Bibliographical Essay

Recent scholarship on the intersection between memory and violence has highlighted the centrality of religion and its role in how violent events are remembered. This is a key theme in J.

While the literature on religion and remembering violence is significant but not voluminous, there is a vast body of literature on physical memorials to the Holocaust, with James E. Young providing perhaps the definitive overview in The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), alongside texts such as Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (Princeton: Columbia University Press, 2001). Projects such as the Stolpersteine (www.stolpersteine.eu/en/) in Europe, as well as other memorials and museums, provide places for physical, embodied and emplaced memory. Studies of Holocaust memory and memorialisation have provided some important avenues for greater understanding of traumatic memory in the aftermaths of violence. Vital works include Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Eric Santner, ‘History beyond the Pleasure Principle', in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 143-54, Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Abacus Books, 1987) and Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (London: Heinemann, 1989).

A central aspect of memory and violence needing further exploration is gender. Scholars have made compelling cases for focusing on gender in visual representation of violence. This is significant, given a dominant mode of remembering violence is through the visual, particularly in film and photographs. Ulrike Weckel's analysis of depictions of women in films documenting the liberation of concentration camps in 1945 and 1946 is notable: Gender & History 17.3 (2005), 538-66. Griselda Pollock argues for the power of dominant cultural scripts of feminine suffering, which circulate at the expense of historical and political analysis through the continued use of a particular photograph taken during the Holocaust; and Nancy Miller examines how two photographs of Kim Phuc (known as the ‘Napalm Girl'), taken in 1972 and 1995, publicly function as gendered narratives of American national history in the context of the Vietnam War; see two chapters in Jay Prosser (ed.), Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), pp. 65-78 and 147-54.