Critical Perspectives
The Visual Representation of the Holocaust in Israeli Schoolbooks
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nurit Elhanan-Peled
The paper discusses the visual representation of the Holocaust in Israeli textbooks for different ages, especially the use of images: photographs and paintings or drawings. It considers the choice of Holocaust images, their importance as testimony but also the thin line between images as testimony and the "pornography of evil," and its possible effects. Questions of ethics, respect for the dead and the vulgarization of brutality are considered as well. The study adopts Social Semiotic mode of inquiry, treating every sign as "motivated" by interest, and applies a multimodal analysis. It draws on Holocaust scholars such as Friedlander, LaCapra, Rothberg and Yablonka, and on semioticians such as Barthes, Kress, Van Leeuwen and Geogre Didi Huberman, to name but a few. The findings from five Holocaust textbooks and five History textbooks published since 2000, show that in Holocaust textbooks verbal and visual chunks complement each other. The Shoa is represented verbally through descriptions of cruel scenes of sadism, while visually it depicts Jewish suffering in graphic, shocking images. However, the images and page layouts differ from one age to another: in books for the young they create myths of heroism, accompanied usually by songs or poems, showing the suffering and the bravery of children. The images become more realistic and disturbing as students approach their military service. This paper argues that Israeli textbooks have a common Holocaust Rhetoric that "act out" the Shoa and do not offer ways to "work through" the traumatic memories.
A Story for Tamir: A Techno Photo Essay of a Black Life
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rasul Mowatt
Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy was shot by police and subsequently died of his wounds in Cleveland, OH on November 22, 2014. For protestors, an affirmation of Black Lives Matter. For policy-makers, a discussion on gun control. For others, a judgment on urban youth. What does Black Lives Matter truly mean? Why should a Black life truly matter? Gillian Rose in Visual Methodologies (2001) posits when looking at and interpreting images that truth is not being sought, but is simply a justification for the interpretation that is being attempted. What can we glean from the images associated with the life and death of Tamir? The aim of this photo essay is to create a retelling of Tamir’s life and death based on an analysis of the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor and Sheriff’s Office 224-page investigative report of the City of Cleveland. It presents the implications of his death and how it ought to inform us of the (mis)representation of his life. The location of his death was in a public park he frequented, a place of play and childhood. However, further analysis of the report reveals a relevance for researchers who use visual materials as artifacts. This retelling conjures a necessary discussion on his legacy, and who gets to be a child, gets to play, and gets to live. As we maintain that quality of life as key tenets in the social sciences and humanities, it is important that we truly embrace that lives matter, especially Black ones, even in death.
Aesthetics, Performativity and Intertextuality in the Creation of a Digital Publication: Gender and Diversity for Early Childhood
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Débora Gonzales
This article explores through an interactive publication in digital media the uses of the concepts of intertextuality and performativity as tools to break gender stereotypes transmitted during early childhood. In this way, the construction of gender is assumed as a gradual process that, through education and other cultural mechanisms, results in social construction. This process is questioned through the work of post-structuralist philosophers and from examples taken from pre-Hispanic cultures, specifically Mesoamerican that at the time raised the notion of non-binary gender. The game is a starting point as an everyday activity that adds more nuances to the definition of gender roles. The performative and the intertextual are proposed as tools that critical theory offers to design to help it face stereotypical constructions of gender. This involves questioning the role of design as an agent of capitalism and its effectiveness in silently but effectively prolonging stereotypical conceptions of gender through products for children. Intertextuality is proposed as a tool to break gender stereotypes which are exemplified through the publication "Primer día de clase" that through poetry, seeks to subvert the construction of gender in early childhood, towards a more egalitarian and wider notion of gender.
