Blood, Bodies and Bones
In the early twenty-first century, remembering violence has increasingly focused on three sites: blood, bodies and bones. In the first part of this chapter, these three sites form the basis of considering the remembrance and forgetting of past violent events that took place during the First World War, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the Spanish Civil War of 1936.
The remembrance of these cataclysmic events more broadly brings into focus forms of commemoration that have recently concentrated exclusively on the body. These involve new technologies such as DNA testing and the retrieval and exhumation of bones of the victims of violence.The aim is to explore this new wave of commemorative practice and argue that in the twenty-first century new technologies have ushered in distinctive forms of such practices surrounding the dead body. This is evident in many circles - especially for the families of the dead - as a highly respectful and appropriate way of remembering victims of violence. In his work on the dead, Thomas Lacquer argues there emerged a new respect for the dead from
War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The literature on Holocaust memorialisation is voluminous, and includes Claudio Fpgu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner (eds.), Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); online environment, Colleen Morgan and Pierre Marc Pallascio, ‘Digital Media, Participatory Culture, and Difficult Heritage: Online Remediation and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade', Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 4.3 (2015), 260-78. the eighteenth century that began a significant shift for the ‘visibility and accountability of the dead'.[1076]
The focus adopted in recent scholarship on the victims of violence has been to consider how human remains have become a distinctive part of commemorative practice.
In 2015, Sevane Garibian wrote in a special issue of Human Remains and Violence of the need for scholars in genocide and memory studies to consider the importance of human remains in commemorations. He wrote that the ‘function of human remains in commemorative practices is multiple, be it memorial, cognitive, probative or cathartic'.[1077]Does this focus on human remains reflect a new attempt to access the ‘true' experience of war? Is the appeal of this exercise that it somehow gives a more ‘accurate' representation of the infliction of violent acts and how these should be remembered - that is, through the forensic analysis of the dead? The issue of ‘true' commemoration of violent acts was raised during the debate that took place over the centenary of memorialisation of the First World War in London, to which we will now turn.