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In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the \"special squads,\" composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these \"Scrolls of Auschwitz,\" which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp's liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

The documents commonly referred to as the \"Scrolls of Auschwitz\" comprise a variety of writings composed by members of the Sonderkommando, a group of predominantly Jewish prisoners who were tasked with the smooth-running of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The writings, which were penned in a period between 1943 and 1944, were produced for a variety of reasons but principally to bear witness to the horrors of the extermination-camp. Here, Chare considers the differing ways in which conservators anthropomorphize artefacts and the changes they are subject to over time. He also considers how Zalmen Gradowski's ideas about materials can provide insights into conservation practices in relation to the Scrolls.

The artist Edith Kiss (1905–1966) was deported from Hungary to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. After liberation, she returned to Hungary and created a series of 30 gouache paintings portraying her experiences. These artworks, which were exhibited in 1945 as Deportation, have so far attracted little attention. This scholarly essay will analyze the insights Deportation and other oeuvres by Kiss can provide on Jewish identity and experience at Ravensbrück. Deportation is compared with representations of Ravensbrück made by the French political prisoners France Audoul, Jeannette L’Herminier, and Violette Rougier-Lecoq.

Colour permeates contemporary visual and material culture and affects our senses beyond the superficial encounter by infiltrating our perceptions and memories and becoming deeply rooted in thought processes that categorise and divide along culturally constructed lines. Colour exists as a cultural as well as psycho-physical phenomenon and acquires a multitude of meanings within differing historical and cultural contexts. The contributors examine how colour becomes imbued with specific symbolic and material meanings that tint our constructions of race, gender, ideal bodies, the relationship of the self to others and of the self to technology and the built environment. By highlighting the relationship of colour across media and material culture, this volume reveals the complex interplay of cultural connotations, discursive practices and socio-psychological dynamics of colour in an international context.

[...]I turn to contemporary efforts to attest to the thylacine, analysing Julia Leigh's (1999) novel The Hunter and its film adaptation, also titled The Hunter (Dir. Daniel Nettheim, Australia, 2011), through the prism of improvisation as a necessary component of ethical witnessing.The archive formed of their remains incarnating a substantial disavowal of loss.12 The International Thylacine Specimen Database (ITSD), with its catalogue of skins, skeletons, skulls, soft tissue and mounts, materials that are held in over a hundred collections spread across over twenty countries, details this archive of body parts.Truganini (also Trugernanner and Trukanini), historically (yet erroneously) thought by some to be the last full-blooded Aboriginal Tasmanian, was shocked by the treatment of William Lanne's body after his death and voiced concern that a museum would also want to take possession of her body when she died.Lanne, popularly viewed at the time as the last male Aboriginal Tasmanian, was dismembered with the aim of using his body for \"scientific purposes\" and body parts (his head) were stolen to this end.14 After her death, Truganini was initially buried in a cemetery but her remains were later exhumed in the interests of science.

This conversation with Griselda Pollock, Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, UK, focuses on her most recent book, Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory (New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 2018). The latter provides new readings of Leben ? oder Theater ? (Life ? or Theater ?), the artistic project of the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943), who painted as CS — the cipher the artist purposely used to disguise both her gender and her ethnicity — thus challenging previous interpretations that treat this remarkable intermedial work as straightforwardly autobiographical.

This essay builds on Jacques Rancière's exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and politics to analyse queer sexuality in Don Siegel's prison film Escape from Alcatraz . The film both illustrates and embodies what Rancière refers to as a redistribution of the sensible, an opening up of a new way of making sense of the world. In Escape from Alcatraz this sense-making is bound up with same-sex desire. Rancière is usually concerned with aesthetic practices linked to class struggle. This essay, however, examines how Rancière's ideas are also illuminating in relation to subjugated sexual experiences.