forgotten about it completely. But to interpret the end of the occupation in this way does it, I believe, an incredible disserv ice. The gradual withering away of public support and the energy of the occupiers is evidence that the co-embodied practices that transduce resonant violence themselves have a long half-life. The sort of emotional energy and dedication required to resist and transform a force as enduring as resonant violence are hard to come by and even harder to maintain. To understand the temporality of this sort of affective energy that works to transduce resonant violence, it is helpful to consider Max Weber’s work on charisma and institution building. Charisma is a force that is directly tied to affect. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term has two meanings, both of which are pertinent here. The first is theological in nature, and it refers to “a free gift or favor specially vouchsafed by God; a grace, a talent.” Weber supports this understanding of charisma when he describes it as “the gift of grace.” 110 The second meaning of charisma in the OED is more secular in nature and is taken directly from Weber. Here, it refers to “a gift or power of leadership or authority” that leads to “the capacity to inspire devotion or enthusiasm.” This definition highlights the relationship between charisma and affect that is so important here. For Weber, charisma is about the ability to inspire devotion or enthusiasm—in other words, the capacity to generate affective energy in a group. Importantly, according to Weber, charisma is a quality that is possessed by an individual, especially a leader. He defines charisma as “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he [sic ] is set apart from ordinary men [sic ] and treated as endowed with supern atural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” 111 He writes about charisma as completely opposed to bureaucracy and routine. It is therefore never a permanent quality, but something that exists from moment to moment. The charismatic leader must constantly reassert and prove their charismatic authority.112 Most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, Weber asserts that the group formed by devotion to a charismatic personality is, by definition, a
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group bound by affect: “The corporate group which is subject to charismatic 113 authority is based on an emotional form of communal relationship.” Although Weber’s theory of charisma is based on a single individual, it is the idea of a “corporate group . . . based on an emotional form of communal relationship” that makes this theoretical framework applicable for thinking about the sorts of co-embodied practices explored throughout this book. The occupation of Alcatraz was outspokenly a leaderless movement, but it also represented the formation of a group bound by an affective connection to a higher cause, as do many of the practices examined in this work. Perhaps, then, we can think about that cause—the collective orientation to a shared goal—as the charismatic leader that “inspires the devotion or enthusiasm” of a group. Weber writes that charisma “may involve a subjective or internal reorientation born out of suffering, conflicts, or enthusiasm,” 114 and the political action of the Indians of All Tribes certainly represents an activist reorientation based on past suffering. What Weber’s theory of charisma helps us understand in particu lar about the affective force of the occupation, however, is its temporary nature. Charisma has the power to bring about massive social change, but the affective energy generated by charisma is too unstable to last. Therefore, in order to endure, the social change it generates must always be followed by the institutionalization or, as Weber calls it, the routinization of charisma.115 The routinization of charisma is the process whereby the affective energy of charisma either disappears completely or transforms into more solid, enduring structures. As a result of this transformation, the affective bonds that constituted the group of charismatic devotees also transform into something that is at once less exciting and more stable. Weber writes, “With the process of routinization the charismatic group tends to develop into one of the forms of every-d ay authority.” 116 In other words, the Arendtian modes of power born out of group political action transform into more traditional modes of top- down power as they become institutionalized and codified. Nearly every activist movement faces the challenge of maintaining the affective energy necessary to sustain such movements as it strugg les to determine when and if to routinize its strugg le. For instance, as I describe in the previous chapter, activists in Argentina needed to decide when and how to end their escraches. Once the state reopened the t rials against perpetrators of the dictatorship, the escraches ended. The reopening of t rials represents a routinization and institutionalization of the escraches. Likewise, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 represent the routinization of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The passage of this final bill is traditionally viewed as the end of the Civil Rights Movement. Not coincidentally, 1968 was also the year that Martin Luther King Jr., the undoubtedly charismatic leader of the movement, was assassinated. Social movements and co-embodied practices have life expectancies. They cannot last forever. The affective energy generated through collective action must, if
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it is to have any lasting effect, be funneled into the tedious and bureaucratic work of institutionalization, where the extraordinary is made routine. I argue that this is exactly what was happening toward the end of the occupation of Alcatraz. More and more of the occupiers came to comprehend the difficulty of maintaining the affective energy that the occupation itself required, especially as it became clear that the government had no intention of ever handing over the deed to the island. That does not mean, however, that the occupation was unsuccessful, b ecause the energy it generated and the affective community it created did, indeed, find a way to routinize and institutionalize at least some of the changes that they w ere seeking. By June 1971, when the occupation was brought to an end, it had grown to be much larger than the sole presence of those fifteen bodies on Alcatraz Island. And the occupiers who left the island did not merely go back to their homes and sit quietly, hoping for change. In fact, the occupation of Alcatraz marks only the beginning of a civil rights movement that would last a decade and include an array of hundreds, if not thousands, of other co-embodied practices, all working for the transformation of resonant violence and the recognition of Native Americans in the United States. For many of the occupiers, the object of desire shifted. It ceased to be only Alcatraz Island itself. It became, in fact, much bigger than that. The occupation helped the participants to see that their object of desire could be much grander. The exchange of a piece of property was not enough. They saw that the change they could effect could have a much larger impact. This kind of effect is articulated well by Wilma Mankiller, a Cherokee Indian who at the time was a college student who participated in the occupation. Mankiller went on to become the first w oman chief of the Cherokee Nation, the largest tribe in the United States. Mankiller says, “When Alcatraz occurred, I became aware of what needed to be done to let the rest of the world know that Indians had rights too. Alcatraz articulated my own feelings about being an Indian. It was a benchmark. A fter that, I became involved.” 117 Mankiller’s quotation describes the affective nature of the occupation, crediting it with articulating “[her] own feelings,” which she already had, but could not quite put into words or actions. Mankiller also illustrates how Alcatraz Island was just the beginning of something much bigger and with a much broader scope. Mankiller’s quotation also highlights another important feature of the affective crucible that was Alcatraz Island: the occupation was producing not only affect but a ctual power. This fact is also demonstrated in a quote from Johnson, who at once refers to the affective state of Native p eoples and outlines how the Native American occupation of Alcatraz fit within the larger counter-resonance machine of the moment: “The temper of social change suffused the entire country during the 1960s as cause-d riven crowds poured into the streets, willing to suffer the violence that erupted when police tried
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to clear them. [. . .] The frustrations of the Bay Area Indian community had reached a critical juncture in concert with the national consciousness.” 118 This quote demonstrates two important things. First, it highlights the affective environment of frustration that motivated all t hese social movements. Second, Johnson offers that the Alcatraz occupation was working “in concert” with the other social movements of the period. This notion of working “in concert” corresponds to Arendt’s notion of power, which, she writes, “springs up whenever people get together and act in concert.” 119 The power that emerged through the Alcatraz occupation, then, was not only the result of the Native American occupiers working in concert with each other. Rather, t hose occupiers w ere also working in concert, whether consciously or unconsciously, with the slew of other social movements happening within the United States and worldwide. All these individual movements were coming together to form this large counter-resonance machine, which was fueled by affect but productive of new forms of power the likes of which had never before existed. There is also a pertinent connection to be drawn between the idea of acting in concert and the other terms from sound theory that are laced throughout this work. The word “concert” originated in the sixteenth century from the Italian concertare, meaning “to harmonize.” When people work in concert, they are working in harmony toward a shared goal. Co-embodied practices that transduce resonant violence do so by resolving its dissonant chords, making this affective violence resound less or differently. They attempt to make harmony out of the disharmony that resonant violence produces. C onclusion In the previous chapter, I referenced Arendt’s concept of the space of appearance and argued how that concept relates to co-embodied practices. According to Arendt, the space of appearance comes into being when p eople come together in the public sphere through speech and action.120 This book is especially concerned with the perform ance of action in the space of appearance, for it is through action—the coming together of individuals to act in concert—t hat true power emerges. For Arendt, power has nothing to do with violence or indeed any force whatsoever. On the contrary, power comes out of collectivity and is legitimated through that collective. Arendt writes, “Power corresponds to the h uman ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.” 121 When such groups come together to perform acts of violence, what emerges is not power at all, but its opposite. True power requires no violence, because power is synonymous with consent.122 Violence, on the other hand, is an option that only needs to be exercised by t hose who do not have consent. Given all this, co- embodied practices— embodied acts performed by groups of people acting in concert and in public space—lead to the formation
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of a space of appearance, out of which new forms of power can emerge. The American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island is an example of just such a practice. The Native Americans’ act of coming together on that rocky outcrop in the m iddle of San Francisco Bay transformed Alcatraz Island into a space of appearance. More import ant, that space of appearance did not remain on the island; rather, it began to grow, to resonate outward, to amplify. The space opened by the occupation, which in its earliest days only contained a handful of individuals, grew to encompass the entire country, including not only the millions of Native Americans living across the United States, but also the non-Indian population that began to identify with and support their cause. Before the occupation, official state policy was literally the termination of Native Americans as a legal category of identity. All that changed a fter 1969. The action of the occupiers set into motion a w hole series of events that no one could have foreseen, and t hese events radically transformed both the way the U.S. government relates to its Indigenous populations and the way those populations understand and present themselves. To borrow from and reverse the sentiment of T. S. Eliot, even if the occupation itself ended in a whimper, what it produced and what followed it can only be described as a huge bang. The occupation of Alcatraz Island became the point of germination for an entire American Indian rights movement, referred to alternately as the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Red Power Movement, which would last through the end of the 1970s. As Fortunate Eag le puts it, “The occupation soon became the spark that lit fuses all over the country.” 123 Native Americans began occupying other pieces of land across the country, reclaiming what had been taken from them. Army bases, naval air stations, and Ellis Island are just a few of the sites that hosted occupations in the decade a fter Alcatraz.124 Two other major occupations took place at Rattlesnake Island, Ohio, and Pit River, California.125 When state officials tried to prevent Natives from fishing certain waterways, even though they were guaranteed that right by several treaties, Native Americans in Washington began to hold “fish-ins.” In April 1971, a fter a series of dramatic protests, Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University, the first Native American college in the United States, opened in Davis, California.126 Before the end of the occupation, Nixon returned Blue Lake in Taos, New Mexico, to the Taos Indians—a concession of forty-eight thousand acres of land. By the end of 1972, the U.S. government had returned eighty acres to the Washoe of California, twenty-one thousand acres to the Yakima in Washington, sixty thousand acres to the Warm Springs tribe of Oregon, and forty million acres to the Navajo.127 Perhaps most important, on July 8, 1970, roughly eight months into the occupation, Nixon addressed Congress and, in a historic move the effects of which are still being felt and celebrated by Native Americans t oday, he ended the policy of termination that had begun only a few decades prior. In that
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speech, Nixon said, “The first Americans— t he Indians— a re the most deprived and most isolated minority group in our nation. On virtually every scale of measurement—employment, income, education, health—the conditions of the Indian p eople ranks [sic] at the bottom.” 128 He continued: It is long past time that the Indian policies of the Federal government began to recognize and build upon the capacities and insights of the Indian people. Both as a m atter of justice and as a m atter of enlightened social policy, we must begin to act on the basis of what the Indians themselves have long been telling us. The time has come to break decisively with the past and to create the conditions for a new era in which the Indian f uture is determined by Indian acts and Indian decisions.129 With these words, Nixon ushered in a new policy of “self-determination without termination,” through which Native tribes would be treated as sovereign nations with levels of autonomy that were unprecedented since the start of colonization. Following this proclamation, Nixon’s administration made twenty-t wo legislative proposals in 1970 that supported Native self-r ule. The following year, forty-six new laws w ere passed to support the same effort. The budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs increased by 224 percent, doubling health care funds and increasing protections on Native rights to water and land.130 This policy of self-determination, inspired by the Red Power Movement, is still in place today. The Indians of Alcatraz Island did not succeed at obtaining any of the t hings for which they claimed to be fighting. Today, over one million people per year go to Alcatraz Island to tour the former prison cellblocks. Few of them stop to peruse the small and isolated exhibition on the occupation. Still, the occupation of Alcatraz Island was undoubtedly a turning point for American Indians in the United States. For non-Indigenous Americans, it instilled a new need to recognize and redress the crimes of the United States’ genocidal past. U ntil the very public occupation of Alcatraz, few Americans felt connected to the strugg le of American Indians or understood that contemporary U.S. policy still had such a damaging effect on them. Because it received such widespread media attention, the occupation opened the eyes of many who had u ntil then ignored the sins of their country’s past, which subsequently opened the door to begin redressing t hese wrongs. More than anything it did for non-Indigenous Americans, however, the occupation of Alcatraz Island and the Red Power Movement that followed made a huge affective difference for Native Americans themselves. One of the biggest changes it catalyzed was a rekindling of pride in Native American identity and culture. According to the U.S. Census of 1960, t here were 523,591 American Indians in the United States. By 1970, the first year of the occupation, that number grew 51 percent, to 792,730. By 1980, it had grown to 1,364,033, a 72-percent change from ten years prior.131 Given that the
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average U.S. population growth rate was around 1 percent for both of t hese censuses, it is impossible that such massive leaps in population were only due to birthrate. Rather, events like the occupation of Alcatraz led to Native Americans being more ready to declare and take pride in their heritage. According to social scientists Janice R. Kelly and Jennifer R. Spoor, group interactions like co-embodied practices are not necessarily brought about by positive affect, but they can absolutely produce positive affective states, among them social-cohesion factors like group pride.132 Indeed, the population data and personal testimonies of Native Americans show that, before the Red Power Movement, many chose to hide their identity to census data collectors. This sentiment is articulated well by Lenny Foster, who says, “The movement gave me back my dignity and gave Indian people back their dignity. It started with Alcatraz, we got back our worth, our pride, our dignity, our humanity.” 133 Leonard Peltier (Chippewa) puts it another way that stresses the affective impact of Alcatraz and the very real repercussions of that affect: I experienced the excitement of it all—t he good feelings—t he excitement of seeing and watching your people put their heads up. Before that you were not having that. You had full- bloods claiming they were half- bloods, half-bloods claiming they were quarter-bloods, quarter-bloods claiming they w ere white. Power w asn’t the feeling with me. It was more a sense of pride.134 This increase in pride and dignity is a sentiment expressed again and again across countless interviews with Native Americans who experienced the occupation of Alcatraz. These statements demonstrate how the negative affective force of resonant violence was, through the occupation, transduced into a positive affective force that completely opposed that which existed beforehand. Through assembling and acting together, Native communities transformed feelings of shame and hopelessness into feelings of pride that went on to fuel f uture fights for justice and civil rights. Of course, it would be sadly over-celebratory to state that Alcatraz fixed all the problems that Native Americans face. The resonant violence that has been echoing and amplifying since 1492 was not suddenly eliminated completely in 1969. Native Americans are still one of the most underprivileged and underrepresented groups in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2019 the infant mortality rate for Native Americans was two times higher than that of white Americans. According to the “2013 American Indian Population and Labor Force Report,” produced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in many states and tribal areas, only around 50 percent of the adult population is employed, and roughly 23 percent of Native American families live below the poverty line.135 During the COVID-19 pandemic, the “deep-rooted” inequities of Native health care w ere brought into stark relief, as Native communities suffered significantly higher rates of
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infection, hospitalization, and death compared to non-Indigenous Americans.136 While the economic security of some tribes has grown significantly thanks to various industries, most famously casino gambling, other tribes have strugg led to find economic stability. T hese hardships faced by American Indians today are the direct result of centuries of resonant violence, and it w ill obviously take more than one co-embodied practice, however powerful, to respond to such violence. Still, the occupation of Alcatraz Island cannot be denied as a watershed moment for American Indians in the United States. Although it was produced by a community wrought from the flames of centuries of oppression and vio lence, it manifested as a powerf ul and peaceful example of how negative affect can be transduced into positive affect, as well as new forms of agency and power, through co-embodied practice. Moreover, it demonstrates how that positive affect can extend outward and amplify, resonating just as strongly as the resonant violence it seeks to recompose. Fortunate Eag le writes: One of our original goals for Alcatraz Island had been to set up an institute of higher learning, an Indian college. I think that in ways we were successful beyond our wildest dreams. We educated an entire country about Indian life, and the experience of the occupation educated many Indians who went on to become leaders and spokespeople in the Indian movement. The spirit and lessons of Alcatraz became a part of history and can never be lost.137 The affect generated on Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971 is still resonating, amplifying, and performing t oday, and w ill continue to do so into the f uture. To this day, former occupiers and other Native Americans gather on Alcatraz Island every year on Thanksgiving. As they eat, sing, and dance together, they remember that first Thanksgiving on Alcatraz in 1969 and all the activists who were born out of the crucible of that occupation.
