Sites that haunt : affects and non-sites of memory

doi:10.14361/9783839436295-004

Sites that haunt : affects and non-sites of memory

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Sites that haunt : affects and non-sites of memory

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Bibliographic description

title:	Sites that haunt : affects and non-sites of memory
author:	Sendyka Roma
editor:	Dziuban Zuzanna
book title:	The "Spectral Turn" : Jewish Ghosts in the Polish Post-Holocaust Imaginaire
date of publication :	2019
place of publication : name of publisher:	Bielefeld : Transcript Verlag
pages:	85-106
ISBN:	978-3-8376-3629-1
eISBN:	978-3-8394-3629-5
series:	Memory Cultures; 6
DOI:	10.14361/9783839436295-004
notes:	Przedruk. Art. z czasopisma "East European Politics and Societies" 2016, nr 4 (30)
language:	English
book language:	English
abstract in English:	Republishing of the article printed in East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 2016, Volume XX Number X, Month 201X 1-16, transl. by Jennifer Croft. In this article, the author seeks to establish whether specific sites from Eastern Europe can be viewed as loci critiquing Pierre Nora’s seminal notion of lieux de mémoire. The sites in question are abandoned, clandestine locations of past violence and genocide, witnesses to wanton killings, today left with no or not adequate memorial markers. Without monuments, plaques, or fences, they might be understood as "completely forgotten", as Claude Lanzmann once claimed. In opposition to that view, in the article the locations in question are interpreted as still potent agents in local processes of working with a traumatic past. Sites of mass violence and genocide are described as unheimlich and trigger strong affective reactions of fear, disgust, and shame whose actual causes remain unclear. This article analyzes possible catalysts of these powerful affective responses. The first hypothesis is grounded in the abundance of ghost stories in literary or artistic representations of the sites in question. The second hypothesis addresses the issue of the presence of dead bodies: human remains have never been properly neutralized by rituals. And finally, the third hypothesis explores the "effect of the affects" of non-sites of memory as the capacity of bodies to be moved by other bodies, the bodies affected in this case being those of the visitors to the uncanny sites.
keywords in Polish:	miejsca pamięci, nie-miejsca pamięci, warszawskie getto, KL Plaszow, afekty
keywords in English:	sites of memory, non-sites of memory, Warsaw ghetto, KL Plaszow, affects
number of pulisher's sheets:	1,1
type:	chapter
subtype:	academic paper