Search

This article describes some of the techniques museums use to represent the suffering body in exhibitions. Some display human remains, but much more common, especially in Western museums, are stand-ins for the body. Manikins take many forms, including the wax museum’s hyperrealistic representations, the history museum’s neutral grey figures and the expressionistic figures that represent enslaved people in many recent exhibits. Symbolic objects or artefacts from the lives of victims can serve as counterweights to telling the story of their deaths. Photographs can show horror and the machinery of death, focus attention on individual lives or recreate communities. The absence of the body can call attention to its suffering. All of these techniques can be useful for museums trying to display and teach traumatic histories, but must be used with care and caution.

What is Jewish about memory and how does it relate to questions of justice and redemption? Within European modernities we learn to think of ourselves as rational selves and within a liberal moral culture to put the past behind us, so making it difficult to engage with the traumatic histories of the Shoah and the moral challenges it offers to European moral traditions. Does Judaism provide a critique of secular moral traditions and open possibilities for an embodied ethical tradition that values memory and so engagements with the past, while reminding us that 'not to know sufferings means not to be human'? (Genesis Rabbah 92:1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we open up a dialogue across generations that shares the experiences, memories and learnings of psychotherapy and sexual politics and ways these were lived in the libertarian politics of the 1970s? Exploring attempts at living politics and the attempts to create more equal relationships and engage critically with traditions of psychoanalysis and humanistic psychotherapies so that they could engage more directly with issues of class, race, gender and sexuality, I explore how concerns around masculinities proved vital in shaping new political imaginations. I go on to raise questions that might open up a dialogue across generations and so learn from the past so that different hopes can be created for the present. This means recognizing the prevalence of complex transnational identities produced through mass migrations that have helped shape multicultural cities and so call for different frameworks to understand relationships between the ‘psyche’ and the ‘social/political’ within a globalized world. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]