Conclusion ou t of t h e de s e rt The cases I describe in the previous four chapters demonstrate the powerful and unexpected things that can occur when groups of people recognize resonant violence and unite to transduce it. Through practices of memorialization, curation, visitation, trans-action, and occupation, individuals in numerous post-atrocity contexts have come together in response to the damaging affect of resonant violence. By working in concert, they have transduced at least a portion of that negative affect and transformed the way the past functions in the present. Before concluding, however, I do want to sound a note of caution, if only to stress that overcoming such a devastating force is not at all a foregone conclusion. The picture is not always so rosy, and even in cases where co-embodied practices succeed, it does not mean the “work” is over. Rather, rooting out systemic, identity-based violence in all its forms is a perpetual project to which all people must be committed. Several years ago, I traveled the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, a 1,200-m ile journey from north Georgia to Oklahoma that was traversed by the Cherokee when they w ere forcibly expelled from their homeland in 1838 and 1839. Along the way, I visited many of the more than eighty sites that commemorate this journey in an attempt to document how t hese sites reckon with the single largest act of ethnic cleansing in United States’ history. While on the journey, I had many troubling moments as I confronted my own privilege as a non-Indigenous American who grew up in the ancestral territories of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Yamassee, and Kusso, and who lives today in the land of the Lenape. The most powerful, however, was the one that struck me most unexpectedly. The Trail of Tears State Park outside Jackson, Missouri, sits alongside the Mississippi River at the border between Missouri and Illinois. According to the park’s website, it marks the point at which “nine of the 13 Cherokee Indian groups being relocated to Oklahoma crossed the Mississippi River during harsh winter conditions in 1838 and 1839.” In the park’s visitors’ center, there is a gift shop that sells a number of items to support the maintenance of the park, and among these items were some lapel pins with the official logo of the Trail of Tears National Historic 188
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Trail. My traveling companions and I decided that we should buy some pins to commemorate our trip, so we asked the kind attendant for three of them. When she told me the price, I reached into my wallet and pulled out a $20 bill to pay. Staring up at me from that bill was Andrew Jackson, one of the orchestrators of the genocidal project memorialized by this very state park. We walked out to the car with our lapel pins in hand, and I glanced at our license plate. It was the car of my parents, who live in north Georgia, the ancestral territory of the Cherokee, where we started our journey. Like many U.S. license plates, theirs included the name of their home county: it read “Jackson” in black, bold letters. We got in the car and drove to a hotel in Jackson, Missouri, which got its name in 1819, when Birdtown was renamed to honor Andrew Jackson, the hero from the War of 1812. It was during that war that Jackson and his troops decimated a band of Muscogee Indians in a series of battles, including the B attle of Talladega and the B attle of Horseshoe Bend. And, of course, just a couple days prior, I had visited Jackson’s former plantation home, the Hermitage, through which the Trail of Tears passed, and within which countless crimes against humanity w ere perpetrated against the enslaved people imprisoned on that property. But today it is a site celebrating antebellum beauty and the tenacity of a populist hero. Everywhere I turned that afternoon and throughout the trip, it felt as though Andrew Jackson were there. This genocidaire, this war criminal was ubiquitous. Those who suffered b ecause of him, however, w ere far less present. By the time we arrived at the Trail of Tears State Park, we had visited site after site commemorating the Cherokee and the vio lence they experienced, and we were almost always the only people there. In the moment I paid for the lapel pins, I imagined what it would feel like to visit Germany today and see Hitler’s face on a euro coin, or to visit Argentina and walk down a street named a fter Rafael Videla or Emilio Massera. It is often said that history is written by the victors, and the omnipresence of Andrew Jackson seemed to be a case in point regarding who the “victors” of U.S. history have been. What is the difference in the United States compared to Germany and Argentina when it comes to remembering past atrocities? In the United States, our Hitler won. I began this book with the inspirational activism of the w ater protectors at Standing Rock, who spent late 2016 protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through unceded Sioux territory. Despite the global attention their brave activism garnered, their co-embodied practice did not succeed at its stated goal. The Dakota Access Pipeline was completed in April 2017 and became commercially operational two months later. Both the story of Standing Rock and my experience along the Trail of Tears illustrate the insidious power of resonant violence. Despite the inspiring picture I may have painted over the previous four chapters of co-embodied practices that have transformed the way resonant violence functions, t hese practices do not always succeed. In fact, they all too often fail. The collective action of civil society in the face of large-scale, systemic, state violence is almost always a reenactment of David’s fight against
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Goliath. Where the David of myth succeeded, however, the Goliath of resonant violence is tragically not so easy to topple. Accepting this fact, the easiest thing to do for those who are not directly negatively impacted by resonant violence is to disregard it—to sit in the comfort of our unmolested lives, blinding ourselves to the suffering of o thers whose rights are derogated on a daily basis. Even then, however, there are moments when the nature of this violence is so visible it becomes impossible to ignore. A young refugee boy’s lifeless body washed ashore on a beach. A police officer’s knee forced down upon a Black man’s neck. A child in a cage, crying for her m other who she might never see again. It is in these moments when resonant violence no longer exists in the felt unfelt. We see it. We feel it. And we have to make a choice: to act or to sink back into the privilege of ignorance. Even when we decide to act alongside o thers, we do not always succeed. But one thing is certain: if we never act, the damaging effects of resonant violence w ill never be overcome. This book has detailed the numerous ways that genocidal violence is an enduring reality in post-genocide societies. Resonant violence—the affective, social component of genocidal violence, which both allows for genocide’s physical manifestation and continues to resonate after that physical violence ends— can have long-term effects that play out in the life of every member of a society. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of both states and the populations within their purview to develop positive and productive ways to respond to this violence. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau develops a theory of strategies and tactics to highlight the different modes of exercising and responding to power in contemporary society.1 For de Certeau, strategies are the means exercised by what Foucault or Althusser might call the apparatuses of traditional power. They are the tools used by institutions, by the state, or by militaries to manipulate and control subjects. Tactics, on the other hand, offer means for t hose not in control of the apparatuses of traditional power to assert their own agency within the field of power relations. De Certeau writes, “A tactic is the art of the weak.” 2 If strategies denote the manipulations of authority exercised on the individual subject to make them more docile, then tactics are the means of resis tance through which that subject can push back against these manipulations, refusing the yoke of docility, at least momentarily. I say momentarily because tactics succeed to the extent that they succeed in a moment in time. De Certeau definitively places a value judgment on tactics over strategies; for him, the authority of the state, exercised through strategies, is to be resisted through the tactics of individuals or groups operating outside of t hese apparatuses. When it comes to dealing with the residual effects of genocidal vio lence, however, both the state and society as a whole must develop techniques for facing the past—the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung—in a way that prevents its repetition in the present and f uture. When societ ies fail to develop comprehensive tactics and strategies for addressing the full real ity of this
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violence, it can continue to manifest in social inequalities, economic disparities, institutional and structural discrimination, and the potential re-emergence of the exceptional physical violence that we typically identify as genocide. Over the last several decades, states around the world have developed strategies of transitional justice whereby post-atrocity regimes address the human rights abuses of the past through truth commissions that present and construct clear narratives about the past, the criminal prosecution of perpetrators, material and symbolic reparations for victims, and the institutional reform of the structures that allowed for the perpetration of violence to begin with. Frequently, however, the strategies that new regimes develop to “deal with the past” are limited. Repeatedly, they fail to address central aspects of the resonant vio lence that allowed for the abuses to take place. Furthermore, states often fail to incorporate nongovernmental, civil-society groups in the process of developing transitional justice strategies. Fortunately, the state is not the only actor in these situations. As I have argued throughout this book and elsewhere, 3 civil society has an undeniably essential role in addressing resonant violence and the ways it functions in post- genocide societies. Through the power of co-embodied practices, whereby groups of conscientious individuals come together in the public sphere to confront the realities of resonant violence and work actively toward its transduction, everyday p eople can at once highlight how resonant violence performs in ways that might be too obscured to notice at first glance and perform upon that affective violence, transducing it into something else altogether. Through their concerted efforts, these groups produce Arendtian power, which is not the same as traditional models of state-centric, top-down power. Arendtian power emerges through groups of p eople speaking and acting in concert in the public sphere.4 This new form of power that emerges through co-embodied practice has its own affective energy that can resonate both upward, so that it affects the state and the way it addresses the past institutionally, and also outward, so that it incrementally works to repair the social fabric that has been left in tatters by resonant violence. Resonant violence seeks to atomize entire populations; co- embodied practices bring populations back together. Arendt’s notions of action and power, which emerge out of the per for mance of co-embodied practices, stem directly from her understanding of politics. According to Arendt, “politics” refers not to lawmaking, governance, and the humdrum nature of bureaucracy to which we often ascribe the term. Rather, politics is about a recognition of diversity—d iverse identities, opinions, worldviews, ideas, desires, needs—a nd a coming together to figure out ways of living communally and understanding the world through this diversity. Arendt writes: If someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he [sic] can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many
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p eople, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.5 For Arendt, the world is not a physical object or location, but that which is created through diverse p eople coming together. Similarly, power emerges in and through the coming together across difference toward a shared vision or aspiration. Importantly, this coming together is not about erasing difference, but acknowledging it fully and with the understanding that t here is something to learn from that difference. Although this understanding of the world and politics may seem utopian, Arendt does not mean it to seem like some unattainable vision of the world. For Arendt, each individual represents a diverse perspective, so even daily social interactions are a part of this coming together across diversity. Being with o thers despite differences is politics. On the contrary, genocide, as well as resonant violence, which is both its instigator and its product, abhors diversity. The primary goal of genocide is to eliminate difference. Arjun Appadurai clearly argues how modernity and the so-called flattening of the world through globalization have contributed to a rise in ethnic and genocidal violence.6 According to Appadurai, regimes that have been “left b ehind” by the financial and political realities of globalization often turn to identity politics and nationalism as a grounding or stabilizing affective platform around which to center the nation-state. Recent years have demonstrated that financial and political hardship are not even a prerequisite for turning to such a culture of nationalism. Radical nationalisms seek to eliminate difference b ecause it gets in the way of the notion of a “pure” national ethos. Minorities who do not fit as well into a larger picture of national identity become targets. Small minorities are especially prone to what Appadurai calls predatory identities b ecause they “represent a tiny obstacle between majority and totality or total purity.” 7 He continues, “In a sense, the smaller the number and the weaker the minority, the deeper the rage about its capacity to make a majority feel like a mere majority rather than like a whole and uncontested ethnos.” 8 Of course, genocide and large-scale political vio lence are not only the byproducts of globalization and neoliberal capitalism; they existed long before them. Appadurai makes a convincing argument, however, that the political and economic realities of the world today create an environment that is particularly prone to such violence. The “rage” that Appadurai identifies as emerging from the contemporary political scene is resonant violence. It is the affective force that manifests through social, economic, institutional, and physical violence against t hese minority populations in an attempt to eliminate them and, thus, to eliminate difference.9
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As stated above, Arendt’s definition of the world is tied directly to the coming together of people across that which divides them. If we accept Arendt’s definition, then, genocide and resonant violence, which both aim for the isolation and destruction of specific groups deemed by perpetrators to be “different,” result not only in the elimination of the persecuted groups, but also in the destruction of the world as we know it. In one passage, Arendt details this process. Interestingly, she is referring most directly to the threat of a nuclear holocaust, which felt imminent in the 1950s, when she wrote this text. The ideas she expresses, however, describe the results of genocide and resonant violence just as clearly: If a people or nation, or even just some specific h uman group, which offers a unique view of the world arising from its particular position in the world—a position that, however it came about, cannot readily be duplicated—is annihilated, it is not merely that a people or a nation or a given number of individuals perishes, but rather that a portion of our common world is destroyed, an aspect of the world that has revealed itself to us until now but can never reveal itself again. Annihilation is therefore not just tantamount to the end of a world; it also takes its annihilator with it. Strictly speaking, politics is not so much about human beings as it is about the world that comes into being between them and endures beyond them.10 There are two particularly important things to highlight here. First, because Arendt believes the world does not only include but actually is the diversity of people and perspectives around the globe, the destruction of one of those groups contributes to what Arendt calls “worldlessness.” 11 When even one group is destroyed, we become more and more “worldless.” This leads to the second import ant point: the victim of worldlessness is not only the eliminated group, but every person on the planet, including the perpetrator of that elimination. This exact phenomenon is where the utility of thinking in terms of resonant violence rather than trauma lies. As stated in the introduction, trauma is victim centric. It is experienced by victims of physical, emotional, or psychological violence. And yet genocidal violence has an effect not only on victims; perpetrators, bystanders, and collaborators are also affected by it and must live with the decisions they have made and the ways they relate to that violence. Because resonant violence refers to the affective force of genocide—that which precedes, catalyzes, sustains, and succeeds genocidal violence—it does not refer only to victims, but to entire societies who are all affected by the emotional force of such violence. Therefore, just as Arendt states, when a group of people attempt to annihilate another group of people, they are not only destroying the world for that group, but for themselves as well. Resonant violence affects everyone. W hether they acknowledge it or not, perpetrators are the victims of their own violence, for they have unalterably transformed the world, actually making it into less of a world. And the ongoing affective force of such violence
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continues to resonate even a fter that group has been killed, influencing the way the past is remembered, the values and responsibilities the perpetrator society chooses to honor, and the potential focus on new minorities that “warrant” persecution and possible destruction. When it goes unresolved and unacknowledged, resonant violence breeds more and more worldlessness. The question then becomes how to respond to this growth of worldlessness. Is there anything to be done that can make the world more “worldful” or, as Arendt puts it, worldly again? Arendt has a special word for a worldless world. She calls it the desert: “The modern growth of worldlessness, the withering away of everything between us, can also be described as the spread of the desert.” 12 Resonant violence creates this desert. In a particularly paradoxical way, it disconnects us through the very force that connects us, that exists between us, and that is transmitted by us: affect. The negative affect of resonant violence pushes p eople apart. If its ultimate goal is atomization, then actually its goal is to cease being affect altogether, for affect is always social. Resonant violence, when it succeeds fully, can only exist as individual feeling or sentiment, no longer transmissible or shareable with o thers. Arendt writes, “The danger lies in becoming true inhabitants of the desert and feeling at home in it.” 13 Resonant violence pushes us toward feeling at home in the desert of worldlessness. The desert is not total, however. Arendt insists on pointing out t hose collectives and actions that strugg le toward worldfulness. Appropriately, she calls them oases: The oases are t hose fields of life which exist independently, or largely so, from political conditions. What went wrong is politics, our plural existence, and not what we can do and create insofar as we exist in the singular: in the isolation of the artist, in the solitude of the phi losopher, in the inherently worldless relationship between human beings as it exists in love and sometimes in friendship—when one heart reaches out directly to the other, as in friendship, or when the in-between, the world, goes up in flames, as in love. Without the intactness of these oases we would not know how to breathe. . . . In other words, the oases, which are not places of “relaxation” but life-g iving sources that let us live in the desert without becoming reconciled to it, w ill dry up.14 Art. Thought. Friendship. Love. T hese are the oases that Arendt sees, which allow us to survive the desert. Arendt does not really theorize how t hese oases might grow larger, however. For her, the reality of the desert seems an irreversible inevitability; the best we can hope is for the duration of t hese small pockets of humanity and life within the desert that we have created. I argue that, if anything could make it possible, co-embodied practices like the ones described across this book, which represent their own forms of oasis, have the potential of retaking the desert, resonating outward so that the desert created
