Dancing with the dead generations after the Holocaust: a fictional blogged phenomenology and pedagogy of embodied post-Holocaust inherited memories via a/r/tography

This project is a self-reflexive philosophical thought experiment on Holocaust memory, imagery and pedagogy. I ask if the artist-researcher-teacher-I who is neither a survivor nor a daughter of a survivor, can present an image of the Holocaust that carries memories forward via inherited or vicarious memories gained through multiple means of gathering and storing memory information. I engage open-ended arts-based inquiry through writing and art, published Second Generation narratives, and post-Holocaust artists' theological, philosophical and artistic considerations of memory as I promote an art of memory and transformational pedagogy. I question which memory theories, theologies, and philosophies must inform an artist-researcher-teacher in order to intersect and interpret personal lived experience with that of eye-witnesses or other inheritors of Holocaust memories. My inquiry is located within larger issues of Holocaust studies: memory, art, narrative and curriculum research. I theorize Post-Holocaust imagination through self-reflexive arts-based research situated in a fluid, contingent fictional blog of a Second Generation teacher/artist wrestling with her inherited memories. Concepts of A/r/tography, an embodied art, research and teaching practice, are engaged as tools to inquire into sites and disciplines of post-Holocaust art making that interconnect to beget layers of additional or new understandings or unfold those hidden due to cultural, political or religious constructs or metanarratives. My inquiry does not end with a "final solution," but asks additional questions related to keeping alive Holocaust memory through arts and pedagogical theories and praxes that acknowledge present reality (dystopic) rather than hope for future perfection (utopic).