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"The Visuality/Visibility of "Holocaust": How Trauma Disappears"
Daniel F. Schowalter
This essay explores the conspicuous gap between representations of the Shoah and representations of the American Indian Holocaust. While there are a great many similarities between the two traumatic moments, the profound differences in the contexts, forms, and functions of their images--and the ways in which meaning is crafted from them--present some interesting and challenging questions. In short, unlike the Shoah, the American Indian Holocaust lacks an "autonomous" collection of images. There are no "ready made" icons to invoke the trauma, no images with the cultural currency to make that indexical move. In fact, relative the Shoah, the American Indian Holocaust can claim no images "as its own." With these problems in mind, this essay offers critiques of several American Indian Holocaust images, including James Earle Fraser's "The End of the Trail" and photographs of those slaughtered at Wounded Knee. The readings explore some of the tensions between these images and other more familiar atrocity images from the Shoah as well as the unique features of images of death generally. When reading photographs of living people, (e.g., survivors during the liberation of the camps), the viewer is always forced to imagine what the subjects' lives were like, to imagine them as moving, sentient beings with consciousness, politics, lived experiences and mystery. With photographs of death, however, the viewer is not prompted to ponder the lives of the people depicted, only the moment of death. The significance of this absence of impending death in such photos is also explored.
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