Imagination, performance and affect: a critical pedagogy of the Holocaust?

Based on video testimony interviews held in the Shoah Foundation
Institute’s Visual History archive and the Melbourne Jewish
Holocaust Centre’s archive, this paper examines Holocaust survivor
testimony as it relates to their return to the sites of atrocity,
particularly Auschwitz-Birkenau. It analyses how survivor’s (re)
encounters with material and imaginative landscapes reveals
conceptions of, inter alia, agency, community, absence and
belonging in the performance of self. It uses these tensions
between landscapes of the past and present to develop the
theoretical relationship between performativity and ideas of
affect. In doing so, it explores how these ideas can be used to
engage students in a critical pedagogy of the Holocaust through
analysis of survivor video-testimony and in visiting landscapes of
the Holocaust.