On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence

This book offers to academic and general public readers timely reflections about our relationships to violence. Taking cues from the self-reflexivity, themes, and subject matters of Holocaust, queer, and Black studies, this large group of diverse intellectuals wrestles with questions that connect past, present and future: where do I stand in relation to violence? What is my attitude toward that adjacency? Whose story gets to be told by whom? What story do I take this image to be telling? How do I co-witness to another’s suffering? How do I honor the agency and resilience of family members or historical personages? How do past violence and injustice connect to the present?

In smart, self-conscious, passionate, and often painfully beautiful prose, cultural practitioners, historians and cultural studies scholars such as Angelika Bammer, Doris Bergen, Ann Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch, Priscilla Layne, Mark Roseman, Leo Spitzer, Susan R. Suleiman and Viktor Witkowski explore such questions, inviting readers to do the same. By making available compelling examples of thinkers performing their own work within the cauldron of crises that came to a boil in 2020 and continued into the next year, this volume proposes strategies for moving forward with hope.