CMCI’s Dr Jessica Rapson celebrated her new monograph Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice at a drinks reception at the international Mnemonics Postgraduate Summer School, an event co-funded by CMCI (see our previous item).
Jessica’s book examines the transcultural politics of commemorative landscapes of the Nazi Holocaust. Here. She argues that commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of “monument fatigue,” a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present.
Copies of Topographies of Suffering can be purchased for half price, for a limited time only, from the publisher: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/extras/docs/flyer/RapsonTopographies_9781782387091.html