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by resonant violence transforms into a lusher, greener landscape produced through the amplified power of collective action. Each of the chapters of this book details certain subsets of co-embodied practices that have emerged in post-genocide societies. Although this book only takes three cases as its objects of analysis, it should go without saying that these practices are present not only in these three cases. Aspects of them can be seen in many post-genocide societies—e specially those where groups of people are actively working to acknowledge, rather than ignore, the violence of the past. A fter outlining the concept of resonant violence in chapter 1, in chapter 2 I detailed one of the most visible examples of such practices: co-embodied practices of memorialization. Human beings have been building memorials to honor and remember the dead since time immemorial. U ntil the mid-t wentieth century, the most spectacular of these memorials have been war memorials that honor the soldier-citizens who have died fighting for the state. Practices of memorialization began to change, however, a fter the Holocaust, owing at once to the unprecedented levels of violence that it wrought and the qualitative shift in violence it represented. Genocide memorials are not meant to honor the glorious deaths of soldiers, but the forsaken victims of the state’s own project of annihilation. Thus, genocide memorials have moved gradually away from the architectural language of traditional monumentality and toward the creation of an affective environment whereby visitors can feel an emotional identification with those who have died. Sites like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin demarcate a new effort to create not just spaces for thoughtful contemplation, but sites of embodied experience. Visitors become a part of the memorial space itself. In fact, their embodied encounter with the site is intended to be its own memorial practice. I have argued that this shift to create affective landscapes for confronting past violence underscores an increasing recognition—perhaps conscious, perhaps not—of resonant violence. Chapter 3 focused specifically on practices of visitation at former sites of mass atrocity that have been converted into sites of memory. Visitors report coming to sites like former Nazi concentration camps and former Argentine clandestine detention centers to gain historical knowledge of the past. The fact that they could obtain such knowledge from any number of other sources, however, demonstrates that they are also seeking an affective connection with the past, which they obtain through the co-corporeal experience of being with others in the space of memory. In this chapter I argued that the most successful of t hese sites are t hose that create spaces for group, embodied practices within them, allowing for intersubjective encounters. Sites like ESMA in Buenos Aires—which contains not only the site of death and torture represented by the Officers’ Quarters, but also a cultural center and a number of buildings dedicated to human rights activism in the present—show how sites of memory can activate the past in the present by making it a part of
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the everyday. Through this process, the negative affect of resonant violence, which has become normalized over time, is made strange again. Likewise, the co-embodied practices that occur within the site work to transduce that vio lence into positive affect and new political agency, which can then resonate outward, far beyond the bounda ries of the site itself. The first chapters underscored the modes of co-embodied practice that center on specific sites of memory. The following two chapters, on the other hand, analyzed two modes of co-embodied practice that occur through pol iti cal action, where groups come together in the broader public sphere. These practices do not center around specific spaces designated for encountering the past. Rather, by occurring within the larger public arena, they highlight the universality of resonant violence and challenge large sectors of society to join the effort to transduce it. Through detailing the escraches of H.I.J.O.S. in Argentina, chapter 4 introduces the concept of co-embodied practices of trans-action. These practices refuse to be centered on a single literal or figurative space. Rather, their transitional nature allows them to cross large swaths of space and, in the process, refigure it. These practices also demonstrate the per for m ance of what Arendt calls political action,15 which is, for her, the highest level of human activity, whereby people come together in the public sphere and act together in speech or deed t oward a shared goal. Co-embodied practices of trans-action give birth to a space of appearance, within which the negative force of resonant violence is transduced and out of which emerge new, positive affect and Arendtian power. In chapter 5 I highlighted co-embodied practices of occupation. Although these practices align themselves with a single, symbolic space, their ultimate purpose is for the effects of their occupation to amplify and resonate outward, influencing an entire society through their occupation of that small space. I focus specifically on the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971), a political action that kicked off the Red Power Movement and contributed to a sea change in the relationship between Native American populations and the U.S. government. Through their practice of occupation, the activists transformed Alcatraz Island into a crucible for the transduction of resonant violence into agency and power. Furthermore, through their comprehensive outreach strategy, the occupiers ensured that the effects of their action would extend far beyond the bounda ries of Alcatraz Island to affect not only American Indians across the country, but indeed all Americans. Although the occupation of Alcatraz failed to achieve its stated goals, the affect generated through it was institutionalized through an array of public-policy initiatives that have definitively transformed the relationship between Indigenous nations and the United States’ government. Resonant violence is, at its core, affective, and affect is often a difficult t hing to recognize and an even harder t hing to measure. B ecause of this real ity, t here are still a number of questions to be answered about how to address
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resonant violence so that it ceases to perform its damaging effects in post-(or even pre-) genocide societ ies. How can we recognize when resonant violence is present, especially before it manifests in the physical acts of destruction that we typically label as genocide? In post-genocide societies, how do we know when resonant violence has been adequately addressed or transduced? T hese are difficult questions to answer, and the empiricist w ill likely be dissatisfied with the response I am about to give. And h ere, if I have not done so already, I give myself away as a liberal pragmatist who willingly buys into the potentially imperial project of international human rights norms: for those who l iti cally believe in the presence and power of affect, perhaps the only po responsible attitude to take is to act as if resonant violence is always present. We have an obligation to root out social inequity in all its forms. We have a responsibility to ensure the protection of our fellow human beings from all forms of violence, especially violence levied on them by state power. Con temporary human rights discourse and international norms like the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) highlight the responsibility of the state to protect its own populations and to ensure that other states are fulfilling that responsibility as well. If we understand resonant violence to be an insidious force that encourages its own obscurity, we should constantly be enacting new tactics and strategies to bring it to light and fight against its perpetuation. For t hose who are dissatisfied with this extra-cautious approach, however, I w ill offer something more concrete. Risk assessment has been a consistent preoccupation in the fields of genocide studies and prevention since the early 1990s. Sociologist Helen Fein was the first to apply the tools of risk assessment to predicting genocide when she developed a model to measure risk for genocide based on quantitative data obtained from previous cases.16 Since Fein’s foundational study, numerous risk assessment models have followed, each trying to hone the precision with which they can identify the risk for genocide and mass atrocities. This increased focus on assessing risk has led to a proliferation of risk assessment models, including ones developed by Barbara Harff,17 James Waller,18 B. E. Goldsmith et al.,19 the United Nations’ “Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes,” 20 and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project.21 Despite the fact that aspects of these models vary, with some citing certain risk factors that o thers do not, t here is now widespread consensus on many of the risk f actors that contribute to genocide and other mass atrocity violence. The fact that genocides continue to happen today, in other words, is not a result of our not knowing how to predict them. Their occurrence is much more strongly representative of a deficit in political w ill and a tendency to wait u ntil it is far too late to take actions that can stop the escalation of t hese f actors. As Waller illustrates, the factors that these models cite as indicative of a f uture risk of genocide generally fall into four categories. 22 Certain risk f actors relate to governance.23 We know, for instance, that authoritarian states are
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more likely to experience a genocide than democratic states. Even more likely are states in transition and so-called anocracies, that is, governments with a mix of authoritarian and democratic characteristics. 24 Another risk factor relating to governance is known as a state legitimacy deficit, a reality that emerges when the citizenry (or a portion thereof ) does not trust that the government has its best interests at heart. 25 Governance-related risks also include systematic state- led discrimination, whereby the state enacts policies that implicitly or explicitly disadvantage certain identity groups over o thers.26 These governance-related factors are interconnected with resonant violence and the ways that structural instabilities manifest in post-genocide contexts. For instance, state legitimacy deficits increase when states fail to recognize the impact of atrocity violence on formerly targeted identity groups. Similarly, states that bring an end to mass killing but fail to repeal discriminatory legislation passed before or during a genocide maintain the discriminatory structures that led to genocide to begin with. Other risk factors relate to economic conditions.27 Although many of t hese economic risk factors are macroeconomic in nature—for instance, mass atrocities are more likely to occur during periods of global and/or regional economic instability, which may or may not be the result of any domestic policy28 — several of these economic risk factors are clearly tied to resonant vio lence. One in par t ic u l ar relates to systemic economic discrimination. Research finds that atrocity violence is more likely in societ ies where t here is a marked difference in relative wealth between identity groups. When certain identity groups have a monopoly on the economic resources of a country while o thers strugg le for basic necessities, like access to food, water, shelter, education, or health care, risk for atrocities increases. Oftentimes, these economic disparities are perpetuations of policies enacted during a period of mass atrocity.29 For instance, in the United States, there continues to be a notable wealth gap between Black Americans and white Americans. According to a study by the Brookings Institute, the average white family in the United States has ten times the net worth of the average Black family. 30 This economic inequality is a direct result of centuries of policies that have disadvantaged Black people, dating back to slavery. Resonant violence is often most visible through risk factors relating to social fragmentation. 31 This category of risk includes things like identity- based social divisions, which manifest through the polarization of the public and the segregation of public space;32 unequal access to basic goods and ser vices, whereby certain identity groups have differential access to government serv ices, functioning schools, public facilities, and basic needs, like fresh food and water;33 and gender inequalities. 34 These chasms that divide social groups are very often related to identity-based discrimination during periods of outright violence. For instance, women who suffered rape during periods of atrocity violence in places as diverse as the Democratic Republic of Congo,
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Iraq, and Bosnia and Herzegovina have all faced the enduring stigma of their own violation a fter periods of violence have dissipated. Rejected by their own families and communities, these victimized w omen continue to confront the resonating impacts of past violence every day of their lives. 35 The final category of risk f actors relates to conflict history. 36 Sadly, one of the biggest predictors that a society w ill experience a genocide is if it has already experienced a genocide in the recent past. 37 As alarming as this fact may be, it is import ant not to look at post-genocide societ ies as doomed to fall victim to genocide again. Past genocide tends to be a salient risk factor specifically in those societies that have not taken measures to actively deal with the underlying issues that led to genocide to begin with—t hat is, societ ies that have not come to terms with resonant violence and the ways it operates. The very fact that prior genocides or atrocities are such a reliable predictor of risk for future identity-based violence is in itself demonstrative of the danger of resonant violence. For a society to truly recover from genocide and immunize itself from recurrence, it requires a holistic approach that goes far beyond ending outright killing. Rather, it necessitates a comprehensive review of all the ways identity-based divisions manifest through that society’s political, social, and economic structures. Risk assessment models can paint a bleak picture of the current state of affairs in many places, but, given that so many of these risk factors are related to the continuing impacts of past genocides and other mass atrocities, they also provide a road map for recognizing and responding to resonant violence. In so many ways, the practices detailed in this book are clear examples of initiatives to recognize these risk factors and mitigate them in some way—transforming these dangerous societal structures in the process. The construction of state memorials, like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, represents an acknowledgment on the part of the government of the suffering of a victim group, which can in turn increase the confidence that group has in its government and decrease the state legitimacy deficit. The escraches of H.I.J.O.S. pointed out the frailty of rule of law in Argentina; when trials reopened against former perpetrators, these weakened judicial structures became stronger, mitigating governance- related risks regarding weak state structures. The occupation of Alcatraz Island helped to visibilize an identity group that was all too absent from the concerns of most non-Indigenous Americans; this co- embodied practice both highlighted the identity- based divisions that disadvantaged Indigenous Americans and promoted concrete actions to respond to those realities. If we are seeking tools to measure the success of co-embodied practices in transducing the effects of resonant violence, I propose that we can find them in these risk assessment models. Resonant vio lence is being transduced when these risk factors are diminished in some way. Or, more positively, we can measure resonant violence’s end when the h uman rights of all groups within a society are protected and respected.
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Of course, this is no easy task. It is unlikely that any society exists where the rights of all people are honored equally. It is incredibly improbable that a case exists where t here is no division of any kind among certain groups. In the end, however, a society that is resistant to genocidal violence, where adequate measures of prevention exist, looks pretty much like a normal, functioning social democracy that recognizes and protects the rights of each citizen and that provides for their basic health and wellbeing. And even if the goal of creating a society without division and with equality of access for all seems impossible, what harm could come from attempting to do it anyway? Here, I turn to a combination of the utopian thinking espoused by José Esteban Muñoz and the critical, self-reflexive thinking encouraged by Arendt. Muñoz celebrates the impossibility of utopian thinking, describing it as “a rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” 38 The fact that the f uture one hopes for is impossible does not mean that one should not actively aspire to it. That vision for an unfeasible future can still create new, better realities through the process of trying to achieve the unachievable. This push for utopian dreams, however, should always be mixed with what Arendt refers to as critical thinking. 39 Arendt describes critical thinking as the individualized process of judgment undertaken by political subjects through which they reflect upon their own decisions, their own lives and aspirations. Even though it is an act undertaken by the individual subject, however, it is always conscientious of all other subjects. She writes: Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all o thers are open to inspection. Hence, critical thinking, while still a solitary business, does not cut itself off from “all o thers.” To be sure, it still goes on in isolation, but by the force of imagination it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant’s world citizen. To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.40 ere lies the real political possibility in resolving resonant violence and preH venting its future propagation: to aspire at once toward a seemingly unachievable f uture where the po l iti cal hardships of today no longer exist and, simultaneously, to embody “an enlarged mentality” that focuses those aspirations not only on our own well-being but that of all others as well. In other words, constructing a world free of resonant violence is also about actively cultivating an affective politics of empathy. Every individual has a responsibility to ensure the rights of every other individual. If, as I encourage, we act as if resonant violence is always present, we can only benefit from the collective action that emerges as a response to it. T here is no such thing as the rights of e very person being “too well protected,” so long as those rights are extended to all.
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I hope that this research serves only as the beginning for more scholars, pract it ioners, and activists to consider the role of affect in genocidal violence. There is still substantial work to be done. This book argues for the existence of resonant violence as the enduring, affective force that both precedes and succeeds genocidal violence. It examines a number of co-embodied practices as positive responses to that force and argues that t hese practices actually serve to transform the negative effects of resonant violence into new, positive affect, pol itical agency, and Arendtian power. The work encompassed in t hese pages, however, is purely qualitative. Acknowledging the existence and role of affect and measuri ng it are two completely different t hings. I leave it to other scholars to test this theory of resonant violence by f inding potential ways to measure its effects in post-genocide societies. Furthermore, the three sites examined in this book all represent cases in which the state itself has made at least some efforts to curtail the violence of the past by implementing policies and laws to address it. Sometimes t hese processes have been labeled as transitional justice (as in the case of Argentina). Other times they are not conceived within this frame (as in the United States). It would be particularly interest ing, however, to examine co-embodied practices and their effectiveness in cases where the state continues to refuse to acknowledge and “deal with” the past altogether, for instance, in Turkey, where even a hundred years a fter the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians, the state continues to deny their actions as genocide. As I write the closing paragraph of this conclusion, the reality of political violence around the world seems like a continued certainty. Armenia and Azerbaijan are in a state of identity-based armed conflict over the territory that is known alternately as Nagorno-K arabakh and Artsakh. The government of Myanmar is a renewed military dictatorship that continues its project of genocide of the Rohingya minority, with even more ethnic groups now u nder threat. Only a few years ago, the Colombian government signed a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to bring an end to decades upon decades of conflict, and now that peace seems as tenuous as ever, as guerilla fighters are returning to the jungles. Russia has outlawed homosexuality, and China is perpetrating a genocide against the education centers.” Closer to Uyghur minority, imprisoning them in “re- home, U.S. police continue to kill Black Americans at a rate that far exceeds the rate for other identity groups. In the e arlier part of Trump’s presidency, his administration enacted a policy of separating children from their parents when they crossed the United States–Mexico border. Although this policy itself came to an end a fter sparking international outrage, over five hundred of t hese children are still without their parents. Meanwhile, violence rages on in places like Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Venezuela, Afg hanistan, Kashmir, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and many o thers, almost completely unacknowledged by the international community. The sheer number
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of examples I can cite h ere only from recent headlines are evidence of the horrifying power of resonant violence. Reading the newspaper or watching the even ing news is enough to make even the most optimistic of us hopeless in the face of such violence. Still, there is hope. In 2019 and 2020, protestors in Hong Kong spent months occupying the city’s streets, demanding freedom and the revocation of the encroaching power of mainland China. In 2018, millions in Argentina took to the streets in the Ni Una Menos movement, sparking a national reckoning with violence and discrimination against women. Despite the restrictions of a global pandemic, hundreds of thousands in the United States took to the streets in 2020 in response to the police killing of George Floyd, leading to widespread calls for policing reform and a more comprehensive approach to dealing with the legacies of enslavement in the United States. And, for the f irst time in recent memory, Democratic candidates for the presidency in the United States incorporated racial justice initiatives and the betterment of Native lives as central pillars of their campaigns, thanks in part to the activism of groups like Black Lives M atter and Standing Rock. These collective responses to resonant violence, born out of so much hardship and pain, are perhaps the best hope we have. By coming together in the face of the resonant violence that seeks to push them apart, these collectives are performing and, indeed, enacting a better, more peaceful world.
