Abstract
While noting the selective and mobile nature of cultural memory and representation, recent memory and museum studies (e.g., see Amy Sodaro 2020; Michael Bernard-Donals 2016) have drawn attention to the formulaic re-inscription of power and racial asymmetries embedded in memorial exhibits. For example, as Katalin Deme (2019) emphasizes, public commemoration of WWII in post-socialist East Central Europe has been subject to selective memory driven by the state and national institutionalization of ethnic assimilation, of who belongs and who does not. Jiri Weil’s 1949 novel, Life with a Star, documenting the Jewish experience in Prague during WWII, and published 4 years after the war, bears witness to the Jewish citizens being rounded at the Radio Mart, a marketplace in Prague 7, for a transport to Terezin to depart from the Bubny railway station, anticipating the post-war attempts at the public memorialization of the Radio Mart and the Bubny railway station as memorial-museum sites. I argue that when examined in conjunction with one another, memorials as texts and literary texts as memorials provide a new insight on the precarities of living together, including perceptions of belonging and their hierarchization (of who belongs and who does not) that are both convivial and tangential. I read them as sutured texts or “semiospheres,” drawing on the work of Yuri Lotman (27), as cultural systems that are in relation to and in translation of one another, but also as museum texts that embody contentious relationships between spaces and identities.
Presenters
Pavlina RadiaProvost and Vice-President, Academic, Department of English, University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Postmemory, Museum, Precarity, Conviviality, Representation of Memory in Central Europe
