Imagination, performance and affect: a critical pedagogy of the Holocaust?

Based on video testimony interviews held in the Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History archive and the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre’s archive, this paper examines Holocaust survivor testimony as it relates to their return to the sites of atrocity, particularly Auschwitz-Birkenau. It analyses how survivor’s (re) encounters with material and imaginative landscapes reveals conceptions of, inter alia, agency, community, absence and belonging in the performance of self. It uses these tensions between landscapes of the past and present to develop the theoretical relationship between performativity and ideas of affect. In doing so, it explores how these ideas can be used to engage students in a critical pedagogy of the Holocaust through analysis of survivor video-testimony and in visiting landscapes of the Holocaust.