Ac k nowle dgm e nt s
This book is the product of a decade of research and writing. When I started that research, I was a theater director who decided to get a master’s degree in perform ance studies so I could eventually supplement my directing habit with a steady university teaching income. Ten years later, I am an atrocity prevention scholar and practitioner who works both at a research university and an international atrocity prevention NGO. The transition from artist to academic has been a long and strange one but has brought me an immense amount of happiness and a sense of purpose that I cannot understate. This book and the person I have become over the past ten years are a direct result of the p eople and ideas I have encountered along the way, and I want to acknowledge several of them who have played a particularly pivotal role. I first began the work that would become this book as a PhD student in New York University’s Department of Perform ance Studies. While there, I was lucky to work u nder and alongside an array of brilliant people who have inalterably s haped the way I encounter the world. In part icu l ar, Diana Taylor’s work is one of the central inspirations for my research and for my love of per form ance studies more generally. She is the person who motivated me to focus on the power of social activism, and her writing on Argentina is what first provoked me to conduct research t here. Deborah Kapchan was the most supportive dissertation chair a student could have and has always pushed me to think more deeply and carefully. I cherish all the conversations we have had, not only in her office, but over roasted lamb in Croatia or over wine in Spain. She was and continues to be equal parts challenging and nurturing, and it is one of my greatest privileges in life that I now count her as not only a mentor but a friend. Two other colleagues from NYU have remained steadfast supporters of my work and well and true friends: Leticia Robles-Moreno and Kaitlin Murphy. Thank you both for your friendship, along with the ideas and meals we have shared together through t hese years. I owe a debt of gratitude to all the p eople who took the time to speak with me during my field research. T here are too many to name them all, but I want to single out a few who went the extra mile to offer their guidance and support. In Poland, thank you to Alicja Białecka and Marta Barecka of the 203
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Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. In Germany, thank you to Stefanie Fischer, an incredible Holocaust scholar who has helped guide my work on Holocaust memory. In Argentina, a special thanks to Julian Axat, Andrea Gualde, Alejandra Naftal, and the fantastic artists of Grupo de Arte Callejero, all of whom inspire me in the ways they work for change. In New York, thank you to John Haworth, sen ior executive emeritus of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, who provided invaluable feedback on this book. I am grateful for the editorial team at Rutgers University Press, especially Lisa Banning, Alex Hinton, and Nela Navarro, for believing in this work, along with all those who have read and offered feedback on this manuscript throughout the publication process. Additionally, Christopher Wen was a huge help in preparing this manuscript. For all that I have learned through my academic research, I have learned as much, if not more, from working at the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities (AIPG), where I have the privilege to collaborate with government officials in more than ninety countries around the world in the creation of public policy to protect vulnerable identity groups. It is one of the greatest joys of my life to work alongside my colleagues at AIPG, and I thank them for their support over the years, as I balance my life as an academic and practitioner. I want to thank my colleagues, Paula Araújo Alves, Susan Braden, Samantha Capicotto, Eugenia Carbone, Matei Demetrescu, Eliza Fairbrother, Gabriela Ghindea, Fernanda Gomez Guevara, Ashley Green, Laura Karaskiewicz, Sharleen Lazartes, Liz Marvin, Jack Mayerhofer, Abbas Muluubya, Kevin Lillian Nakayenga, Gary Penzell, Amanda Petraglia, Duaa Randhawa, Violet Roberts, Mariana Salazar, Rob Scharf, Ashad Sentongo, Gosia Waligora, Hannah Waller, James Waller, and Stephanie Wright. I also send a special thank you to Owen Pell, Charlie Scheidt, Allyne Schwartz, and Fred Schwartz (in memoriam). Their support of AIPG and of my work has been a true mitzvah. Many academics are not so lucky as to find the perfect academic home so early in their careers, but I am not one of them. I am ecstatic to be a faculty member of Binghamton University’s Department of Public Administration, and I thank all my colleagues in that program. My true home at Binghamton, however, is in the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, and I am beyond proud to be a member of that team. Thank you to my colleagues at I-GMAP for their consistent support. Without Stephen Capobianco and Yongabi Ngoh, d oing my job would be so much more difficult. I especially want to thank Max Pensky and Nadia Rubaii, two of the best colleagues one could dream of. Their leadership of I-GMAP is shaping a one-of-a-k ind institution that is making real change in the world, and I am so honored to be a part of it. Thank you both for your trust in me. The work of writing a book can be tedious and lonely, and one really cannot make it through without the loving support of a group of friends. I am
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privileged to have a network of support that spans the globe. In the United States, thank you to my dear friends Ashley Bales, Alex Barron, Dave Culver house, Jessica Culverhouse, Andy Donald, Laura Ericson, Brittany Felton, Tamara Fisch, Will Flynt, Kelly Gillespie, Kate Kirschner, Phil Kirschner, Caitlin Mahoney, Abigail Pañares, Mike Ricca, Chris Shade, Kristi Shade, Zarina Shea, and Dave Smallen, most of whom met me as a theater director, then stuck with me as I made the transition into a boring academic. In Argentina, thank you to Tomas Borovinsky, Tomás Gershanik, Daniela Szenkman, and Paula Szenkman, mis amigos porteños. I fell in love with Buenos Aires because I fell in love with you all! In Italy, grazie mille a Valeria Presotto, the w oman who planned my wedding, then became one of my dearest friends. In Brazil, thank you Clara Ramírez-Barat and Marlon Weichert, two of the best friends and traveling companions anyone could ask for. I am so grateful for all your friendships; they have brought me utter joy during good times, just as they have sustained me in difficult moments. Thank you to my family, who have offered their love and unconditional support of me and my work throughout my life. Thank you especially to Zach and Stacey Whigham, who I count not only as a b rother and sister-i n-law but as best friends. Thank you, Memaw and Papa (in memoriam), whose love for their grandchildren has only been rivaled by their love for each other. Vă mulţumesc, Ana şi Teo, pentru că m-aţi făcut parte din familia voastră. And thank you most especially to Mom and Dad, who have loved me and supported me throughout good times and bad, and who have taught me much more than I have ever learned in all the books I have read and classes I have taken. Fin ally, and most importantly, thank you, Tibi Galis. In so many ways, I would not have been able to write this book were it not for you. You have inspired me so significantly that it is often hard to tell where your ideas end and mine begin. I am guided by your vision of a world in which no one is victimized because of who they are, and we are closer to making that world a reality because of your work. You are a constant support and the best friend one could have. Te iubesc foarte mult.
Note s
I ntroduction 1. United Nations, “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” (2011); International L abour Organi zation (ILO), “Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, C196” (1989), Article 6(1). 2. Jonah Engel Bromwich, “16 Arrested at North Dakota Pipeline Protest,” New York Times, November 21, 2016, https://w ww.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/d akota-access -pipeline-protesters-police.html. 3. Bromwich, “16 Arrested at North Dakota Pipeline Protest.” 4. Throughout this book I alternate between the terms “Native Americans,” “American Indians,” and “Indians” to describe Indigenous people of what is now the United States. For more on this decision, see Charles C. Mann, New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2011). The oldest term, “Indian,” comes from indio, the attribution given to the Indigenous p eople by Columbus when he thought he had arrived in the East Indies. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, social scientists began to replace the term with the more politically correct “Native Americans.” Many Indigenous p eople, however, prefer the term “Indian” or “American Indian,” and use it to describe themselves. For instance, the Smithsonian museums located in Washington, DC, and New York City dedicated to Indigenous peoples of the Americas and designed by representatives from various tribes around the country chose to call the museum the National Museum of the American Indian. I alternate between all these terms, mostly to avoid repetition. 5. 111th Congress, “H.R. 3326,” Pub. L. No. 111–118 (2009). 6. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the White House Tribal Nations Conference,” https://obamawhitehouse.a rchives.g ov/t he-press-office/2 010/12/16 /remarks-president-white-house-t ribal-n ations-conference. 7. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amer ic as (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 13. 8. This represents the so-called functionalist school of thought in Holocaust studies. Intentionalists, on the other hand, do argue that the destruction of all Jews was the initial and enduring goal of the Nazis. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2017), 340–41. 9. Marion A Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 22–23; Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 6. 10. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966). 11. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair. 12. Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 29–62; Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 17–49; Benjamin A. Valentino,
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Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 167. 13. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 6. 14. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 29. 15. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Lite rature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. 16. Williams, Marxism and Lite rature, 132. 17. James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 18. “Mass atrocity” is an umbrella term that includes the three gravest international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Many in the field of genocide prevention have adopted the use of this term so as not to mire themselves in debates over whether a crime meets the legal definition of genocide, as laid out in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. I explain this in further detail in subsequent pages. 19. United Nations, “Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes: A Tool for Prevention” (UN Office of the Special Advisers on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, 2014). 2 0. Early Warning Proj ect, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https:// earlywarningproject.u shmm.org/, accessed July 29, 2021. 21. Atrocity Forecasting Project, Australia National University, https://politicsir.cass .a nu.edu.au/research/projects/atrocity-forecasting, accessed December 7, 2020; B. E. Goldsmith et al., “Forecasting the Onset of Genocide and Politicide: Annual Out-of-Sample Forecasts on a Global Dataset, 1988–2003,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 4 (2013): 437–52. 22. Barbara Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 57–73. 2 3. Stephen McLoughlin, The Structural Prevention of Mass Atrocities: Understanding Risk and Resilience (New York: Routledge, 2014). 24. Scott Straus, Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016). 25. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of G overnment, Proposals for Redress, 2nd ed. (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2008 [1944]), 79. 26. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); David L. Nersessian, Genocide and Political Groups (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 27. Scott Straus provides a keen analysis of many reasons why a mass-atrocity framework can be more useful than one focused solely on genocide. For more on this argument, see Straus, Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. 2 8. A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); Damien Short, Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death, and Ecocide (London: Zed Books, 2016); Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 29. Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide,” in Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide, 102–32. 3 0. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. 31. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 32. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1961).
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33. Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja, eds., Genocide M atters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2013); Adam Jones, ed., New Directions in Genocide Research (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012); Jones, Genocide; Elisabeth Hope Murray, Disrupting Pathways to Genocide: The Process of Ideological Radicalisation (London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2015); Waller, Confronting Evil. 34. Gregory Stanton, Eight Stages of Genocide (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2008). 35. Gregory Stanton, “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” Genocide Watch, http://w ww .g enocidewatch.com /ten- stages- of-g enocide, accessed December 7, 2020. 36. Stanton uses the term “symbolization” to describe acts that solidify the classification of individuals into groups through the use of symbols. For instance, the Third Reich used symbolization when it forced all Jews to wear the six-pointed Star of David whenever they appeared in public. 37. Stanton’s full ten stages include classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial. 38. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011); Neil Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1995); Alexander Mayer-R ieckh and Pablo de Greiff, eds., Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional Societies (New York: SSRC, 2008); Colleen Murphy, The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Tricia D. Olsen, Leigh A. Payne, and Andrew G. Reiter, Transitional Justice in Balance: Comparing Pro cesses, Weighing Efficacy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2010); Olivera Simić, ed., An Introduction to Transitional Justice (New York: Routledge, 2016); Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Hugo Van der Merwe, Victoria Baxter, and Victoria Chapman, eds., Assessing the Impact of Transitional Justice (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2009). 39. I nternational Center for Transitional Justice, “What Is Transitional Justice?,” https://w ww.ictj.org/about/t ransitional-justice, accessed March 5, 2020. 4 0. Tibi Galis, “Keeping the Wolves at Bay: Transitional Justice and Reform in Argentina, South Africa, and Hungary” (PhD diss., Clark University, 2015). 41. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Norwell, MA: Anchor Press, 1959), 15. 42. Thomas J. Csordas, “Introduction: The Body as Represent at ion and Being-i n-t he- World,” in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1. 43. Csordas, “Introduction,” 12. 4 4. Diana Taylor, ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 10. 45. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35. 4 6. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. 47. J. L. Austin, How to Do T hings with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 4 8. Csordas, Embodiment and Experience; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 49. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1925]). 50. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 51. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
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52. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 87–106. 53. James Edward Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 54. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture a fter the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 55. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 56. Yifat Gutman, Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2017). 57. Taylor, ¡Presente!. 58. Gutman, Memory Activism, 2. 59. Saul Elbein, “The Youth Group That Launched a Movement at Standing Rock,” New York Times, January 31, 2017, https://w ww.nytimes.com /2 017/01/31 /m agazine/t he-youth-g roup-t hat-l aunched-a-movement-at-standing-rock.html. 6 0. Elbein, “The Youth Group That Launched a Movement.” 61. Elbein, “The Youth Group That Launched a Movement.” 62. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C.J.M. Hubback (London: International Psycho-A nalytical Press, 1922). 63. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 30–31. 6 4. Kai Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Jack Saul, Collective Trauma, Collective Healing (New York: Routledge, 2013). 65. Ignacio Martín-Baró, “War and the Psychosocial Trauma of Salvadoran Children,” in Writings for a Liberation Psychology, ed. Adrianne Aron and Shawn Corne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 122–35. hildren,” 124. 6 6. Martín-Baró, War and the Psychosocial Trauma of Salvadoran C 67. Ian Craib, Psychoanalysis and Social Theory (London: Harvester-W heatsheaf, 1989); Ian Craib, “Social Construction of a Social Psychosis,” Sociology 31, no. 1 (1997): 1–15; Ian Craib, Experiencing Identity (London: SAGE, 1998); Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (London: Palgrave, 2003); Simon Clarke, “Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Interpretation of Emotion,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 33, no. 2 (2003): 143–61; Simon Clarke, “Theory and Practice: Psychoanalytic Sociology as Psycho-Social Studies,” Sociology 40, no. 6 (2006): 1153–69. 68. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1–30; Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012). 69. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” 10. 70. Yael Danieli, ed., International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York: Plenum Press, 1998); Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina; Natan Kellerman, Holocaust Trauma: Psychological Effects and Treatment (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009); Marianne Hirsch, F amily Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory; Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 71. R. M. MacNair, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002).
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72. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). 73. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 29. eople Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, 74. James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary P 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 75. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Berkeley, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). uman Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago 76. Hannah Arendt, The H Press, 1998). 77. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970). 78. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005).
C hap te r 1 Re sonant Viol e nce 1. Patricia Ticineto Clough, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 2. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (Project Gutenberg, 2009 [1677]), http://w ww.g utenberg.org/fi les/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm. 3. Spinoza, Ethics, n.p. 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre nia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 5. Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments,” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xvi. 6. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn 1995): 83–109. 7. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015). 8. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 85. 9. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 88. 10. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. 11. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 88. 12. Massumi, Politics of Affect, 4. 13. Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Volume 1: The Positive Affects (New York: Springer, 1962); Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Volume 2: The Negative Affects (New York: Springer, 1963). 14. Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, “Constraints across Cultures in the Face and Emotion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17, no. 2 (1971): 124–29; Paul Ekman et al., “Universals and Cultural Differences in the Judgments of Facial Expressions of Emotion.,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53, no. 4 (1987): 712–17, https://doi.org/10.1037/0 022 -3514.53.4.712; Paul Ekman et al., “Emotion and Autonomic Nervous System Activity in the Minangkabau of West Sumatra,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62, no. 6 (1992): 972–88. 15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 16. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Lauren Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 17. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, O thers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in Gregg and Seigworth,
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The Affect Theory Reader, 29–51; Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 18. Even if Tomkins’s ideas can be seen in the work of t hese scholars, each has certainly made their own contributions to the field—m any that contradict some of Tomkins’s ideas. Furthermore, while some of these scholars write openly about the influence of Tomkins on their work (Ekman, Sedgwick), others (e.g., Ahmed) do not. 19. Ann Pellegrini and Jasbir Puar, “Affect,” Social Text 100 27, no. 3 (2009): 37. 2 0. Massumi, Politics of Affect. 21. Massumi, Politics of Affect, 212. 2 2. James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary P eople Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 2 3. Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (London: Sage, 2012). 24. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 25. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. 26. Deborah Kapchan, “Body,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 33. 27. Kapchan, “Body,” 34. 2 8. Kapchan, “Body,” 34. 29. Kapchan, “Body,” 42. 3 0. Ann Pellegrini, “Feeling Secular,” Women and Performance 19, no. 2 ( July 2009): 209. 31. J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 32. Daughtry, Listening to War, 3. 33. Daughtry, Listening to War, 77. 34. Daughtry uses the term “auditor” rather than “hearer” or “listener” in order to highlight the agency of this hearing/listening subject. 35. Daughtry, Listening to War, 77–78. 36. Daughtry, Listening to War, 78. 37. Daughtry, Listening to War, 78. 38. Transitional justice in the aftermath of genocide is concerned primarily with perpetrators and victims, rarely taking bystanders into account as a group that requires either punishment or reparations. Emily F. Harwell and Philippe Le Billon, “Natu ral Connections: Linking Transitional Justice and Development through a Focus on Natur al Resources,” in Transitional Justice and Development: Making Connections, ed. Pablo de Greiff and Roger Duthie (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2009), 282–331. 39. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 4 0. Javier Auyero, Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 41. James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 42. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We W ill Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998); René Lemarchand, “The 1994 Rwanda Genocide,” in C entury of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 483–506; Ervin Staub, “The Origins and Prevention of Genocide, Mass Killing, and Other Collective Violence,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 5, no. 4 (1999): 303–36. 43. Daughtry, Listening to War, 321. 4 4. Daughtry, Listening to War, 123. 45. Using related language, William Reddy has developed the term emotional regime to refer to “the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and
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‘emotives’ that express and inculcate them; a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.” Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49, no. 2 (2010): 242. While I appreciate Reddy’s notion of an emotional regime, its focus on a basic emotions understanding of affect fails to encompass the scope of resonant violence’s potential influence. For instance, it is difficult to apply the concept to the economic sphere, which is surely affected by resonant violence. 4 6. Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 10. 47. M. L. Lyon and J. M. Barbalet, “Society’s Body: Emotion and the ‘Somatization’ of Social Theory,” in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 48. 4 8. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3. 49. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 6. 50. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Felipe Pigna, Los Mitos de La Historica Argentina, 1, 2, y 3 (Buenos Aires: Pleneta, 2004); Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle, eds., The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 51. Rachel Yehuda et al., “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation,” Biological Psychiatry: A Journal of Psychiatric Neurosciences and Therapeutics 80, no. 5 (2016): 372–80. 52. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Per formance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 41. 53. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 55. 54. Lyon and Barbalet, “Society’s Body,” 50. 55. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 77–128. 56. Arendt, On Violence. 57. Arendt, On Violence, 56. 58. Stefan Helmreich, “Transduction,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 222–31. 59. Julian F. Henriques, “Sonic Dominance and Reggae Sound Sessions,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 451–80; Julian F. Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (New York: Continuum, 2011). 6 0. Kapchan, “Body.” 61. Kapchan, “Body.” 62. Waller, Becoming Evil. 63. Waller, Becoming Evil, 183. 6 4. Waller, Becoming Evil, 187. 65. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 6 6. Melvin J. Lerner, The Belief in a Just World (New York: Plenum Press, 1980); Waller, Becoming Evil. 67. Schoen Cooperman Research, “Claims Conference Holocaust Poll,” Claims Conference, March 2020, http://www.c laimscon.o rg/w p-c ontent/uploads/2 020/1 0/Millennial -Holocaust-Survey-TOPLINE - 8.2 0.2 0 _ NATIONAL.pdf.
