Space, Place, and Memory: The Long Aftermath of the Nazi Genocide in Belarus, 1941-2008
How might, or should, we remember and live with the aftermath of genocide? Foregrounding the role of space and place, Anika Walke examines how people have remembered and lived with the effects and repercussions of systematic violence and genocide in Belarus. Building on a variety of sources including oral histories, photographs, and archival documentation, and memoirs, Walke complicates well-known critiques of (post-) Soviet politics of memory that foreground the marginalization of the Holocaust.
Anika Walke is Assist. Professor in the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis. She was educated at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and the State University of St. Petersburg, Russia, before she completed her doctorate at UC Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching interests include World War II and Nazi genocide, migration, nationality policies, and oral history in the (former) Soviet Union and Europe. Her book, Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford), weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remembered it after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Light lunch will be served.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the NC Jewish Studies Seminar & Wired! Lab for Digital Art History and Visual Culture at Duke.