This book explores the pedagogical possibilities of testimony and witnessing. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, this book highlights the ultimate impossibility of witnessing and testimony: testimonies do not stand outside language, history, politics, or capitalist systems. Through analysis of different aspects of representation, subjectivity and emotions, this book illustrates how testimonies can be used as a way to control student emotions, perceptions and understandings. Testimonies used within teaching can work as a way to reproduce stereotypes of suffering, and can thus consolidate and reinforce exisiting power structures and identities. By exploring these difficulties, the author argues for the value of teaching historical testimonies of suffering that recognize both the impossibilities and possibilities of witnessing and testimony.​ “Marie Hållander has provided an indispensable guide to re-thinking the pedagogical possibilities of witnessing and testimonies, essential reading for anyone interested in how to approach these topics both critically and pedagogically. Through a lucid theoretical synthesis, this book re-inscribes a dynamic pedagogical dimension into the topics of witnessing and testimony, which have been dominated by historians, psychologists and literary critics. Thinking through the theoretical challenges of witnessing and testimony yet using powerful examples from teaching, Hållander develops a forceful analysis that shows the profound implications of these topics for pedagogical practice.” —Michalinos Zembylas, Open University of Cyprus, Cyprus “Timely and topical, this fascinating book complicates approaches to witnessing, suffering and testimony without diminishing the pedagogical, historical and political significance of sharing, or harkening to, one’s experience. It is a powerful, original and valuable contribution in its field, not only because it weaves its themes in a diligent, reflective and critical manner, but also because it has its own, unique perspective and sensibilities, as these emerge from erudite combination of narrative, pedagogy and philosophy.” —Marianna Papastephanou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

The Holocaust presents an immense challenge to those who would represent it or teach it through fiction, film, or historical accounts. Even the testimonies of those who were there provide only a glimpse of the disaster to those who were not. Between Witness and Testimony investigates the difficulties inherent in the obligation to bear witness to events that seem not just unspeakable but also unthinkable. The authors examine films, fictional narratives, survivor testimonies, and the museums at Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in order to establish an ethics of Holocaust representation. Traversing the disciplines of history, philosophy, religious studies, and literary and cultural theory, the authors suggest that while no account adequately provides access to what Adorno called "the extremity that eludes the concept," we are still obliged to testify, to put into language what history cannot contain.

In this unique collection, Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub examine the nature and function of memory and the act of witnessing, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. Moving from the literary to the visual, from the artistic to the autobiographical, and from the psychoanalytic to the historical, the book defines for the first time the trauma of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing "the unprecedented historical occurrence of...an event eliminating its own witness." Through the alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, the authors focus on the henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event, literature and evidence, speech and survival, witnessing and ethics.

Performing Pedagogy examines the theory and practice of performance art as an art of politics. It discusses the different ways in which performance artists use memory and cultural history to critique dominant cultural assumptions, to construct identity, and to attain political agency. In doing so, Garoian argues, performance artists like Rachel Rosenthal, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Robbie McCauley, Suzanne Lacy, and the performance art collective Goat Island engage in the practice of critical citizenship and radical forms of democracy that have significant implications for teaching in the schools. Finally, Garoian contextualizes performance art pedagogy within his own cultural work to illustrate how his own memory and cultural history have informed his production of performance art works and his classroom teaching practices.

During the twentieth century, witnessing grew to be not just a widespread solution for coping with political atrocities but also an intricate problem. As the personal experience of victims, soldiers, and aid workers acquired unparalleled authority as a source of moral and political truth, the capacity to generate adequate testimonies based on this experience was repeatedly called into question. Michal Givoni's book follows the trail of the problems, torments, and crises that became commingled with witnessing to genocide, disaster, and war over the course of the twentieth century. By juxtaposing episodes of reflexive witnessing to the Great War, the Jewish Holocaust, and third world emergencies, The Care of the Witness explores the shifting roles and responsibilities of witnesses in history and the contribution that the troubles of witnessing made to the ethical consolidation of the witness as the leading figure of nongovernmental politics.

Among sources on the Holocaust, survivor testimonies are the least replaceable and most complex, reflecting both the personality of the narrator and the conditions and perceptions prevailing at the time of narration. Scholars, despite their aim to challenge memory and fill its gaps, often use testimonies uncritically or selectively-mining them to support generalizations. This book represents a departure, bringing Holocaust experts Atina Grossmann, Konrad Kwiet, Wendy Lower, J?rgen Matth?us, and Nechama Tec together to analyze the testimony of one Holocaust survivor. Born in Bratislava at the end of World War I, Helen "Zippi" Spitzer Tichauer was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. One of the few early arrivals to survive the camp and the death marches, she met her future husband in a DP camp, and they moved to New York in the 1960s. Beginning in 1946, Zippi devoted many hours to talking with a small group of scholars about her life. Her wide-ranging interviews are uniquely suited to raise questions on the meaning and use of survivor testimony. What do we know today about the workings of a death camp? How willing are we to learn from the experiences of a survivor, and how much is our perception preconditioned by standardized images? What are the mechanisms, aims, and pitfalls of storytelling? Can survivor testimonies be understood properly without guidance from those who experienced the events? This book's new, multifaceted approach toward Zippi's unique story combined with the authors' analysis of key aspects of Holocaust memory, its forms and its functions, makes it a rewarding and fascinating read.

Five Pedagogies, A Thousand Possibilities aims at providing the groundwork for articulating sites of enriching pedagogies so that critical hope and the possibility of transformation may stay alive.