Description

---

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.

About the Author

---

DORA APEL is the W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair Professor Emerita in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her many books include Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob and Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (both Rutgers University Press).
 

Praise For…

---

"Calling Memory into Place is written out of a deep conviction in the emancipatory and reparative potentials of memory. Building on the trauma and the resilience inherited from her mother’s survival of the Holocaust, Dora Apel powerfully explores how memorials, visual artworks, and personal narratives of illness and recovery can mobilize us in the struggle for social justice."
— Marianne Hirsch

"In this deeply personal and thoughtful book, Dora Apel explores what it means to recall terrible events and what is at stake in forgetting them. She shows us that artworks, memorials and monuments, however fixed they may be in their form, are also malleable in their meaning when they are mobilized by individuals, communities and governments. Whether she is writing about recent attempts to reckon with America’s legacy of racial violence, the dilemmas that arise from efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, or her own struggle with cancer, Apel’s approach is always lucid, empathic and moving."
— Coco Fusco

"An inherently fascinating, thoughtful and thought-provoking series of insightfully informative essays on the role of memory in processing personal, social, cultural and political histories, Calling Memory into Place is an impressive and original work that is nicely illustrated throughout in full color." 
— Midwest Book Review

"Apel brings it all to bear in this extraordinary book."
— PopMatters

"The Best Books of 2020: Non-Fiction"
— PopMatters, The Best Books of 2020: Nonfiction

The Library Café interview with Dora Apel
— The Library Cafe