Between Hope and Despair Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma

This is a book that is at once masterful, disturbing, and passionate. The scholarship is meticulous and the analysis penetrating and insightful. The writers challenge us all to confront the enormity of evil as well as to celebrate the profoundly human impulse for redemption. -- David E. Purpel, University of North Carolina, Greensboro These wide-ranging, courageous essays on the impact of the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and other instances of political terror and mass violence, acknowledge the limits of the social and psychological remedies that can be drawn from remembering the past. At the same time, through a close and intensive study of testimonies, memoirs, fiction (including second-generation witness), and other modes of story telling they scrupulously analyze the possibility of working-through recent trauma. The essayists jointly advocate a new direction, which they call the pedagogical rather than strategic practice of memorialization. -- Geoffrey Hartman, Project Director, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Between Hope and Despair is a well-documented, scholarly work... The editors of [the book] should indeed be commended for offering us such a wonderful collection. Journal Of Curriculum Studies An exceptionally smart collection of essays. Jac Shoshana Felman observed that the unprecedented teaching possibilities opened up by the 'revolutionary pedagogy of psychoanalysis' have never been fully grasped or utilized in the classroom. The contributors to this collection and other educators now exploring the relations between history, trauma, and teaching, have begun that work. Their efforts lay the groundwork for nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of 'multicultural education' and teaching about and across social and cultural difference. -- Elizabeth Ellsworth, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin, Madison