The Memorialization of Genocide

Simone Gigliotti

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138099012
• eBook ISBN: 9781317394167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Divided societies, tormented pasts, and unrepentant perpetrators. Why are some countries more intent on vanquishing uncomfortable pasts than others? How do public and often unsightly attempts at memorialisation both fail the victims and valorize their oppressors?

This book offers fresh and original perspectives on dictatorship, fascism and victimization from the bloodiest decades in Europe's, Australia's and Central America's colonial and modern history. Chapters include analyses of Francoist memorials in Spain, assessments of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, the forgetting of frontier colonial violence in Tasmania, Romania's treatment of its Roma populations in the midst of Holocaust memorialisation in Bucharest's urban development, and whether or not the Holocaust continues to serve as an instructional model or impossible aspiration for cross-cultural genocide memorialisation strategies. In an era of ongoing political, ethnic and religious conflict, and unrepentant insurgent activity around the world, this collection reminds readers that genocidal actions, wherever and whenever they occurred, must be held to account by more than rhetoric and concrete memory. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Thinking comparatively about genocide memorialization

REBECCA JINKS

This article argues for a comparative approach to studying genocide memorialization. Memorials and museums form an intrinsic part of state and society in post-conflict societies, and a comparative approach can capture the dynamics of memory politics and state building at play, especially the reception and instrumentalization in different national arenas of transitional justice mechanisms and the ways in which international agendas interact with domestic ones. The article first reviews the small existing comparative literature, and then offers a discussion of three potential comparative approaches: the transfer of representational strategies and discourses of remembrance by museum or memorial staff who serve as consultants for new projects; how genocide museums construct evidence or proof of genocide, and how these constructions might be received by victim and perpetrator groups in post-genocide societies, and by international visitors; and, finally, how the differences between official memorials and other places of memory might resist hegemonic state narratives.

Introduction

The study of memorials to genocide and other atrocities is now firmly entrenched as a field of inquiry. Many of these studies are richly nuanced, offering insights into the contexts and debates surrounding national and local memorials, memorials designed by ‘starchitects’ (Daniel Libeskind, for example) and others put together more spontaneously, memorials whose political lives spanned successive regimes and others that were never built. Whether studies of the German ‘countermonuments’ of the 1960s onwards, the Rwandan government’s selective remembering and preference for the macabre at its six national genocide memorials, or the campaigns of the Women of Srebrenica,¹ they point towards the ways in which states use the genocidal past in support of a particular national narrative, the multiple ways that societies engage or disengage with public commemorations, and indeed the growth in memorialization itself. These studies indicate broadly similar dynamics at play, notwithstanding the specificities of the national or local context; yet, to date, very few studies compare genocide memorialization. In this article, I make a case for the addition of the comparative method to the study of genocide memorialization. Just as comparative analysis in the fields of history and political science has enhanced our understanding of the specificities and parallels in the genocidal process, so too can a comparative approach to genocide memorialization illuminate how contexts and power relations shape remembrance and representation, and how meanings are made from the events in their aftermath. If genocide involves the violent destruction of community, then we might ask how the fact of genocide, or its denial, is used by political elites and ordinary people in different contexts to construct, or reconstruct, community in the aftermath. How has genocide been used for political and social purposes in different contexts? What influence has the international community had in these different aftermaths? Where have potentials for a different kind of civic society opened up, and where have they been closed down? What of cases not widely recognized as genocide, either domestically or globally?

The opening section discusses the few existing comparative studies, using them as a starting point for a consideration of how the comparative method might be applied to genocide memorialization—asking what it might add to our understanding of the processes and politics of memorialization beyond simply identifying ‘trends’, how it might negotiate the stark differences between cases, and whether it runs the risk of replicating debates from the historical arena. In part, the aim here is to suggest different thematic approaches and empirical openings that might expand the repertoire of this emerging field: to this end, the rest of the article identifies and explores some potentially useful points of comparison in the case studies on which my own research has focused—memorials and museums that commemorate genocide in Armenia, Cambodia, the Holocaust, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda—and, where possible, to point towards other examples that might confirm or complicate these comparisons. In particular, I explore the diffusion of representational strategies and concepts across the global landscape of memorialization via the exchange of visits and expertise; how genocide museums construct evidence or proof of genocide, and how these constructions might be received by victim and perpetrator groups in post-genocide societies, and by international visitors; and how hegemonic state narratives might be disrupted by the differences between official memorials and local, often personal, memories and experiences of place and event.

Outlining the field

The Holocaust has, overwhelmingly, received the most attention in studies of genocide memorialization, although in the past decade or so the literature on other case studies has begun to grow (albeit unevenly; there are relatively few studies of Armenian memorialization, for example, whereas work on Cambodia and Rwanda is developing more strongly).² A substantial proportion of these publications focus on a single museum, memorial or ritual of public remembrance, although others look at the shape of national remembrance in both national and ‘local’ genocide memorials,³ or compare the memorialization of one genocide in different national settings (e.g. James Young’s canonical work The texture of memory (1993)).⁴ These studies are invaluable, because their analysis is often culturally sensitive and sophisticated in its application; the challenge with comparative research is to preserve these nuances and use them to build a picture of how a variety of actors, state or otherwise, negotiate shifting narratives about the past, cultural traditions of burial and mourning, and the realities of the aftermath in the pursuit of their own agendas.

