A Mobile Holocaust:
Testimony and the Spatial Turn

November 14, 2014 at 4:00 PM Pacific Time

A public lecture by Simone Gigliotti (Senior Lecturer at Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand)
Center Visiting Scholar, Fall 2014

Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research

How can analyses of Holocaust witnessing be approached in spatial terms? This talk draws primarily on the USC Shoah Foundation testimony of two Holocaust-era witnesses with postwar profiles of testimony giving – a slave laborer in a death brigade, and a ghetto internee who survived on false papers. It reports on an analytical effort to identify criteria for “spatial experience” in their testimonies, and then situates this coding effort in the spatial turn in Holocaust studies and the geo-humanities, arguing for a methodologically flexible approach to analyzing Holocaust video-testimony in spatial terms while recognizing the incomplete and performative, embodied act of this testimonial genre. Finally, it provides a short critique of the potential and challenges of analyzing video-testimony as untapped spatial metadata of the crime of genocide.