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68. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 119. 69. Kerry Whigham, “Performing Prevention: Civil Society, Perform ance Studies, and the Role of Public Activism in Genocide Prevention,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Sheri P. Rosenberg, Tibi Galis, and Alex Zucker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 332. 70. Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 14. 71. Waller, Becoming Evil.
C hap te r 2 Bui lding Memory 1. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Berkeley, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 49. 2. Huyssen, Present Pasts. 3. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 52. 4. Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1. 5. Peter Birle et al., eds., Memorias Urbanas En Diálogo: Berlín y Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Buenos Libros, 2009), 14. 6. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representa tions, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24. 7. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 8. 8. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amer ic as (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 9. Diana Taylor, ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 38–40. 10. Taylor, ¡Presente!, 38. 11. A. V. Seaton, “War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815–1914,” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 1 ( January 1999): 130–58; Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (Bristol, UK: Channel View Publications, 2009); Paul Willard, Warwick Frost, and Clare Lade, “Darkness beyond Memory: The Battlefields at Culloden and L ittle Bighorn,” in Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places, ed. Leanne White and Elspeth Frew (New York: Routledge, 2013), 264–75. 12. James M. Mayo, “War Memorials as Political Memory,” Geographical Review 78, no. 1 (1988): 62. 13. Quoted in Sean A. Forner, “War Commemoration and the Republic in Crisis: Weimar Germany and the Neue Wache,” Central European History 35, no. 4 (2002): 515. 14. Forner, “War Commemoration and the Republic in Crisis,” 515. 15. James Edward Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 2. 16. Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, 3rd ed. (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008). 17. Young, The Texture of Memory, 10. 18. Young, The Texture of Memory. 19. Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Paul Stangl, “The Soviet War Memorial in Treptow, Berlin,” Geographic al Review 93, no. 2 (2003): 213–36. 2 0. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Alain Touraine, Critique of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: T owards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); Jean- François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
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21. Peter V. Zima, Modern/Postmodern: Society, Philosophy, Lite rature (London: Continuum, 2010), 66. 2 2. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv. omen’s Concentration 2 3. Alyn Beβmann and Insa Eschebach, eds., The Ravensbrück W Camp: History and Memory (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2013); Jordan, Structures of Memory; Claudia Koonz, “Germany’s Buchenwald: Whose Shrine? Whose Memory?,” in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. James Edward Young (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), 111–19. 24. Young, The Texture of Memory, 2. 25. Jordan, Structures of Memory, 74. 26. Jordan, Structures of Memory, 75. 27. Allan Cochrane and Adrian Passmore, “Building a National Capital in an Age of Globalization: The Case of Berlin,” Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) 33, no. 4 (December 2001): 341–52; Mary Nolan, “The Politics of Memory in the Berlin Republic,” Radical History Review, no. 81 (2001): 113–32; Forner, “War Commemoration and the Republic in Crisis”; Henry W. Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration: Two Berlin Memorials,” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 1 (January 2005): 133–73. 2 8. Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001); Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration.” 29. Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration.” 3 0. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 223. 31. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 167. 32. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 167. 33. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin; Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration.” 34. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin. 35. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin; Nolan, “The Politics of Memory in the Berlin Republic”; Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration.” 36. Stefanie Endlich, “El Monumento a Los Judíos Asesinados de Europa,” in Memorias Urbanas En Diálogo: Berlín y Buenos Aires, ed. Peter Birle et al. (Buenos Aires: Buenos Libros, 2009), 127, author’s translation. 37. Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration,” 138. 38. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 220. 39. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 221. 4 0. Young, The Texture of Memory, ix. 41. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 34. 42. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Lite rature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Young, The Texture of Memory; Huyssen, Present Pasts; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 43. Jewish Studies scholar Oren Baruch Stier makes a similar argument when he writes, “The Holocaust has been and w ill continue to be imaginable, speakable, representable; people do indeed strugg le to identify and empathize with its effects, however difficult and approximate the results.” Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 23. 4 4. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 7. 45. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 7. 4 6. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 7.
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47. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. 4 8. Jordan, Structures of Memory. 49. Daniel Libeskind, “Trauma,” in Image and Remembrance: Representations of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 44. 50. Connie Wolf, ed., Daniel Libeskind and the Contemporary Jewish Museum: New Jewish Architecture from Berlin to San Francisco (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2008), 63. 51. James Edward Young, “Daniel Libeskind’s New Jewish Architecture,” in Wolf, Daniel Libeskind and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 50. 52. Libeskind, “Trauma.” 53. Marin Majica, “Bücher Kann Man Verbrennen, Den Geist Nicht,” Berliner Zeitung, 2003, http://w ww.berliner-z eitung.de/a rchiv/a m-70 --jahrestag-der-buecherverb rennung -d rehte -s ich -a m -b ebelplatz -a lles -u m -b uecher - -b uecher -k ann -m an -verbrennen- -den-g eist-n icht-,10810590,10085872.html (Last accessed August 5, 2014); Juliet Koss, “Coming to Terms with the Present,” Grey Room 16 (2004): 116–31. 54. Quoted in Majica, “Bücher Kann Man Verbrennen, Den Geist Nicht.” 55. Young, The Texture of Memory, 27. 56. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 140. 57. Young, The Texture of Memory, 28. 58. Young, The Texture of Memory, 48. 59. Irit Dekel, “Public Passages: Political Action in and around the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin” (PhD diss., New School University, 2008). 6 0. Dekel, “Public Passages,” 21. 61. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin; Nolan, “The Politics of Memory in the Berlin Republic”; Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration.” 62. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 169. 63. Endlich, “El Monumento a Los Judíos Asesinados de Europa,” 130, author’s translation. 6 4. Endlich, “El Monumento a Los Judíos Asesinados de Europa,” 131. 65. Peter Eisenman, “The Silence of Excess,” in Holocaust Memorial Berlin, ed. Eisenman Architects (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2005), n.p. 6 6. Quoted in Endlich, “El Monumento a Los Judíos Asesinados de Europa,” 130. 67. Hanno Rauterberg, “Building Sites of Remembrance,” in Eisenman Architects, Holocaust Memorial Berlin, n.p. 68. Adam Kerpel-Fronius, personal interview, November 15, 2013. 69. Dekel, “Public Passages”; Irit Dekel, “Ways of Looking: Observation and Transformation at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin,” Memory Studies 2, no. 71 (2009): 71–86. 70. Dekel, “Public Passages,” 3. 71. Dekel, “Ways of Looking,” 83. 72. Patricia Ticineto Clough, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 73. Edward S. Casey, “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty,” Man and World 17, no. 3 (1984): 279–97; Edward Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 17–44. 74. Casey, “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty,” 280, original emphasis. 75. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 37. 76. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 77. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 186. 78. Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love M atters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 6. 79. Nussbaum, Politic al Emotions, 11. 8 0. Nussbaum, Politic al Emotions, 11.
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C hap te r 3 Fi lli ng the Abse nce An e arlier version of this chapter was published as an article in Museum and Society 12, no. 2 ( July 2014). 1. James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2. Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity, trans. Sarah Clift (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 3. James Edward Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); James Edward Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); James Edward Young, The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York: Prestel- Verlag, 1994); Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst: University of Mas s a chu setts Press, 2003); Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). hings with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 4. J. L. Austin, How to Do T Press, 1962); Kerry Whigham, “Reading the Traces: Embodied Engagement with the Past at Three Former Nazi Concentration Camps,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 26, no. 2 (2019): 221–40. 5. Marcelo Brodsky, ed., Memory u nder Construction (Buenos Aires: La Marca Editora, 2005); Memoria Abierta, Memorias en la ciudad: Señales del terrorismo de estado en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2009). 6. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, “Introduction,” in Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 7. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 8. Nayanika Mookherjee, “ ‘Never Again’: Aesthetics of ‘Genocidal’ Cosmopolitanism and the Bangladesh Liberation War Museum,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, suppl. 1 (2011): S71–91. 9. Avril Alba, “Set in Stone? The Intergenerational and Institutional Transmission of Holocaust Memory,” in Remembering Genocide, ed. Nigel Eltringham and Pam Maclean (New York: Routledge, 2014), 92–111. 10. Pilar Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición: Los Campos de Concentración En Argentina (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2008), 100. 11. Vikki Bell and Mario Di Paolantonio, “The Haunted Nomos: Activist-A rtists and the (Im)Possible Politics of Memory in Transitional Argentina,” Cultural Politics 5, no. 2 (2009): 149–78. 12. Brodsky, Memory under Construction; Bell and Di Paolantonio, “The Haunted Nomos”; Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle, eds., The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 13. Edward S. Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 17–44. 14. Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” 39. 15. Alejandra Naftal, personal interview, digital recording, March 10, 2017. 16. D iana Taylor, “Trauma, Memoria y Per for m ance: Un Recorrido Por Villa Grimaldi Con Pedro Matta,” Emisférica 7, no. 2 (Winter 2010): n.p.; Diana Taylor, ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
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17. LaCapra, History and Memory a fter Auschwitz, 12. 18. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, “Annual Report” (Oświeçim, Poland, 2012), 23. 19. Rami K. Isaac et al., “Understanding Dutch Visitors’ Motivations to Concentration Camp Memorials,” Current Issues in Tourism 22, no. 7 (2019): 747–62. 2 0. Naftal, personal interview. 21. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization; Assmann, Shadows of Trauma. 2 2. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000); Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv. 2 3. Hamzah Muzaini et al., “Intimations of Postmodernity in Dark Tourism: The Fate of History at Fort Siloso, Singapore,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 5, no. 1 (2007): 28–45. 24. Auschwitz guide, personal interview, digital recording, December 4, 2013. 25. Auschwitz guide, personal interview. 26. Haracio González, “The Shadows of the Building: Construction and AntiConstruction,” in Memoria En Construcción: El Debate Sobre ESMA, ed. Marcelo Brodsky, trans. David William Foster (Buenos Aires: La Marca Editora, 2005), 245. 27. González, “The Shadows of the Building,” 245. 2 8. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 29. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture a fter the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 98. 30. Instituto Espacio para la Memoria, “Primary Document” (Buenos Aires: IEM, n.d.). 31. Instituto Espacio para la Memoria, “Primary Document.” 32. Alicja Białecka, personal interview, digital recording, December 4, 2013. 33. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 3 4. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, “Annual Report,” 2020. 35. Białecka, personal interview. 36. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amer ic as (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 37. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, “Annual Report,” 2019. 38. Young, The Art of Memory, 37. 39. Brodsky, Memory under Construction. 4 0. “La Ciudad cedió a Nación centros clandestinos de la dictadura,” Legislatura Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, May 8, 2014, https://w ww.legislatura.gov.a r/_ post _old.php? ver=3525; “Se aprobó la disolución del Instituto Espacio para la Memoria,” Notas Periodismo Popular, May 9, 2014, https://notasperiodismopopular.com.a r /2 014/05/09/se-aprobo-l a-d isolucion-del-i nstituto-e spacio-para-l a-memoria/. 41. Naftal, personal interview. 42. Naftal, personal interview. 43. Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (New York: Berg, 2007), 26. 4 4. Kaitlin M. Murphy, Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americ as (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 106. 45. Murphy, Mapping Memory, 107. 4 6. David Winner, “But Was This the Beautiful Game’s Ugliest Moment?,” Financial Times, June 21, 2008. 47. Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the L abors of Memory, trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-A nativia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 21. 4 8. Alejandra Naftal and Hernán Bisman, “Propuesta de intervención museográfica: Museo de Sitio Centro Clandestino de Detención, Tortura y Exterminion—E x ESMA” (Buenos Aires, n.d.).
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49. Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Per formance of Israeli National Identity (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008); Jack Santino, “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death,” in Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, ed. Jack Santino (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5–15; Whigham, “Reading the Traces.” 50. Eduardo Jozami, personal interview, digital recording, August 15, 2013. 51. Jack Kugelmass, “Why We Go to Poland: Holocaust Tourism as Secular Ritual,” in Young, The Art of Memory, 175–83. 52. Jozami, personal interview. 53. Memoria Abierta, Memorias en la ciudad, 67. 54. Instituto Espacio para la Memoria, La Otra Final: El Partido Por La Vida y Los Derechos Humanos (Buenos Aires: Anexo Memoria, 2008), 32. 55. Instituto Espacio para la Memoria, La Otra Final. 56. Instituto Espacio para la Memoria, La Otra Final, 32. 57. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 48. 58. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect. 59. Instituto Espacio para la Memoria, La Otra Final, 22. 6 0. Emily Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships: Staging Latina Resist ance through Urban Per for m ances of Pain,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32, no. 1 (2011): 102. 61. Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships,” 119. 62. Mihaela Mihai, Negative Emotions and Transitional Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 63. Taylor, ¡Presente!, 10. 6 4. Instituto Espacio para la Memoria, La Otra Final, 40. 65. Memoria Abierta, Memorias en la ciudad, 130. 66. “Denuncian nuevos ‘asados’ de funcionarios del Gobierno en la es ESMA,” La Nación, September 2, 2013, https://w ww.lanacion.com.ar/p olitica/d enuncian-indignacion-y -lagrimas-por-nuevos-asados-de-f uncionarios-en-la-ex-esma-n id1616295/. 67. “Denuncian nuevos ‘asados’ de funcionarios del Gobierno en la es ESMA.” 68. María Belén Etchenique, “Insólitos Argumento Para Defender Los Asados K En La ESMA: ‘Acá No Se Mató a Nadie,” Clarin, September 2, 2013, https://w ww.clarin .com/politica/i nsolito-a rgumento-defender-e sma-aca _0_ SJf EIcNov7l.html. 69. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3. 70. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 71. Mariano De Vedia, “Cabandié Defendió Los Asados En La Ex ESMA,” La Nacion, September 4, 2013, https://w ww.l anacion.com.a r/politica/cabandie-defendio-los -a sados-en-l a-ex-e sma-n id1616668/. 72. “Denuncian nuevos ‘asados’ de funcionarios del Gobierno en la es ESMA.” 73. Marvin Prosono, “Cross Purposes: The Conflict over Symbolic Territory between Poles and Jews at Auschwitz,” in The Continuing Agony: From Carmelite Convent to the Crosses at Auschwitz, ed. Alan Berger, Harry James Cargas, and Susan E. Nowak (Lanham, MD: University Press of Amer ica, 2004), 55–75. 74. More recently, Oświeçim has experienced growth, causing this trend to slow. 75. Cristina Maria Adriani and Jodey Russell Manning, “ ‘Negotiating with the Dead’: On the Past of Auschwitz and the Present of Oświeçim,” Psychology and Society 3, no. 1 (2010): 42–58. 76. Prosono, “Cross Purposes,” 66. 77. A ledia Assmann, “Re- Framing Memory: Between Individual and Collective Forms of Constructing the Past,” in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. K. Tilmans, F. Van Vree, and J. Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 44.
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78. Guido Indij, “Nota Del Editor,” in Memoria En Construcción: El Debate Sobre La ESMA (Buenos Aires: La Marca Editora, 2005), 43, author’s translation. 79. Quoted in Young, The Texture of Memory, 13. 8 0. Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición. 81. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 82. Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición, 147. 83. Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición. 8 4. Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición, 88, emphasis added. 85. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, “Annual Report,” 2012. 86. Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición, 155. 87. Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición, 159. 8 8. Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhe toric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 26.
