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Holocaust

Posted on 06/05/2008

‘The time has come to address this treacherous tendency to misunderstand the place of the Holocaust.’

Professor Griselda Pollock will deliver the Aubrey Newman Lecture 2008 at the University of Leicester on Tuesday 6 May

.

In it, Professor Pollock will discuss the nature of both trauma and memory and the relation of both to representation.

Her lecture, After-image/After-affect. The Politics and Aesthetic Solace in the Encounter with Unbearable Knowledge, will be delivered at 5.30pm in the Ken Edwards Lecture Theatre 3.

Professor Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History, University of Leeds. She said: “The intense engagement, theoretically, historically and critically with the traumatic legacies of the twentieth century has given rise to the related but distinct fields of memory studies and trauma studies.

“Between the two lies the difficulty of encountering unbearable knowledge as individuals, as societies, as inheritors of the  aftermath of the Final Solution.  Generating often heated debate at every level, the nature of both trauma and memory and the relation of both to representation has taken its academic place beside an equally complex series of aesthetic explorations of trauma, catastrophe and  memory across all continents and in every kind of artistic medium.

“Even though it is so recent that there has been proper attention paid to this enormity, the Holocaust is already being resisted as being over-present, over-stressed, over-emphasized in these debates.  What about...? - and another list of atrocities and suffering is offered as if the sheer variety and multitude of 20th century horrors abrogates the specificity of any one of them or the enormity of the Holocaust itself. The time has come to address this treacherous tendency to misunderstand the place of the Holocaust, historically, theoretically, and conceptually in what now defines the world in which we all live, post the realization of a totalitarian genocide.

“I want to stress the retrospect of memorial representation in face of the unrepresentability of trauma and explore, theoretically, some of the emerging ideas about the potentialities for encounter with and transformation of the past as this work of created memory. If trauma is inherently unknowable except in its secondary retracings, it is always the shadow in representation, invisible except through a representation which it cannot be, but which  can tip it into the field of visibility which is not to do with vision, but which becomes the texture that supports affectivity. Introducing a small range of recent works of artists of the second generation, working in a variety of media, I shall propose the inevitability and psychologically poetic force  of after-image, and after-affect  as a counterpoint to current theories of the post-traumatic and explore the ways in which it has been variously tracked across a range of media by contemporary artists born into this legacy.”

The Newman Lecture series is intended to give public recognition to Professor Aubrey Newman’s contribution to Holocaust Studies and his dedication to maintaining the Stanley Burton Centre since its establishment more than a decade ago. The annual Newman Lectures provide a platform for leading-edge and topical research in Holocaust Studies.

Aubrey Newman is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leicester and has written extensively in the field of Anglo-Jewish history and particularly in the history of Provincial Jewry since the middle of the eighteenth century.

The lecture will take place on Tuesday 6 May 17:30 18:30 in Ken Edwards Lecture Theatre 3, to be followed by a reception in the Senior Common Room, Charles Wilson Building. The event is open to the public and free .