Efforts at this kind of comparative research come, of course, with many attendant difficulties—not least the more prosaic issue of funding. But conceptually, too, comparative research requires careful setting up. Comparative historiography in the arenas of history, political science and anthropology has demonstrated the problems with taking one case study as a model or template—most frequently this has been the Holocaust—or with privileging similarities over differences in the search for a neat overarching explanation. This latter point is all the more pertinent when, as comparative work on memorialization would demand, one is attempting cross-cultural comparisons, where the nuances of each culture (including one’s own) need to be acknowledged and preserved within the text. Alongside these is the issue of definition and inclusion that has often plagued comparative genocide studies, but where it seems that an inclusive but rigorous approach proves most productive. But lest this seem too daunting, it is worth noting that at the same time the comparative historiography has not only demonstrated that careful comparisons along these lines bring richer understandings, but has also made a strong argument for comparative work as a mechanism for defusing and diluting narratives of national or group exceptionalism, or what A. Dirk Moses has termed the ‘phallic logic’ of claims that ‘my trauma is bigger than yours’—logics that are themselves so often involved in the genesis of genocide.⁵ These are the challenges but also the impetus for studying genocide memorialization comparatively.

The two studies that have already taken up this challenge—Paul Williams’ Memorial museums (2007) and Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro’s chapter in Remembering for the future (2010)⁶—discuss the museums and memorials as part of a ‘global rush to commemorate atrocities’ (Williams), or the ‘internationalization of a new commemorative paradigm’ (Bickford and Sodaro). Neither explicitly theorizes their comparative approach, and neither is restricted only to genocide memorialization, but both usefully discuss various global trends in these memorial museums: the encouragement of identification with the victims through displays of personal objects and individual or family photographs; the concern to allow visitors to ‘experience’ the site as an authentic space; and the underlying philosophy or goal of many of these institutions of creating a human rights culture and facilitating learning about the past in order to prevent genocide and violence in the future—trends that are neatly encapsulated by Bickford and Sodaro under the headings of ‘empathy’, ‘experience’ and ‘education’. Quite rightly, both pieces criticize this underlying premise that sympathy for the victims and ‘learning from the past’ will somehow prevent violence in the future (indeed, learning what is always only vaguely conceptualized in such discourses, or translated into universal concepts such as learning ‘tolerance’, which hardly go to the root of the problem). Both works, then, offer wide-ranging analyses of the patterns of display in a wide variety of memorial museums, and the ways in which these museums have taken up and interpreted human rights discourses. In their analyses of these museums and memorials as manifestations of (or at least guided by) a human rights culture, though, both leave plenty more to be said about how and why human rights discourses were adopted (and by whom) in each case, what this might mean for shifting power relations, and whether they signify reform or merely lip-service. Williams does include a chapter on contestations over memory in the aftermath, but Bickford and Sodaro, who approach their examples primarily as being ‘part of the transitional justice “tool kit”’, do not have space in their short chapter to consider the social conflicts and rather less cosmopolitan and progressive narratives behind the establishment of many of these museums.⁷

A third example here is Jenny Edkins’ Trauma and the memory of politics (2000/2003), which goes further in linking local or national politics behind memorialization with global trends. Her case studies, too, are not limited to genocide and are generally western—for example, the Irish famine, the Holocaust, WWI, and America’s memory of Vietnam—but she combines quite lengthy analyses of certain of the individual memorials with her broader conclusions that, for example, the narratives at these memorials ‘seem unable to get away from the rhetorics of state or nation, and they fail to escape the racialization upon which the genocides, enslavements and famines were themselves based’ and also that, since roughly the 1990s and the emergence of globalized humanitarian power, a new narrative has come into force—one of rescue.⁸ Edkins’ nuanced analysis, which oscillates effectively between each case study and her broader argument, is a useful model for the kind of comparative work under consideration here.

In addition to these studies, there is also a growing literature on ‘dark tourism’ that seeks to chart and explain the seemingly increasing public interest in visiting sights and sites that can be labelled as ‘dark’, from the London Dungeons to Auschwitz.⁹ Little real work has been conducted on genocide tourism itself thus far,¹⁰ though, and at present much of the literature (which is rooted in the methodology of tourism studies) is concerned with typologizing the field into different categories of tourist sites, and indeed different shades of ‘dark’,¹¹ and discussing issues of supply and demand, ‘v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The memorialization of genocide
• 1. Thinking comparatively about genocide memorialization
• 2. Memorializing colonial genocide in Britain: the case of Tasmania
• 3. Site of memory and dismemory: the Valley of the Fallen in Spain
• 4. Holocaust commemoration in Romania: Roma and the contested politics of memory and memorialization
• 5. Revisiting the El Mozote massacre: memory and politics in postwar El Salvador
• Index