C hap te r 4 E mbodie d Justi c e An earlier version of this chapter was published as an article in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (April 2016). 1. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 98. 2. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 55. 3. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 123–25. 4. Arendt, On Violence, 44. 5. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992). 6. Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994). 7. Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 8. Diana Taylor, ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 9. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2011. 10. Benedetta Calandra, La Memoria Ostinata: H.I.J.O.S., i Figli Dei Desaperecidos Argentini (Rome: Carrocci Editore, 2004), 51. 11. Calandra, La Memoria Ostinata. 12. Susana Kaiser, “Escraches: Demonstrations, Communication and Political Memory in Post-Dictatorial Argentina,” Media Culture Society 24 (2002): 499–516; Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Diego Benegas, “ ‘If There’s No Justice . . .’: Trauma and Identity in Post-Dictatorship Argentina,” Performance Research 16, no. 1 (2011): 20–30; Vincent Druliolle, “H.I.J.O.S. and the Spectacular Denunciation of Impunity: The Strugg le for Memory, Truth, and Justice and the (Re-) Construction of Democracy in Argentina,” Journal of H uman Rights 12, no. 2 (2013): 259–76; Cecelia Sosa, “Humour and the Descendants of the Disappeared: Countersigning Bloodline Affiliations in Post-Dictatorial Argentina,” Journal of Romance Studies 13, no. 3 (Winter 2013): 75–87; Cecelia Sosa, Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship: The Performances of Blood (Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2014); Francesca Lessa and Cara Levey, “From Blanket Impunity to Judicial Opening(s): H.I.J.O.S. and Memory Making in Postdictatorship Argentina (2005–2012),” Latin American Perspectives 42, no. 3 (March 2015): 207–25; Noa Vaisman, “Variations on Justice: Argentina’s Pre-and Post-Transitional Justice and the Justice to Come,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 82, no. 2 (2017): 366–88.
Notes to Pages 126–130
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13. Donatella Della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires; Charles Tilly and Lesley J. Wood, Social Movements: 1768–2008, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2009); Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). 14. Guillermo O’Donnell, Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democ ratization (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); Susan Eckstein, ed., Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Héctor Eleodoro Recalde, Historia de La Argentina (1810–2018): Desde La Revolución de Mayo Hasta La Presidencia de Mauricio Macri (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Aula Taller, 2020); Eric Hershberg and Fred Rosen, eds., Latin America after Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in the 21st Century? (New York: The New Press, 2006); Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle, eds., The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Mason W. Moseley, Protest State: The Rise of Everyday Contention in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Marcela A. Fuentes, Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin Amer ic a (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). 15. Kerry Whigham, “Filling the Absence: The Re-E mbodiment of Sites of Mass Atrocity and the Practices They Generate,” Museum and Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 88–103; Kerry Whigham, “Performing Prevention: Civil Society, Perform ance Studies, and the Role of Public Activism in Genocide Prevention,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Sheri P. Rosenberg, Tibi Galis, and Alex Zucker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 321–51. 16. Tibi Galis, “Keeping the Wolves at Bay: Transitional Justice and Reform in Argentina, South Africa, and Hungary” (PhD diss., Clark University, 2015); Pablo de Greiff, “A Conversation with Pablo de Greiff,” presentation, Transitional Justice, Binghamton University, September 8, 2020. uman Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago 17. Hannah Arendt, The H Press, 1998). 18. Arendt, On Violence. 19. Quoted in Calandra, La Memoria Ostinata, 150. All translations are the author’s own, u nless otherw ise noted. 2 0. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, O thers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 21. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 15. 2 2. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 17. 2 3. Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (London: Sage, 2012). 24. Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 20. 25. Kaiser, “Escraches,” 511. 26. Benegas, “ ‘If T here’s No Justice . . . ,’ ” 21. 27. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 20. 2 8. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 11. 29. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 31. 3 0. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 9. 31. Ana Tello, personal interview, digital recording, August 8, 2013; Sofia Caravelos, personal interview, digital recording, July 26, 2013. 32. Colectivo Situaciones, “Documento de La Comisión de Escrache de H.I.J.O.S. Noviembre de 2001,” in Genocida En El Barrio: Mesa de Escrache Popular (Buenos Aires: Responsabilidad Editorial, 2002), n.p. 33. Calandra, La Memoria Ostinata, 149. 34. Ignacio Lescano and Ronith Gitelman, H.I.J.O.S.: Mesa de Escrache Popular, 2003. 35. Federico Zuckerfeld, personal interview, digital recording, August 14, 2013.
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36. Pilar Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición: Los Campos de Concentración En Argentina (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2008), 88, original emphasis. 37. James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary P eople Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 38. Brian Whitener, “Introduction,” in Genocide in the Neighborhood (Oakland, CA: Chainlinks, 2009), 11–32. 39. Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza, “Introduction to Colectivo Situaciones,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 5, no. 4 (2005): 597. 4 0. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966). 41. O’Donnell, Counterpoints. 42. O’Donnell, Counterpoints. 43. O’Donnell, Counterpoints. 4 4. Arendt, The Human Condition, 188. 45. Arendt, The Human Condition, 190. 4 6. I return to this notion of amplification in the next chapter. 47. H.I.J.O.S.: Mesa de Escrache. 4 8. Jennifer Adair, “Popular Politics, the Catholic Church, and the Making of Argentina’s Transition to Democracy, 1978–1983,” in Making Citizens in Argentina, ed. Benjamin Bryce and David M. K. Sheinin (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 161–79. 49. Colectivo Situaciones, “Discurso de H.I.J.O.S. En El Escrache de Weber,” in Genocida En El Barrio. 50. “Never Again,” which is both the title of the report of Argentina’s truth commission and a commonly used mantra across cultural contexts vowing a commitment to preventing f uture occurrences of genocide and mass atrocity. 51. Colectivo Situaciones, “Hipotesis Para La Discusión,” in Genocida En El Barrio. uman Condition, 199. 52. Arendt, The H 53. Grupo de Arte Callejero, GAC. Pensamientos, Prácticas, Acciones (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2009), 81. 54. Kerry Whigham, “Memory Encroachments and Re-Plotting the Past: Cartographies of Violence and Memory in Post-Atrocity Argentina, Germany, and the United States,” in Historical Dialogue and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities, ed. Elazar Barkan, Constantin Goschler, and James Waller (New York: Routledge, 2020), 277–303. 55. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2008), 173. 56. The word colorado refers literally to something red in color, but is also used to refer to something connected with communism. Here, Etcétera . . . m akes use of both of t hese meanings. 57. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985). 58. Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 31. 59. Arendt, The H uman Condition, 200. 6 0. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 61. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. 62. Julián Axat, “A Desobediência Biopoética e o Direito de Resistência: Entrevista Com Julián Axat,” Prisma Jurídico 9, no. 2 (2010): 246. 63. Julián Axat, “Las Madres como hecho poético,” Aromito de José María Pallaoro (blog), August 10, 2012, http://a romitorevista.blogspot.com/2 012/0 8/julian-a xat-l as -m adres-como-hecho.html. 6 4. Axat, “Las Madres como hecho poético.” 65. Julián Axat, “El Hijo y El Archivo,” presented at Exilio y Dictadura, Universidad de Sao Pablo USP, June 2010, 252.
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66. Julián Axat, personal interview, digital recording, August 8, 2013. 67. Axat, personal interview. 68. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Per formance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2. 69. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2. 70. Quoted in Roach, Cities of the Dead, 6. 71. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 6. 72. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10, emphasis added. 73. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10. 74. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2. 75. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2. 76. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. 77. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 165. 78. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 168. 79. Taty Almeida, personal interview, digital recording, July 17, 2013. 8 0. Whitener, “Introduction.” 81. Colectivo Situaciones, Genocida En El Barrio. 82. Colectivo Situaciones, “Conversación Con La Mesa de Escrache,” in Genocida En El Barrio. 83. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 8 4. Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 1–2. 85. J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 86. Kai Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 179.
C hap te r 5 O cc upy i ng Spac e, Ampli fy i ng Af f e c t 1. Troy R. Johnson, We Hold the Rock: The Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, 1969 to 1971 (San Francisco: Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, 1997), 9. 2. Adam Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!: The Indian Occupation of 1969–1971 (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1992), 18. 3. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 18. 4. Johnson, We Hold the Rock. 5. Johnson, We Hold the Rock, 11. 6. Max Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization,” in Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968 [1947]), 48–65. 7. Troy R. Johnson, Alcatraz: Indian Land Forever (Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of California, 1994); Troy R. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-D etermination and the Rise of Indian Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Johnson, We Hold the Rock; Alvin M. Josephy Jr., Joane Nagel, and Troy R. Johnson, eds., Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Troy R. Johnson, Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne, eds., American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Vine Deloria Jr., “Alcatraz, Activism, and Accommodation,” American Indian Cultural and Research Journal 18 (1994): 25–32; Vine Deloria Jr., “This Country Was a Lot Better Off When the Indians Were R unning It,” in Josephy, Nagel, and Johnson, Red Power, 28–38; Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: Free Press, 1996); Dennis Banks, Russel Means, and
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Notes to Pages 153–164
Janet McCloud, “The Activist Legacy of Red Power,” in Josephy, Nagel, and Johnson, Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom, 60–64; Richard DeLuca, “ ‘We Hold the Rock!’: The Indian Attempt to Reclaim Alcatraz Island,” California History 61, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 2–22; Bradley G. Shreve, Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011); Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002); Judith Nies, Native American History: A Chronology of a Culture’s Vast Achievements and Their Links to World Events (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996). 8. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!; Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island; Johnson, Nagel, and Champagne, American Indian Activism. 9. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 10. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 11. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!; DeLuca, “ ‘We Hold the Rock!’ ”; Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island; Johnson, We Hold the Rock. 12. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island; Johnson, We Hold the Rock. 13. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 78. 14. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 15. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 16. Quoted in Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 173. 17. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island; Johnson, We Hold the Rock. 18. Johnson, We Hold the Rock. 19. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 2 0. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 21. Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983). 2 2. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 44–47. 2 3. Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (London: Sage, 2012), 12. 24. Fortunate Ea g le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 44–45. 25. DeLuca, “ ‘We Hold the Rock!’ ” 26. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 27. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 45. 2 8. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 45–46. 29. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 12. 3 0. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and T here of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 3. 31. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 46–47. 32. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966). 33. T hese five tribes w ere known as the “five civilized tribes,” b ecause they had assimilated so successfully into European-A merican cultural practices. Despite the fact that most could read or speak Eng lish, dressed in Euro-A merican clothing, and lived in houses identical to t hose of their white American neighbors, racist ideology prevented most Americans from seeing them as “normal” members of society. 3 4. A group of Cherokee Indians, for instance, evaded capture and hid in the mountains of North Carolina. To this day the Cherokee Nation is split, with two bands centered in Oklahoma and the other in North Carolina. 35. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 2001). 36. H arvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, The State of the Native Nations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.
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37. David Reed Miller, “Definitional Violence and Plains Indian Reservation Life: Ongoing Challenges to Survival,” in Violence, Resistance, and Survival in the Ameri cas: Native Americans and the Legacy of Conquest, ed. William B. Taylor and Franklin Pease G.Y. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 226–48. 38. Miller, “Definitional Violence and Plains Indian Reservation Life,” 227. 39. H arvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, The State of the Native Nations. 4 0. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 41. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 55. 42. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 474. 43. H arvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, The State of the Native Nations, 5. 4 4. Some other important examples of co-embodied practices of occupation include the 1943 Rosenstrasse protest in Berlin, the lunch-counter sit-ins of the American Civil Rights Movement, and the more recent occupations of the Occupy Wall Street movement, among others. 45. Steve Pile, “Introduction: Opposition, Political Identities, and Spaces of Resis tance,” in Geographies of Resistance, ed. Steve Pile and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1997), 1–32. 4 6. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 466. 47. H arvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, The State of the Native Nations. 4 8. While conditions on reservations have improved since the 1970s, Indians living on reservations still, by and large, experience lower standards of living than other Americans. 49. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 50. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly M atters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 51. Pile, “Introduction,” 2–3. 52. Pile, “Introduction,” 17. 53. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 43. 54. Quoted in Johnson, We Hold the Rock, 22. 55. Quoted in Johnson, We Hold the Rock, 27. 56. Quoted in Johnson, We Hold the Rock, 27. 57. Quoted in Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 122. 58. In the quotation, Foster inaccurately attributes the idea for the name Indians of All Tribes to John Trudell, which could not have been true. The name was used to sign the proclamation, which was released on the first attempt at occupying Alcatraz. Trudell did not become involved u ntil several days into the occupation of November 20, 1969. Still, the sentiment of the quote speaks to something larger that overshadows this factual error. 59. Lenny Foster, “Alcatraz Is Not an Island,” in Johnson, Nagel, and Champagne, American Indian Activism, 138. 6 0. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 61. Reclaiming Native Truth: A Project to Dispel America’s Myths and Misconceptions, “Research Findings: Compilation of All Research” (Denver, CO: First Nations Development Institute, June 2018), https://r nt.fi rstnations.org/w p-content /uploads/2 018/0 6/FullFindingsReport-screen.pdf. 62. Reclaiming Native Truth, “Research Findings,” 53. 63. Reclaiming Native Truth, “Research Findings,” 8. 6 4. Reclaiming Native Truth, “Research Findings,” 20. 65. David Treuer, Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey through Reservation Life (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2012), 20.
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Notes to Pages 171–179
6 6. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 67. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 8. 68. James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 69. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 70. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 3. 71. A nna Gibbs, “Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect,” Australian Humanities Review 24 (December 2001): n.p. 72. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 23. 73. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 74. Mihaela Mihai, Negative Emotions and Transitional Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 75. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 22. 76. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 32. 77. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 201, original emphasis. 78. William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 79. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, 42. 8 0. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, 42. 81. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, 42. 82. J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 83. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2004); Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). 8 4. Quoted in Johnson, We Hold the Rock, 5, emphasis added. 85. Lenny Foster, “Alcatraz Is Not an Island,” in Johnson, Nagel, and Champagne, American Indian Activism, 136–39. 86. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 72. 87. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 84. 8 8. Quoted in Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 70. 89. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 9 0. Quoted in Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 102. 91. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 93. 92. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 93. 93. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 111. 94. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 111. 95. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 94, original emphasis. 96. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 94. 97. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island; Johnson, We Hold the Rock. 98. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!. 99. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 100. Johnson, We Hold the Rock. 101. DeLuca, “ ‘We Hold the Rock!’ ”; Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 102. Quoted in Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 101. 103. DeLuca, “ ‘We Hold the Rock!’ ” 104. DeLuca “ ‘We Hold the Rock!’ ”; Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 105. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression.
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106. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 107. DeLuca, “ ‘We Hold the Rock!,’ ” 16. 108. DeLuca, “ ‘We Hold the Rock!’ ”; Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 98. 109. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 94. 110. Max Weber, “The Pure Types of Legitimate Authority,” in Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution Building, 47. 111. Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization,” 48. 112. Max Weber, “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” in Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution Building, 18–27. 113. Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization,” 50. 114. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1947), 363. 115. Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization.” 116. Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization,” 60. 117. Quoted in Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 129. 118. Johnson, We Hold the Rock, 9. 119. Arendt, On Violence, 52, emphasis added. 120. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 121. Arendt, On Violence, 44, original emphasis. 122. Arendt, On Violence. 123. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 147. 124. Josephy, Nagel, and Johnson, Red Power. 125. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 126. Fortunate Eag le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz! 127. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 128. R ichard Nixon, “Special Message on Indian Affairs,” Congressional address, July 8, 1970. 129. Nixon, “Special Message on Indian Affairs.” 130. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 131. Josephy, Nagel, and Johnson, Red Power. 132. Janice R. Kelly and Jennifer R. Spoor, “Affective Influence in Groups,” in Affect in Social Thinking and Behavior, ed. Joseph P. Forgas (New York: Psychology Press, 2006), 311–25. 133. Quoted in “The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indians of All Tribes, 1969-1971,” eds. Josephy, Nagel, and Johnson, Red Power, 39. 134. Quoted in “The Occupation of Alcatraz Island,” eds. Josephy, Nagel, and Johnson, Red Power, 40. 135. Bureau of Indian Affairs, “2013 American Indian Population and L abor Force Report,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary, Office of the Assistant Secretary-I ndian Affairs, January 16, 2014. 136. M ark Walker, “Pandemic Highlights Deep-Rooted Problems in Indian Health Ser v ice,” New York Times, May 21, 2021. 137. Fortunate Ea g le, Alcatraz! Alcatraz!, 151.
C onc lu si on 1. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 2. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37. 3. Kerry Whigham, “Performing Prevention: Civil Society, Perform ance Studies, and the Role of Public Activism in Genocide Prevention,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Sheri P. Rosenberg, Tibi Galis, and Alex Zucker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 321–51.
