Sites That Haunt: Affects and Non-sites of Memory

Figure 1 from: Muchowski J (2021) Vernacular historical practices on Holocaust non-sites of memory in Poland. International Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 37-44. https://doi.org/10.3897/hmc.1.63351

“…Our research is based on the assumption that these sites are important components of local memory cultures: unburied bodies affect activities of people living in the area and trigger memory practices. We describe them as non-sites of memory following Claude Lanzmann's refiguration of Pierre Nora's term (Lanzmann 1990;Sendyka 2015Sendyka , 2016Sendyka , 2017a. The field work on non-sites of memory referring to genocidal violence in the 1930's and 40's was conducted in various locations in Poland in 2016-2018.…”

“…The goal of my analysis is to describe these practices, discuss their critical potential, and indicate their distinct features as activities pertaining to contested sites of memory. I found a central instrument for approaching this task in concepts of "non-site of memory" and "vernacular historian" as introduced to the debate by Claude Lanzmann (and further elaborated by Roma Sendyka) (Lanzmann 1990;Sendyka 2016) and Lyle Dick (Dick 2010a(Dick , 2010b(Dick , 2013. The term 'non-site of memory' is a critical extension of Pierre Nora's sites of memory and refers to sites of violence whose forms of commemoration are questioned by local residents or other groups with an interest in the sites' past 1 .…”

Testimoniality: A lexicon of witnesses of Holocaust non-sites of memory in Poland

“…And it is precisely testimoniality, świadeczność -the disposition to bear witness and to be a witness -that we would like to discuss in the context of unmemorialised sites of violence, so common in Polish and Eastern European landscape, related to the Holocaust, Romani genocide and ethnic conflicts during World War II. Roma Sendyka (2015Sendyka ( , 2016 dubbed these abandoned post-violence localisations "non-sites of memory", expanding the term used by Claude Lanzmann in the context of post-camp and post-ghetto sites. As Sendyka argues, the category of "non-site of memory" proves to be especially useful in case of localisations that witnessed dispersed violence in Eastern-Central Europe, such as "Holocaust by bullets" and third phase of the Holocaust.…”

Figure 4 from: Szczepan A, Siewior K (2021) Necrocartography: Topographies and topologies of non-sites of memory. International Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 13-24. https://doi.org/10.3897/hmc.1.63418

“…This inadequacy takes the form of a sense of being lost without a reason and an irrational sense of the ineffectiveness of tools available to help us find these locations. Roma Sendyka (2015Sendyka ( , 2016, dubbes such places non-sites of memory: they are dispersed locations of various genocides, ethnic cleansings, and other similarly motivated acts of violence. They constitute entities that undermine the binary divisions between life and death, human and unhuman, culture and nature, past and present, organic and non-organic, and evoke affective resonance.…”