Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism and the Holocaust considers how we remember historical instances of suffering and atrocity, framing its central questions to reflect larger cultural shifts in how we position ourselves in relation to history, performance, and memory.
In her introduction, “Theorizing a Holocaust Performative,” Patraka explores the use of the term “Holocaust” in both its historical specificity and its connection to other genocides. The idea of a “Holocaust performative” invokes the ongoing struggle to mark, articulate, and define the horrific events and absences to which we are accountable. The chapter, “Shattered Cartographies” uses Hayden White’s theories of history to analyse larger tropes that inform theatrical representations of the Holocaust. Roger Griffin’s and Slavoj Zizek’s analyses of fascism and anti-Semitism illuminate the larger rubrics that configure fascist practice. “Reproduction, Appropriation, and Binary Machinery” further investigates ways to stage the machinery of fascist ideology as theorised by Saul Friedlander, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Alice Yaeger Kaplan. “Feminism and the Jewish Subject” considers how feminist reading strategies intersect with Holocaust theatre and performance by women. It deploys Donna Haraway’s and Katie King’s mappings of feminism to introduce Jewish feminism and its relation to Holocaust history. In “Realism, Gender, and Historical Crisis” the author compares Lillian Hellman’s 1941 play Watch on the Rhine to the “Julie” section of Pentimento. A gendered version of Brechtian historicization demonstrates how history, nation, and democracy are configured in a contemporary crisis brought on by fascism. “Theatre of Injury and Injustice” foregrounds staging the body in pain and atrocity, bringing to bear genres that depict physical pain other than theatre and performance to do so. Theories by Jean Francois Lyotard and Elaine Scarry frame a discussion of pain and genocide that is further enlarged by ideas articulated by Klaus Theweleit and Julia Kristeva. “Performing Presence, Absence, and Witness at U. S. Holocaust Museums” opens out issues mentioned throughout the book to new arenas and to the broader frame of performance studies. Using Michel de Certeau’s distinction between “place” and “space,” it evolves a model of museum as site for the performance of witness.
Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism and the Holocaust explores the struggle to represent the unrepresentable landscape of the Holocaust and urges scholars from a variety of disciplines to re-think how we remember historical instances of suffering and atrocity. The book surveys texts ranging from plays and performances to films and museums, situating them at the cross-roads of theatre and performance studies, Holocaust studies, and Jewish cultural studies.