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Inde x
abstract art, 46, 68, 70 Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grand mothers of Plaza de Mayo), 87, 107, 147 Adorno, Theodor, 68 affect, 20; affective economies, 171–172; affective environments, 33–34, 36, 41, 76, 135, 150, 183, 195; affective ruts, 41, 128; affective transmission (and amplification), 23, 25, 30, 37, 153, 168, 170–183; “the affective turn,” 25, 79; definitions and theories of, 25–30; as a means to understand genocidal violence, 8–20; as the tool through which violence performs upon bodies and bodies respond, 21, 25 Afg hanistan, 201 Ahmed, Sara, 27; on directionality of emotions, 29–30; on festishizing wounds/victimhood, 173–174; model of, of affective economies, 171–172; on social norms, 128–129 Alba, Avril, 85 Alcatraz Island, occupation of, 14, 23, 151–153, 183–187, 199; factionalism during, 178–179; overview of, 153–156; performativity of, 165–170; and the proclamation, 156–165; role of affect in, and its amplification, 170–183 Alexander, Jeffrey, 17 Alfonsín, Raul, 123–124 Almeida, Taty, 112, 147 Althusser, Louis, 190 American Indian Foundation, 152
American Indian Movement (AIM), 184. See also Red Power movement American Indians: ambivalence toward, on the part of non-Indigenous Americans, 171; in boarding schools designed for re-education and assimilation, 163; and broken promises, 2, 177–178; and casino gambling, 171, 187; and the Dawes Act, 163; and the “five civilized tribes,” 224n33; forced removal and extermination of by the United States government, 2, 4, 11, 21, 23, 162–165, 166–167, 170; and the Indian Reorg an izat ion Act, 163–164; inequities (health, economic, social) faced by, 159–160, 167, 185, 186–187, 225n48; pride and dignity among, 185–186; protests and occupations by, 184; self-r ule by, 185; teenage suicide among, 15; as a term for Indigenous people, 207n4; and the “termination” policy, 164, 184–185; transformation of relationship of, with the United States, 176, 182, 184, 186–187. See also Alcatraz Island, occupation of; Indians of All Tribes; Red Power movement; reservations, American Indian; Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, anti-DAPL demonstrations at; and specific tribes/ nations anocracies, 198 antisemitism, 4–5, 40, 54, 56, 57. See also Jews; Europea n; Nazi Germany Apache, 169 Appadurai, Arjun, 192
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Index
Archambault, Dave, II, 2 Arendt, Hannah: on natality, 132–133, 200; on power emerging from the action of a group of beings working in concert, 23, 38, 123, 127, 131–132, 135–136, 142, 181, 183, 191–192, 193, 196; on the processual nature of genocide, 9; on the space of appearance, 135–136, 142, 183–184; on terror, 164, 166; on totalitarianism, 37, 162; on the ubiquity of the informer, 122; on worldlessness or the desert, 23, 193, 194–195 Argentina, 189; dictatorship in, 21, 22–23, 34, 83–117, 122; and the Ni Una Menos movement, 202; Supreme Court of, 148; t rials of perpetrators of the dictatorship in, 93–94, 96, 99–100, 101, 102, 123–124, 130, 135, 148, 150, 181, 199. See also Buenos Aires; escraches; Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA); H.I.J.O.S. Argentine Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, 108 Aristotle, 141–142 Armenia, 201 Armenian genocide, 23–24, 201 Asociación de Ex-Detenidos Desaparecidos (AEDD), 113, 114 Asociación de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 107 Assmann, Aleida, 84, 85, 116 atomization of populations, as a goal of totalitarian regimes, 37, 38, 39, 107, 122–123, 132, 162, 164–165, 191, 194; embodied practices as a way of overcoming, 105, 168–170, 173, 191 atrocity crimes, legal definition of, 9, 208n18 Atrocity Forecasting Project (Australia National University), 6 Auschwitz-Birkenau (concentration camp), 18, 21, 68, 88, 107, 113, 120; disputes over, 114–116
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 33, 90, 91, 94–96, 98–99, 106, 119, 120 Austin, J. L., 13 Australia, 9 Axat, Julián, 142–145, 147 Azerbaijan, 201 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 146 Barbalet, J. M., 38 Battle of Berlin, 48, 50, 59, 64 Baum, Herbert, 54, 56, 57, 58, 70 Bauman, Zygmunt, 53 Bebelplatz memorial. See Bibliothek Beck, Ulrich, 53 Benegas, Diego, 129 Benjamin, Walter, 67, 73, 90 Berlant, Lauren, 27, 177; on cruel optimism, 178, 180; on the intimate public sphere, 173 Berlin, 21, 22; Rosenstrasse protest in, 225n44; self-g uided walking tour through, to examine Holocaust memorials, 43–86. See also East Berlin; West Berlin; and specific monuments and landmarks Berlin Wall, 34, 47, 50, 64, 76 Bhaba, Homi K., 145 Białecka, Alicja, 94, 95 Bibliothek (Ullman), 67–74 biopoetics, 143–144, 147, 150 Birle, Peter, 44 Bisman, Hernán, 97 Black Americans: enslavement of, 11, 35, 189, 198, 202; and Jim Crow, 35; police violence against, 35, 190; racial segregation protests by, 165–166; and the wealth gap, 198. See also Black Power movement; Civil Rights Movement Blackfoot, 168, 169 Black Lives M atter, 202 Black Power movement, 175 Blair, Carole, 120 Bloch, Ernst, 160 Boal, Augusto, 141–142 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 117, 199
Index
Bourdieu, Pierre, 129 Boyer, LaNada, 169 Brecht, Bertolt, 67, 73, 129 Brennan, Teresa, 36, 94, 172 Bretal, María Laura, 113 Brodsky, Marcelo, 97 Brown, Wendy, 173 Browning, Christopher, 40 Buchenwald (concentration camp), 55 Buenos Aires, 21, 44; GAC street signs in, 137–138; memory sites in, 106; Plaza de Mayo, 123, 144, 166; slums (villas miserias) of, 34, 35, 134. See also escraches; Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 158, 164, 166, 185, 186 Cabandié, Juan, 114 Calveiro, Pilar, 86, 117, 118, 120, 130 Cambodia, 8–9, 84, 117 Canada, 9 Capone, Al, 151, 167 carnival, 145, 146 Casey, Edward S., 79, 87–88 Casino de Oficiales (Officers’ Quarters, ESMA). See Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti (Haroldo Conti Cultural Center of Memory). See Conti, el charisma, 180–181 Cherokee, 162–163, 182, 188–189, 224n34 Chickasaw, 162–163 Chile, 88, 105 China, 201, 202 Chippewa, 168, 186 Choctaw, 162–163 circles of concern, 80–81 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 181 Civil Rights Movement (U.S.), 14, 175, 181, 182, 225n44 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 25, 79 Club Atlético (detention center in Argentina), 88, 112
247
co-embodied practices, 21–23, 41–42, 90, 191, 195; of curation and visitation, 22, 85–86, 127; failure of, 189; of memorialization, 22, 46, 195; of occupation, 23, 153, 156, 157, 160, 165–166, 168, 170, 175, 196, 225n44; and the space of appearance, 135–136, 183–184; temporality of, 180–182; of trans-action, 23, 127–128, 133, 134, 136, 139, 149, 150, 188, 196; and the transduction of resonant violence, 8, 20, 21–22, 23, 24, 38–39, 42, 46, 80, 84, 87, 90, 106, 108, 111–112, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 136, 153, 156, 170, 172, 173, 180, 182, 183, 187, 188, 191, 194–195, 196, 199, 201. See also escraches; H.I.J.O.S.; Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Cold War, 34, 50, 52, 55, 134 Colectivo Situaciones, 131, 134–135 collective memory. See memory: collective collective trauma. See trauma: psychoanalytic theories of Colombia, 201 Comisión Arte y Política (Art and Politics Committee). See H.I.J.O.S. Comisión Escrache. See H.I.J.O.S. Comisión Identidad (Identity Committee). See H.I.J.O.S. Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, or CONADEP), 123 communists/communism, 34, 43, 54–58,61, 66, 75 concentration, torture, and death camps, 22, 32, 86, 88, 98, 195; in Argentina, 84–85, 92, 95, 96, 102, 119–120, 139, 195; in Chile, 88; function and role of, 117–121; Nazi, 4–5, 33, 55, 59, 65, 66, 75, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 94, 95, 96, 99, 104–105, 114–116, 119, 195; survivors of, and regaining agency, 90. See also specific camps condena social. See social sentence
248
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Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, 40 Connerton, Paul, 14 Connolly, William E., 174–175 Conrad, Sebastian, 85 Conti, el. See Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) COVID-19, 186–187, 202 Creedence Clearwater Revival, 154 crimes against humanity. See mass atrocities, definition of Csordas, Thomas, 12 Cuerpo Quebrado (Broken Body), 105 Custer, George Armstrong, 162 Cvetkovich, Ann, 5–6, 79, 109 Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), 1–3, 4, 9, 15, 19, 37–38, 189–190 Daughtry, J. Martin, 30–32, 35–36, 175 Dawes Act, 163 “death flights,” 87, 113, 137, 138 de Certeau, Michel, 190 Defense Appropriations Act (2009), 2 Deganawidah- Quetzalcoatl University, 184 de Greiff, Pablo, 10 Dekel, Irit, 78 Deleuze, Gilles, 26, 28 DeLuca, Richard, 179 Democ ratic Party, 202 Democ ratic Republic of Congo, 198–199, 201 desaparecidos. See disappeared Dickinson, Greg, 120 dictatorships: and atomization of populations, 37, 38, 39, 107, 122–123, 132, 162, 164–165, 191, 194; and the binarization of society into good and evil and legitimization of violence, 120; in Latin America, 8–9, 84, 132, 143; neoliberal economic policies of, 134–135. See also specific countries disabled (as victims of Holocaust), 43, 64, 75 disappeared (people who were taken, tortured, and killed by the military
dictatorship in Argentina), 83, 86, 87, 96, 105, 109, 113, 114, 117, 118, 122, 143; images of, 89, 108; and the 1978 World Cup, 102, 108; pregnant women among, 87, 138, 139. See also “death flights”; Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA); H.I.J.O.S.; Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo; otra final, La: El partido por la vida y los derechos humanos Donocik, Luis, 126, 130 Early Warning Project (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), 6, 197 East Berlin, 54, 57, 58 East Germany, 34, 52, 54–58, 59, 60, 64, 65. See also East Berlin Egypt, ancient, 50 Einstein, Albert, 67, 73 Eisenman, Peter, 74, 76–77, 78, 79, 81 Ekman, Paul, 27 Eliot, T. S., 184 El Salvador, 201 embodied practices, 3, 12–14, 19–20. See also affect; co-embodied practices emotion. See affect Endlich, Stefanie, 65, 76 Energy Transfer Partners, 1, 37 epigenet ics, 36 Erikson, Kai, 150 Erlmann, Veit, 36 escraches, 23, 124–150, 165; decision of when and how to end, 148, 181, 196, 199 Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), 22, 83–86, 118–121, 195–196; context and background of, 86–9; el Conti at, 105–107, 112, 114, 120; cultural events at, 105–107; disputes over, 113–117; embodied memorializations at, 104–112; first phase of, 91–97; Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA at, , 88, 89, 97–104, 105; National Archive of Memory at, 107–108; Officers’ Quarters at, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94, 97, 105, 113, 119, 195; Salón
Index
Dorado at, 101–102; second phase of, 97–104 ESMA. See Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada Etcétera . . . (artistic collective), 126, 138–142, 222n56 ethnic cleansing, 9, 163, 188 Europe: claims of, to the Americas, 158; colonists/migrants from, 9, 85, 160; Eastern, communism in, 10, 34, 52; far-r ight nationalism in, 5; student protests in, 175. See also Cold War; Jews, Europea n; World War I; World War II; and specific cities and countries Fair Housing Act of 1968, 181 fascism, 48, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60, 70, 73; Jewish victims of Holocaust mischaracterized as resist ance fighters against, 7, 34, 55–56, 57, 65 Faurisson, Robert, 69 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 179 Fein, Helen, 197 Felman, Shoshana, 157 felt unfelt, 32–33, 34, 35, 37, 149, 175, 190 “Final Solution,” 5. See also Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust First Nations Development Institute, 170–171 First World War. See World War I Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 140 Floyd, George, 202 Foley, Malcolm, 90 Fortunate Eag le, Adam, 156; account of the Alcatraz occupation by, 152, 154, 157, 159, 161, 168, 176, 184, 187 Foster, Lenny, 170, 176, 186, 228n58 Foucault, Michel, 41, 143, 190 Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 78 Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes (United Nations), 6, 197 France, 44, 99 Frederick Wilhelm II of Prussia, 47 Freud, Sigmund, 15–16, 80
249
genocide: and the abhorrence of diversity, 192; affective force of, 29, 31–42; covering up of, 10; criminal prosecutions of perpetrators of, 34, 93–94, 96, 99–100, 101, 102, 123–124, 130, 135, 148, 150, 181, 199; definition of, 8–9; enduring effects of, 19; and identity groups, 8, 10, 13, 198 (see also specific identity groups); and memory studies, 14–17; and perpetrators, bystanders, resisters, and collaborators, 6, 18–19, 33, 39, 193; prevention of, and risk assessment models, 6–7, 197–199; as a process, 9–10, 17; and psychoanalytic models of trauma, 15–20; recovery from, 10–11; tendency to delimit, 11; understanding through a memory studies lens, 14–19; understanding through a perform ance studies lens, 12–14. See also genocide studies; transitional justice genocide studies, 8–11, 14, 17, 19, 21, 39 geographies of domination, 166–168 German Democ ratic Republic (GDR). See East Germany German People’s Day of Mourning, 60 Germany, 20–21, 189; antisemitism in, 4; and the genocide of the Herero and Nama of Southwest Africa, 23. See also Berlin; Berlin Wall; East Germany; Nazi Germany; West Germany; World War II Gibbs, Anna, 172–173 Goebbels, Joseph, 54 Goffman, Erving, 11 Goldsmith, B. E., 197 González, Horacio, 92 Goshute, 169 Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. See Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo Gregory, Dick, 154 Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC), 130, 137–138, 144 Guattari, Félix, 26, 28 Gutman, Yifat, 15
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Halbwachs, Maurice, 14 Harff, Barbara, 7, 197 Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, 163–164, 165 Herbert Baum Memorial Stone, 54–58, 64 Herbón, Alicia, 108 Hijas e Hijos del Exilio (Daughters and Sons of Exile), 109 H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos e hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio, or Sons and D aughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence), 22–23, 107, 113, 124–150, 165, 196, 199; committees of, 4. See also escraches H.I.J.O.S.: Mesa de Escrache, 130 Hilberg, Raul, 9 Hirsch, Marianne, 93 Hirschman, Albert, 132 Hitler, Adolf, 4–5, 34, 42, 52, 73, 189 Holdren, Nate, 131 Holocaust, 4–5, 7–8, 13, 20–21, 39, 40, 115, 195; memorials dedicated to, in Berlin, 22, 43–46, 53–86; mischaracterization of victims of, 7, 34, 55–56, 57, 65; survivors of, 5, 7–8, 18, 65, 90, 96; universalization of discourse about, 113–114. See also concentration, torture, and death camps: Nazi; Nazi Germany Holocaust Memorial. See Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe homosexuals: and debate over Holocaust Memorial, 75; outlawed in Russia, 201; as victims of Holocaust, 34, 43, 63, 64 Honduras, 201 Hong Kong, 202 Hunt, Lamar, 152 Huyssen, Andreas, 20–21, 43 impunity. See reconciliation and impunity, for perpetrators of genocide Indian Removal Act of 1830, 162, 167 Indian Reorg a n iz at ion Act (IRA), 163–164
Indians. See American Indians Indians of All Tribes, 151, 165, 168–169, 170, 179, 181, 225n58. See also Proclamation of the Indians of All Tribes Indigenous Americans. See American Indians Indigenous Tribes of the Black Hills of South Dakota, 37 Indij, Guido, 116–117 Instituto Espacio para la Memoria y para la Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (IEM), 91, 97, 108; website for, 93–94, 95, 96, 108, 119 Inter-A merican Commission of Human Rights, 89 International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), 10 Iroquois, 168 Israel, 9; Holocaust memorial museum of, 74 Jäckel, Eberhard, 74 Jackson, Andrew, 189 Jackson State (College) killings, 155 Jehovah’s Witnesses (as victims of Holocaust), 34, 43, 64 Jelin, Elizabeth, 104 Jewish Museum (Berlin), 71 Jews, Europea n: f uture security of, 115; mischaracterization of, as “anti-f ascist fighters,” 7, 55–56; pograms against, 5, 7. See also antisemitism; Holocaust Johnson, Troy R., 152, 177, 179, 182, 183 Jordan, Jennifer, 44, 56 Jozami, Eduardo, 105–106 Juicios a las Juntas ( Junta Trials), 124 Kaiser, Susana, 129 Kapchan, Deborah, 30, 32, 39 Kaplan, Marion A., 5 Kashmir, 201 Kelly, George “Machine Gun,” 167 Kelly, Janice R., 186
