Graphic Representations of the Holocaust and the Middle East: Textual Spaces of Memory

This thesis examines five texts which explore what it means to live with or live within the memory of war and violence. The texts in question are Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Shoah directed by Claude Lanzmann, Waltz with Bashir directed by Ari Folman, Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza and The Photographer, by Didier Lefèvre, Frédéric Lemercier and Emmanuel Guibert. These texts work with comics, film and animation to generate new documentary forms in response to the unique challenges of their subject matter. I examine the way these texts balance the need for documentarian, the need to acknowledge and represent traumatic memory and imagination, and the need to address the pressurised interrelations of collective memory and contemporary politics. My analysis begins with the relations between memory and visuality in Maus and Shoah and develops these frameworks to show the influence of Holocaust representation upon other sites of conflict. In doing so, I explore the ways that trauma and postmemory set the terms for both modern representations of the Holocaust and connected but later territorial violence. I work towards an analysis which encompasses these themes within a human rights framework in order to show how the paradoxes of humanitarianism in a post 9/11 context require new form of representational witnessing.