USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research: Simone Gigliotti - A Mobile Holocaust: Testimony and the Spatial Turn
Doheny Memorial Library Room G 24, Herklotz Room
Please join the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research for a lecture by Simone Gigliotti.
The topic of the lecture will be "A Mobile Holocaust: Testimony and the spatial turn".
Dr. Simone Gigliotti teaches in the History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is part of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, and is working on a book-length project, Enough of this Europe: Routes to Home and Humanity after the Holocaust, which examines the cinematic representation of refugee quests for national belonging, homelands and human rights in the post-genocide and post-war DP era in Europe from 1945 to 1952.
A Mobile Holocaust: Testimony and the spatial turn
How can analyses of Holocaust witnessing be approached in spatial terms? This talk draws primarily on the USC Shoah Foundation testimony of two Holocaust-era witnesses with postwar profiles of testimony giving - a slave labourer in a death brigade, and a ghetto internee who survived on false papers. It reports on an analytical effort to identify criteria for “spatial experience” in their testimonies, and then situates this coding effort in the spatial turn in Holocaust studies and the geo-humanities, arguing for a methodologically flexible approach to analysing Holocaust video-testimony in spatial terms while recognising the incomplete and performative, embodied act of this testimonial genre. Finally, it provides a short critique of the potential and challenges of analysing video-testimony as untapped spatial metadata of the crime of genocide.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Doheny Memorial Library Room G 24, Herklotz Room
To RSVP, please contact Kia Hays: kiahays@usc.edu
