Dancing with the Dead Generations After the Holocaust: a Fictional Blogged Phenomenology and Pedagogy of Embodied Post- Holocaust Inherited Memories Via A/R/Tography
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DRESSER, KAREN ELIZABETH, Ph.D. Dancing with the Dead Generations after the Holocaust: A Fictional Blogged Phenomenology and Pedagogy of Embodied Post- Holocaust Inherited Memories via A/r/tography. (2009) Directed by Dr. Glenn M. Hudak. 383 pp. 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). DANCING WITH THE DEAD GENERATIONS AFTER THE HOLOCAUST: A FICTIONAL BLOGGED PHENOMENOLOGYAND PEDAGOGY OF EMBODIED POST-HOLOCAUST INHERITED MEMORIES VIA A/R/TOGRAPHY by Karen Elizabeth Dresser A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment for the Requirements of the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2009 Approved by Glenn M. Hudak Committee Chair © 2009 Karen Dresser Figure 1. Artistic Title Page. Folds and Containments , 2008. Digital photograph © 2009 Karen Dresser To my son Gabriel Seth Godwin In memory of my husband, William McArthur Godwin, my mother, Elizabeth LaBombard Dresser, my maternal grandmother, Esther Alitalo LaBombard, my paternal grandmother, Marion George Dresser And in memory of and the millions who perished in Nazi concentration camps. You are not forgotten. iii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro: Committee Chair Dr. Glenn Hudak Committee Members Dr. Kathleen Casey Dr. Leila Villaverde Dr. Svi Shapiro March 23, 2009 Date of Acceptance by Committee March 23, 2009 Date of Final Oral Examination iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am thankful for my professors at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for their nurture through word, deed and imagery. Dr. Kathleen Casey encouraged me to listen to and interpret first-person narratives, and to theorize curriculum in a transgressive, creative way. Dr. Leila Villaverde introduced me to a queer way of seeing that gave me eyes to see how normativity (in all its appearances) can be re- imaged through theory and art. Dr. Svi Shapiro showed me how to view cultural, political and societal icons so as to false gods and discover my own truth. Dr. Glenn Hudak allowed me to roam freely through philosophical and theological texts as I found meaning in my own writing and art, and encouraged me to write, publish, present and write some more. In addition, I have been sustained by many along the way: parents, teachers, professors and friends. They are my supports, my nourishment, and my roots. v (PRE)FACE An Introduction from In Back Of and Beyond Maxine Greene (1988) called for “a new way of looking at things” through a commitment to praxes of “educational consequence” in which the tools by which we educate students cut an opening, a space, a caesura, for the “remaking of a democratic community” (p. 126). It is in this space that educators commit anew to intelligence, communication and imagination. The roles Greene assigned imagination in the unfolding drama of education are: to open possibilities and alternatives to the cultural and educational status quo, and to serve as a creative tool by which to “defamiliarize things— to make them strange” (p. 119, 122). Greene’s idea of education was to create spaces in which those who are different-from may come together with many other different-froms for the sake of transforming, resisting, creating, turning, or imagining an even new “different.” I am concerned with remembering the Event called the Holocaust, particularly as I interpret my own inherited, transferred memories from eye-witness narratives, books, photographs, and art. I desire something different in my own art making and writing about the Holocaust, something that troubles the normal studies, that engages me mindfully, emotionally, actively, and artfully in the difficult and sometimes ambiguous questions of Holocaust memory. I desire to grapple creatively with the issues of eyewitness memory, second-hand memory and inherited memory so as to make meaning of my own interaction with each facet of remembrance. I imagine myself as artist, vi researcher, teacher, dialoguing with my art, research materials and students in a living, breathing way that affects not only the fluid situation of a high school Holocaust Imagery class, but also the way I live in the greater environs of the world. I wish for my learning regarding the Holocaust to move me to action in order to make a difference in the world. I desire to bear witness to the fact that I am alive and in opposition to those who oppress, maim, rape, torture, or murder others. What I desire for myself, I likewise desire for my students. I agree with bell hooks (1994) who posited that if we teachers want to teach in ways that will transform consciousness, we should be prepared to experience the pain of acknowledging dominations—race, gender, class, and myriad others—in order to “bear witness, to hear . both the naming of [our] pain and the power that [emerges] when [we feel] that pain go away” (p. 74). hooks described the work that is created from a place of struggle and pain as “libratory” as it inspires teacher and student “to remember and recover ourselves . [to challenge] us to renew our commitment to an active, inclusive feminist struggle” (p. 74). But in order to teach in this libratory way, I first have to struggle myself to explore how, in the experiential and open site of my art studio and classroom (where my theorizing becomes praxis), I set before my own and my students’ eyes images of the struggle and the pain—images that remember the pain of death of those who never came out of Nazi camps alive. I hope for a continuation of a distinctively Jewish and humane way of living after the Holocaust as we acknowledge the presence of other hatreds—even those related to the Israel-Palestine conflicts—and genocides carried on throughout the vii world despite the warnings “never again” and commands to “remember.” No one is truly safe from extermination as long as dominant powers exist that wish a weaker group to be decimated. My own approach to art and writing, specifically as it relates to the Shoah, is as a reflection of the world in which I live, teach and create; it takes into account Leila Villaverde’s (1998) notion of art as a mirror of reality: Art can act as a mirror, confronting realities that are both in the here and now as well as the collection or summation of past events. Art can also heighten hindsight as it prolongs the regression into the past to gather enough information to deconstruct and discard those elements which are no longer needed in the purpose of the art, for the piece of art to work. In the process of making the art, some details that were crucial in the past event may be discarded or exaggerated in service of the aesthetic and commentary value of the piece, working through the disorder of feeling and thought into a terrain that orders it without the restraints of traditional structure. (p. 205) My art making as Villaverde describes is always woven into the past as I interact artfully with a Jewish heritage that relies so heavily on memory and ritual reenactment of the past. Yet, I am mindful of the ways a mirror can distort my worldview through normative social, political and religious traditions and constructions. Therefore, I push within, without, along side of, between and beyond traditions; my art is in a fluid state of becoming. As I engage my own artistic theory, I posit an artful self-study of the Holocaust that focuses not only on historical facts and documents, which are constructed and often biased, but also on the interpretive, midrashic work of post-Holocaust visual artists, whose art is philosophical, theological, imaginative and interrogative. As a teacher, I encourage the ongoing artistic action of my students as they re-act to my viii teaching through their own inquiries. Through these actions, I am able to breathe new interpretative awareness and practices into art making and thus interact with the open- ended debates surrounding Holocaust memory. My main research question asks if the artist-I who am not a survivor nor a daughter of a survivor, can present an image of the Holocaust that carries the memories forward through inherited and vicarious memories.