Index
Kent State (University) killings, 155 Kerpel-Fronius, Adam, 78 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 181 Kirchner, Nestor, 87, 91, 102, 148 Klein, Emily, 110 Kohl, Helmut, 60–61, 62, 65 Kollwitz, Käthe, 62 Koselleck, Reinhart, 49 Kugelmass, Jack, 106 Kusso, 188 LaCapra, Dominick, 80, 90 Ladd, Brian, 65, 66, 73, 74 Lakota-Sioux, 151–152 Landsberg, Alison, 92–93 Lang, Jack, 43 Latin America: concentration camps in, 117; genocidal dictatorships in, 8–9, 84, 132; immigration in, 34; political protests in, 126, 175; transitional justice in, 10. See also specific Latin American countries Leighton, Elliott, 152 Lemkin, Raphael, 8–9, 163 Lenape, 158, 188 Lennon, John, 90 Lerner, Melvin J., 40 Levi, Primo, 18 Ley de Obediencia Debida (Law of Due Obedience), 124, 148 Ley de Punto Final (Law of Full Stop), 124, 133, 148 Libeskind, Daniel, 71 lieux de mémoire (places of memory), 44–45 Livermore, Earl, 169 Lyon, M. L., 38 Lyotard, Jean-François, 53, 69 Madres de Plaza de Mayo. See Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Madres de Plaze de Mayo-Linea Fundadora, 107, 112, 147 Maia, Circe, 108, 111–112 Manifest Destiny, 163 Mankiller, Wilma, 182 Martín-Baró, Ignacio, 16
251
Marx, Karl, 67, 73 mass atrocities, definition of, 9. See also genocide Massumi, Brian, 26–29 Mayo, James M. , 49 Mehl-Art (Flour Art; Schwichtenberg), 71–74 Memorial and Information Point for the Victims of National Socialist “Euthanasia” Killings, 75 memorialization, 22; embodied, 104–112; and performativity of sites in post-Holocaust Berlin, 34, 43–86; spontaneous acts of, 104–105. See also co-embodied practices: of memorialization Memorial of the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered u nder the National Socialist Regime, 75 Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted u nder the National Socialist Regime, 75 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin), 53, 74–82, 195, 199 Memorias en la ciudad, 106 memory: activism, 15, 23; body, 79; collective, 3, 14, 84, 96–97; cosmopolitan, 14; multidirectionality of, 14, 85, 114; prosthetic, 14, 92–93; public, 87–88, 104; spaces and sites of, 22, 44–46, 84–86, 120, 127, 195–196 (see also specific spaces, sites, and memorials); transmission of, 14, 15, 36–37, 147–148; traumatic, 14, 15–16, 17, 19, 68, 88, 147. See also lieux de mémoire; memorialization; memory studies; milieux de mémoire memory studies, 14–17, 19, 20, 21, 43–44, 84 Menem, Carlos, 87, 124 Mesa de Escrache Popular, 148–149, 150 Mexico, 201 milieux de mémoire (environments of memory), 44–45 Miller, David Reed, 164 Minuit, Peter, 158
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Mookherjee, Nayanika, 85 More, Thomas, 160 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 111, 112, 123–124, 143, 147–148; branches of, 107; embodied poetics of, 144; formation of, 123; site of weekly marches of, 123, 128, 166 Mother with Her Dead Son (Kollwitz), 62 Muñoz, José Esteban, 160, 200 Murphy, Kaitlin M., 99, 102 Muscogee (Creek), 162–163, 188, 189 Museo Sitio de Memoria ESMA. See Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) Musil, Robert, 117 Myanmar, 201 Naftal, Alejandra, 88, 90, 97, 98, 102 Namibia, 23 National Archive of Memory. See Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) National Conference on Indian Education, 176 nationalism, 5, 192 National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny, 58–67 National Socialism/National Socialist party (Nazis), 4–5, 34, 43, 65, 75; book burning by, 67–73; ideology of, 18–19, 39, 207n8; resist ance to, 54–58. See also Holocaust; Nazi Germany Native Americans. See American Indians Navajo, 167, 168, 170, 184 Nazi Germany: book burning in, 67–73; history of, 4–5; military heroes of, 60; and monumentality, 73; processes in, that converted ordinary individuals into perpetrators of genocide, 39–42, 62; punishment of war criminals from, 7, 10; resist ance in, 54–58; Soviet liberation of, by Soviets, 50, 66, 88. See also concentration, torture, and death camps: Nazi; Holocaust; National Socialism/National Socialist party (Nazis)
neoliberal capitalism, 21, 34, 124, 134, 135, 174, 192 Neue Wache. See National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny New Zealand, 9 Ni Una Menos movement, 202 Nixon, Richard M., 154, 155, 158, 184–185 Nora, Pierre, 44–45 Nunca Más (Argentine truth commission), 105 Nuremberg laws, 5 Nuremberg Trials, 34 Nussbaum, Martha C., 80–81 Oakes, Anne, 179 Oakes, Richard, 151, 153–154, 156, 157, 159, 177, 179 Oakes, Yvonne, 179 Obama, Barack, 2–3, 4 Occupy Wall Street, 225n44 O’Donnell, Guillermo, 132 Officers’ Quarters. See Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) Ohlone, 167 Ojibwe, 171 Olsson, Juan Pablo, 109–110 otra final, La: El partido por la vida y los derechos humanos (The Other Final: The Match for Life and Human Rights), 108–109, 110, 113 “Otra Voz Canta” (“Another Voice Sings”), 108, 111–112 Ott, Brian L., 120 Ottoman Empire, 23–24 Pacifica Foundation, 177 Paiute-Pomo, 169 Palestine, 201 Patterson, Bradley H., 155 Pellegrini, Ann, 28, 30 Peltier, Leonard, 186 percepticide. See Taylor, Diana: on percepticide perform ance studies, 3, 11–14, 19–20, 21 performative utterance, 13
Index
peripatetic method, 46 perpetration-i nduced traumatic stress (PITS), 18 Pickford, Henry W., 65, 66 Pile, Steve, 166, 168 places-of-sanctuary and places-of- trauma, 88 pogroms, 5, 7 Poland: occupation of by Germany, 5; concentration camps in, 22; Oświeçim, stifling of economy in because of location of Auschwitz, 115–116, 219n74; pogroms in, 5, 7. See also Auschwitz police: and the Argentinian escraches, 139; violence by, against Black Americans, 35, 201, 202; and the Civil Rights Movement (and other movements of the 1960s), 14, 182–183; and the dedication of the Neue Wache memorial, 65; George Floyd’s murder by, 190, 202; and the Standing Rock demonstrations, 1–2, 4, 14, 37 postmodernism, in memorialization, 53–54, 58, 61, 62, 67–69, 70, 71, 74, 78, 93 post-t raumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 18 Pratt, Richard Henry, 163 Proceso, el. See Proceso de Reorganización Nacional Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorg a n iz at ion), 122, 123–124, 143 Proclamation of the Indians of All Tribes, The, 156–165 Prosono, Marvin, 115–116 prosthetic memory. See memory: prosthetic Proyecto Genocida (Perpetrator Project), 105 psychoanalytic theory, 15–19, 25 Puar, Jasbir, 28 public memory. See memory: public public space: perpetrator regimes and the restricting of, 106–107, 165–166,
253 198; transforming resonant violence by resignifying or symbolically transforming, 23, 90, 153, 168. See also co-embodied practices; escraches; memorialization; places-of-s anctuary; places-of-t rauma
Radio F ree Alcatraz, 155, 177 rape/sexual violence, 103, 198 Raue, Jürgen, 58 Rauterberg, Hanno, 77 Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp, 55, 88 Reagan, Ronald, 47 Reclaiming Native Truth Project, 170–171 reconciliation and impunity, for perpetrators of genocide, 23, 99, 124, 128–129, 131, 134, 136, 137, 143, 148 Reddy, William, 212n45 Red Power Movement, 196; birth of, in the 1960s, 175; FBI monitoring of, 179; occupations by, including that of Alcatraz, 14, 152, 184, 196; and an increase in pride and dignity among American Indians, 185–186 reparations, 2, 10, 88, 127, 191 reservations, American Indian, 161, 171, 177; on Alcatraz Island, 158, 159; history of, in the United States, 151–152, 162, 163–164, 166–167, 168; unlivable conditions on, 159–160, 167, 171, 224n48. See also Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, anti-DAPL demonstrations at resonance machine(s): evangelical- capitalist, 174; resonant violence as, and co-embodied practices as a counter to, 174–175, 182–183 resonant violence: affective force of, 21–22, 23, 25, 31–42, 46, 77, 81, 147, 149, 150, 156, 166, 170, 186; and Ahmed’s model of affective economies, 171–172; as relating to Foucauldian understanding of power, 41; as relating to sound in warfare, 31–32;
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resonant violence (cont.) and connections between past atrocities and present realities, 11; and curation and visitation, 85, 89–90, 91, 94; definition and theory of, 3–6, 21–22, 25; and the importance of action, 190; and memorialization, 46, 58, 61, 66, 71, 73, 79, 82, 195; positive and negative aspects of, depending on one’s social group, 19, 40–41, 172; recognizing, 197, 200; refusal of a society to confront c auses and effects of, 7, 20; as a resonance machine, 174–176; risk f actors for, 198–199; role of civil society in addressing, 191; and social atomization, 37–39, 107, 122–123, 132, 162, 164–165, 168, 169, 191, 194; transduction of, through co-embodied practices, 8, 20, 21–22, 23, 24, 38–39, 42, 46, 80, 84, 87, 90, 106, 108, 111, 117, 119, 120, 121, 153, 156, 170, 172, 173, 180, 182, 183, 187, 188, 191, 194–195, 196, 199, 201. See also co-embodied practices Responsibility to Protect (R2P), 197 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 201 Reynolds, Malvina, 154 Roach, Joseph, 37, 145 Rohingya, 201 Roma-Sinti: and debate over Holocaust Memorial, 74–75; as victims of genocide, 34, 43, 63, 64, 65, 70 Rome, ancient, 50 Rosh, Lea, 74 Rothberg, Michael, 114 Ruiz, Raúl Sánchez, 139–140, 141 Russia, 201. See also Soviet Union Rwandan genocide, 35, 84 Sachsenhausen (concentration camp), 55, 119 San Francisco American Indian Center, 152–153, 161, 162 Schechner, Richard, 12
Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 59 Schwichtenberg, Tina, 71–74 Second World War. See World War II Secretariat of Human Rights (Argentina), 113 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 27 segregation, racial, 165–166, 175 Seminole, 162–163, 188 “Ser Mujeres en la ESMA: Testimonios para Volver a Mirar” (“Being Women in ESMA: Testimonies for a Second Look”), 103–104 settler colonialism, 8, 9–10, 21, 14, 19, 158, 161 Shoshone-Bannock, 169 Sioux, 1–3, 151, 152, 160, 168, 169, 189. See also Lakota-Sioux; Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, anti-DAPL demonstrations at slavery, U.S., 11, 35, 189, 198, 202 social sentence, 125, 126, 133, 135, 138, 141, 144, 146, 148 sound and sound theory, 30–36 South Africa, 9 Soviet Union, 48, 52, 57, 64, 77, 88; and the communist Eastern Bloc, especially the GDR, 34, 50, 54, 56; and the liberation of Europe from the Nazis, 50, 66. See also Soviet War Memorial (Berlin) Soviet War Memorial (Berlin), 47–54, 61, 62, 64, 77 space of appearance, 135–136, 140, 142, 183–184, 196 Speer, Albert, 73 sphere of inclusion, 64–66, 81 Spinoza, Baruch, 25–26, 27, 28 Spoor, Jennifer R., 186 Stalinism, 64 Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, anti-DAPL demonstrations at, 1–4, 202; through the lens of genocide studies, 8, 9, 11; through the lens of memory studies, 14–15, 19; through the lens of perform ance studies, 14; understanding through affect, as an
Index
example of resonant violence, 37–38; ultimate failure of, 189 Stanton, Gregory, 9–10, 13, 209nn36–37 Stewart, Kathleen, 149 Stier, Oren Baruch, 215n43 Straus, Scott, 208n27 Students for a Democ ratic Society, 175 symbolization, 10, 209nn36–37 T4 Project, 75 Taussig, Michael, 123 Taylor, Diana: on the archive and the repertoire, 45, 70; on the Argentinian dictatorship, 111, 122–123; on the DNA of perform ance, 147; on embodied practice, 13; on percepticide, 33, 118, 122; on the peripatetic method, 46; on scenarios of conquest, 4, 9; on traumatic memes, 15; on Villa Grimaldi in Chile, 88 Thanksgiving: history of, 2; and the occupation of Alcatraz, 154, 187; and the Standing Rock demonstrations, 2 Tilly, Charles, 123 Tlingit, 168 Tomkins, Silvan, 27–28, 29, 172, 212n18 Topography of Terror, 62 torture, 29, 83, 92, 94, 105, 107, 113–114, 195; as dehumanizing, 86–87; perpetrators of, 29, 102, 125, 129, 134; resonant violence of, 102. See also concentration, torture, and death camps Touraine, Alain, 53 Touza, Sebastian, 131 Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, 188–189 Trail of Tears, 162, 163, 188–189 trans-action. See co-embodied practices: of trans-action transduction of resonant violence. See co-embodied practices: and the transduction of resonant violence transitional justice (TJ), 10–11, 13, 21, 99–101, 127, 191, 201, 212n38. See also
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Argentina: t rials of perpetrators of the dictatorship in; reparations; truth commissions trauma: collective, 15–17, 150; comparison of, to resonant violence, 25, 36–37; connection of, to affect, 5–6; intergenerational transmission of, 15, 36–37, 147; psychoanalytic models of, 15–20; public memory spaces related to, 87–88; range of affects associated with, 109–110; and regaining agency, 90; and transitional justice, 11; as victim-centric, 6, 193; “working through,” 80. See also memory: prosthetic; memory: traumatic; traumatic memes; trauma zone traumatic memes, 15, 123 traumatic memory. See memory: traumatic trauma zone, 31–32, 35 Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), 37, 151, 168 Treuer, David, 171 Trudell, John, 155, 169, 170, 225n58 Trump, Donald, 201 truth commissions, 123, 127, 191 Turkey, 201 Ullman, Micha, 67, 70–71, 72, 73 United Nations: Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 8; “Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes,” 197; Human Rights Council, 10 United Native Americans, 160 United States: and ambivalence of non-I ndigenous population toward American Indians, 171; and child separation at the border, 201; forced removal and extermination of American Indians in, 2, 4, 11, 21, 23, 162–165, 166–167, 170; and protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, 202; role of, in relation to military dictatorships in Latin Americ a, 99; as a settler colonial society, 9;
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United States (cont.) social movements in, 175, 183; tendency in, to view violence as historic rather than current, 11; and the transformation of the relationship between Indigenous nations and, 176, 182, 184, 186–187; and the “victors” of history, 189; and the wealth gap between Black Americans and white Americans, 198. See also American Indians; Black Americans U.S. Congress, 2, 164, 184 utopian thinking, 135, 160–161, 192, 200 Uyghurs, 201 Vashem, Yad, 74 Venezuela, 201 victimhood, 19, 66, 80, 173–174 Videla, Rafael, 102, 148, 189 Vietnam War, 154–155, 175 Viglietti, Daniel, 108, 111–112 Villa Grimaldi (torture center in Chile), 88 voice, horizontal vs. vertical, 132, 133, 136, 147 Voting Rights Acts of 1965, 181 Waller, James, 19, 39–40, 41–42, 197–198 war crimes. See mass atrocities, definition of war memorials, 48–54. See also memorialization Warm Springs (Indian tribe), 184 War of 1812, 189
Washoe, 184 Weber, Ernesto Frimón, 134 Weber, Max, 38, 180–181 West Berlin, 34 West Germany, 56, 59, 73. See also West Berlin Wetherell, Margaret, 29, 41, 128, 157 white supremacy, 175 Williams, Raymond, 6 Willie, Edward, 169 Wise, Eryn, 15 Wolfe, Patrick, 9 women, as victims of violence, 87, 103–104, 139, 198–199, 202 World Cup (Argentina, 1978), 102, 108–109, 112 World War I: economic depression following, 4; memorialization following, 50, 60, 61, 64 World War II, 5; destruction of Berlin during, 43; memorials dedicated to, in Berlin, 22, 43–53. See also Battle of Berlin; Nazi Germany worldlessness, 23, 193, 194 Wounded Knee, 14, 162 Yakima, 184 Yamassee, 188 Young, James Edward, 56, 67, 71, 73, 97 Zadek, Gerhard, 56, 58 Zima, Peter V., 53 Zuckerfeld, Federico, 130, 138–139, 140, 141
About th e Auth or
Kerry Whigham is assistant professor of genocide and mass atrocity prevention at Binghamton University’s Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. He is also the director of research and online education at the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities.