Between Hope and Despair

Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma

Contributions by Rachel Baum, Deborah P. Britzman, Mario DiPaolantonio, Andrea Liss, Jody Ranck, Julie Salverson, Rinaldo Walcott Edited by Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, Claudia Eppert

Publication date:

15 March 2000

Length of book:

264 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780847694624

At the end of a century of unfathomable suffering, societies are facing anew the question of how events that shock, resist assimilation, and evoke contradictory and complex responses should be remembered. Between Hope and Despair specifically examines the pedagogical problem of how remembrance is to proceed when what is to be remembered is underscored by a logic difficult to comprehend and subversive of the humane character of existence. This pedagogical attention to practices of remembrance reflects the growing cognizance that hope for a just and compassionate future lies in the sustained, if troubled, working through of these issues.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Between Hope and Despair: The Pedagogical Encounter of Historical Rememberance
Chapter 2 1 The Paradoxical Practice of Zakhor: “Memories of That Which Has Never My Fault”
Chapter 3 2 If the Story Cannot End: Deferred Action, Ambivalence and Difficult Knowledge
Chapter 4 3 Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play about Landmines
Chapter 5 4 Standing in a Circle of Stone: Rupturing the Binds of Emblamatic Memory
Chapter 6 5 Never to Forget: Pedagogical Memory and Second Generation Witness
Chapter 7 6 Artifactual Testimonies and the Staging of Holocaust Memories
Chapter 8 7 Pedagogy and Trauma: The Middle
Passage, Slavery, and the Problem of Creolization
Chapter 9 8 Loss in Present Terms: Reading the Limits of Post-dictatorship Argentina's National Conciliation
Chapter 10 9 Beyond Reconciliation: Memory and Allerity in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Chapter 11 10 Re-Learning Questions: Responses to the Ethical Address of the Past and Present of Others
Chapter 12 Bibliography
Chapter 13 Index
Chapter 14 About the Editors and Contributors

This is a book that is at once masterful, disturbing, and passionate. The scholarship is meticulous and the analysis penetrating and insightful. The writers challenge us all to confront the enormity of evil as well as to celebrate the profoundly human impulse for redemption.