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Angi Buettner, "Cultural Studies and the Holocaust" The global prevalence of Holocaust material in so many fields of today's cultural production (in both so-called "high" culture as well as "popular" culture) poses questions about the pragmatics of representation. We see not just a burgeoning industry that keeps the memory of the Jewish Holocaust alive, but also countless uses of Holocaust imagery as a template for representing all kinds of other events. Trying to account for this cultural practice, in which the specific Holocaust material experiences a flow through space, time and cultures, raises the dialectic of the tension between this cultural phenomenon and the ontological aspects of the events that motivate Holocaust conscriptions. Questions of representing "extreme occurrences" such as the Holocaust bring to the fore the struggle to understand the relationship between epistemology and event. Thinking about, for instance, genocides forces the material back into questions of discourse. The quandaries about representations have always been about this problematical relationship between how we can describe the world and how, by doing so, we can gain knowledge of the world. While historical research about the Jewish Holocaust is still looking for explanations for the monstrosity of the criminal acts during the Third Reich and makes us aware of how much of the various aspects and acts has yet to be told and known, a lot of cultural studies work looks at post-Holocaust representations rather than the "factual" happenings of the Holocaust. But how to negotiate this tension between the actual events and its representations, between ontology and epistemology? This paper examines possible consequences of these disciplinary differences and asks what it means to look at "the Holocaust" from a Cultural Studies perspective--what are the dangers, but also what are possible aspects and the specific contributions this discipline can offer to Holocaust discourse and research? Biography: Angi Buettner is a graduate of the University of Munich, Germany, and currently completing a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland on the politics of global Holocaust representations. Her current research is in visual culture and news industries. |
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