Perpetrator Studies Network

Books

Memory Passages: Holocaust Memorials in the United States and Germany

By Natasha Goldman. For decades, artists and architects have struggled to relate to the Holocaust in visual form, resulting in memorials that feature a diversity of aesthetic strategies. In Memory Passages, Natasha Goldman analyzes both previously-overlooked and internationally-recognized Holocaust memorials in the United States and Germany from the postwar period to the present, drawing on many historical…

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Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina

By Eva van Roekel. How do victims and perpetrators of political violence caught up in a complicated legal battle experience justice on their own terms? Phenomenal Justice is a compelling ethnography about the reopened trials for crimes against humanity committed during the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Grounded in phenomenological anthropology and…

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Imagining the Unimaginable: Speculative Fiction and the Holocaust

By Glyn Morgan. Imagining the Unimaginable examines popular fiction’s treatment of the Holocaust in the dystopian and alternate history genres of speculative fiction, analyzing the effectiveness of the genre’s major works as a lens through which to view the most prominent historical trauma of the 20th century. It surveys a range of British and American…

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The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and Its Unaccounted Lives

By Harry Harootunian. In the 1910s historian Harry Harootunian’s parents Ohannes and Vehanush escaped the mass slaughter of the Armenian genocide, making their way to France, where they first met, before settling in suburban Detroit. Although his parents rarely spoke of their families and the horrors they survived, the genocide and their parents’ silence about…

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Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur

By Eyal Mayroz. Why do we allow our governments to get away with “bystanding” to genocide? How can we, when alerted to the mass slaughter of innocents, still not take a stand? Reluctant Interveners provides the most comprehensive answers yet to these confronting questions, focusing on the complex relationships between the citizenry, the media, the political elites,…

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Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide

By Boreth Ly. How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure…

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Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary

By Raya Morag. Perpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate…

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American Public Memory and the Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations

By Lisa A. Costello. The recent rise of global antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American white nationalism has created a dangerous challenge to Holocaust public memory on an unprecedented scale. This book is a timely exploration of the ways in which next-generation Holocaust survivors combine old and new media to bring newer generations of audiences into…

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Victim, Perpetrator, or What Else? Generational and Gender Perspectives on Children, Youth, and Violence

Edited by Doris Bühler-Niederberger and Lars Alberth. Children, while being the most victimised group in society, rarely become a topic of sociological research, neither as victims nor as perpetrators. The sociological discussion on power and violence happens beyond generation as an important dimension of social structure, and in many respects also beyond gender aspects that…

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The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture

Edited by Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner. The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In…

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