Böcker i New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts-serien

In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase 'the concentrationary universe' to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and the analyses of violence by Agamben, Virilio, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it also offers close readings of films by Cavani and Haneke that identify and critically expose such an imaginary and, hence, contest its lingering force.

Concentrationary Memories has, as its premise, the idea at the heart of Alain Resnais's film Night and Fog (1955) that the concentrationary plague unleashed on the world by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s is not simply confined to one place and one time but is now a permanent presence shadowing modern life. It further suggests that memory (and, indeed, art in general) must be invoked to show this haunting of the present by this menacing past so that we can read for the signs of terror and counter its deformation of the human. Through working with political and cultural theory on readings of film, art, photographic and literary practices, Concentrationary Memories analyses different cultural responses to concentrationary terror in different sites in the post-war period, ranging from Auschwitz to Argentina. These readings show how those involved in the cultural production of memories of the horror of totalitarianism sought to find forms, languages and image systems which could make sense of and resist the post-war condition in which, as Hannah Arendt famously stated 'everything is possible' and 'human beings as human beings become superfluous.' Authors include Nicholas Chare, Isabelle de le Court, Thomas Elsaesser, Benjamin Hannavy Cousen, Matthew John, Claire Launchbury, Sylvie Lindeperg, Laura Malosetti Costa, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Glenn Sujo, Annette Wieviorka and John Wolfe Ackerman.

At the core of this book is a series of conversations with five British artist Black women who exhibited in both Lubaina Himid's 1985 The Thin Black Line and 2011 Thin Black Line(s) exhibitions: Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce (OBE), Lubaina Himid (MBE, Turner Prize nominee), Claudette Johnson and Ingrid Pollard. The conversations explore their memories of art education and early careers, their experiences in the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, and their responses to the exhibition Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain in 2011, a quarter of a century after the original installation at the ICA in 1985, to reflect upon the issues of race and gender over that period in terms of how Black artist women have collaborated, made art, organized and conversed despite the failure of the British art institutions to sustain, conserve and study their work. Specifically avoiding the classic form of the artist interview, this book draws on a methodology not used in art history before: Constructivist Grounded Theory, which arrives at new theories of how individuals experience the world and act in it through analysing discourse generated in informal but structured conversation that seeks to discover new knowledge, rather than to impose existing theoretical models or concepts on experience as delivered in speech. Voices of Art, Belonging and Resistance is an analysis of the structural racism of British art institutions as experienced by Black subjects, and it also inflects that larger issue specifically with issues of gender and sexuality. Avoiding the now much abused concept of intersectionality, the method allows the intricacies of race, class, gender and sexuality to be in play at all times across the accounts of life experience as artists of the subjects being interviewed and the analysis of the discourse thus generated and art historically and culturally analysed.

Examines the work of American German Jewish artist Eva Hesse. Using feminist approaches and taking as a starting point two of her key works, the author reveals the way in which Hesse has been constructed as a 'woman artist' and explores the overlooked legacy of the Holocaust and refugee life in her art practice.

Visioning Israel-Palestine strives to cultivate recognition of the part that cultural products have played in the duplication of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While this conflict is one of the longest-lasting struggles over land and human rights in recent history, politicians and the media have largely reduced it to a series of debates over historical facts and expressions of violence. Its persistence, however, has also led to the manufacture of cultural products that challenge understandings of the conflict as a fight between two distinct peoples unified against each other. The wide range of international contributors to the volume analyse the content of such products alongside the work that they do within Israel-Palestine and in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas. Considering Israeli and Palestinian films, art installations, street exhibitions, photographs and oral histories, Visioning Israel-Palestine expands the conflict's historical imagination and nurtures suitable cultural conditions to revitalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Concentrationary Memories is based in the idea that the concentrationary plague unleashed on the world by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s has remained and is now a permanent presence shadowing modern life. It also argues that memory - and, indeed, art in general - must be invoked to show this haunting of the present by this menacing past.

Activists working in post-traumatic societies have resisted psychoanalytical terms because they fear that pathologizing individual suffering displaces the collective and political causes of traumatic violence. In a contrary direction, some thinkers have latterly embraced what Judith Butler insists is 'the psychic life of power.'