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Preservationist Aesthetics: Memory, Trauma And The New Global Enclosures, Kate Lawless

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation is a comparative study of the role of memory in four intersecting spheres of contemporary cultural production: (memory) art, (war) photography, (trauma) literature and the (memory) museum. It argues that the sites of memory in this study—including museums of memory and human rights, the famous Sonderkommando photographs and experimental works in conceptual art and literature—are characterized by a preservationist aesthetic, which names the principle of preservation at the heart of new practices of cultural resistance and new forms of enclosure through which social, political and economic exploitation are reframed, as aesthetic problems, in terms of loss and erasure. …