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1. Who Do I Remember For? Memory as Genre and Dark Pleasures of Trauma Witnessing

  • Petar Odak (author)
Chapter of: (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War(pp. 27–47)

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Metadata
Title1. Who Do I Remember For?
SubtitleMemory as Genre and Dark Pleasures of Trauma Witnessing
ContributorPetar Odak (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0383.01
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0383/chapters/10.11647/obp.0383.01
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightPetar Odak
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-04-22
Long abstractThere is a lot written on trauma-witnessing and childhood memories, very often in tandem. I am entering this discussion by engaging with two questions that have not been addressed extensively within the field of memory/trauma studies: (1) In which ways and from what places are memories being structured even before they come to be ‘our’ memories? In other words, can we talk of memory as a genre?; and (2) What kinds of dark pleasures are derived from trauma-witnessing―both from the side of the witness-teller and from the side of the listener? Finally: How are these two questions connected, and what does their intersection tell us about the possibilities and limits of memory-writing? This chapter is very personal; for, in it, I try to grapple with my own uneasiness when faced with these questions in the context of a memory-writing workshop. It is also a chapter that tries to contextualize its conclusions within the wider frame of memory-writing processes of different kinds.
Page rangepp. 27–47
Print length21 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Petar Odak

(author)
Visiting Teaching Fellow at Al-Quds University

Petar Odak was born in the last years of Yugoslavia, witnessing its violent dissolution firsthand, and spending his formative years in the seemingly never-ending post/socialist transition to something worse. His recently defended PhD project (in Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna and at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University) revolves around different emanations of the ghosts of socialist pasts within the post/socialist affective capitalism. Therefore, the essay in this volume comes as a result of a very needed personal, political, and professional self-reflection. Currently, he is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at Humanities and Practicing Arts Programs at Al-Quds Bard College in Jerusalem, Palestine.

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