Calling Memory into Place

by Dora Apel

How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forgetting? And how can inherited family and cultural traumas be channeled in productive ways?   In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer.   These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations.

248 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 17, 2020

Reviews

[Edward Hillel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous life-affirming journey with author Dora Apel. It’s a powerful work of art, a journey into the self and into the world. Melding of personal memoir, historical memory and collective traumas with visual notations and discussions about memory, the body, place and images are seamless and beautifully executed, and each chapter could be developed into their own book. Of course the most searing element is the discussion of illness, first Hannah Wilke’s and then the author's own cancer. On a couple of occasions I found myself thinking: has Oprah seen this? It’s a book that can be appreciated by a wide spectrum of readers.

[Scotch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Visual art, in particular photography and contemporary memorials, offer a way for buried history to speak through our bodies and feelings—despite difference. Apel writes with passion about a more critical view on history that moves us towards solidarity and social change. This is particular urgent when, as in the case of Israel/Palestine and the current rise of US white supremacy, history and its very real traumas are weaponized as justification for new division, oppression, and violence.

Apel’s chapters on her mother’s death and Apel’s breast cancer treatment flowed seamlessly but felt conceptually tangential at first. But I now see these as a personal story of the lasting effects of historical trauma in the author’s life and body, pain and love, and context for her deepening perspective and passion for history and art.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a very heartening thing to have read both Guy Stern's autobiography and Dora Apel's superbly crafted and executed study. Everything she creates is golden, in my view (and I have had the honor to recommend previous books by Dora for Wayne State awards), but here Dora deliberately mixes careful scholarly research with starkly personal essays about her family and herself. While all the chapters are a delight in different ways, parts 4 & 5 spoke to me particularly.