On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency, Suzana Milevska (Ed.), Berlin: SternbergPress, 2015

 
 Suzana Milevska (Ed.)On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency

Texts by Tal Adler, Eva Blimlinger, Andrea B. Braidt, Jasmina Cibic, Das Kollektiv, Zsuzsi Flohr, Eduard Freudmann, Tímea Junghaus, Jakob Krameritsch, Jean-Paul Martinon, Suzana Milevska, Helge Mooshammer, Peter Mörtenböck, Trevor Ngwane, Karin Schneider, Primrose Sonti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Working Group Four Faces of Omarska

On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency prompts a unique crossdisciplinary inquiry into the productive potential of the affect of shame. This book contests the ontological understanding of shame and the psychoanalytical interpretation of it based on personal traumatic experiences linked to lack, loss, memory repression, and absence. Rather, the book builds on complex issues (initially proposed by Paul Gilroy) that concern the coming to terms with a grim colonial and imperial past: How can one deal with the personal and collective memories of “paralyzing guilt” after dreadful atrocities and genocides? How can such negative experiences be transformed into “productive shame” (not only for the perpetrators but also for the victims and witnesses)?

This collection of essays, discussions, and interviews reflects on the intersection of the historicity, materiality, and structures behind culturally constructed race and racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Romaism, and queer shame across different disciplines, fields, and theories (for example, in philosophy, art and art history, visual culture, architecture, curating, postcolonial history, gender and queer studies). Various case studies and artistic projects employing collaborative and participatory research methods are analyzed as practices that empower the process of turning shame into productive agency. The ensuing role of productive shame is to prevent the recurrence of the institutional structures, patterns, and events that are responsible and constitutive of racism, and has been contextualized in recent debates on political responsibility and reconciliation in Europe and Africa.

Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, vol. 16
Design by Surface

December 2015, English
16.5 x 22 cm, 264 pages, 41 color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-149-9
€22.00

Dr. Suzana Milevska is a theorist of visual art and culture and curator. From 2013-2015 she was the first Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. From 2010-2012 she taught art history and theory of visual art at the Faculty of Fine Arts – University Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje.  From 2008-2010 she taught fine arts and digital art at BA and MA level at the New-York University in Skopje and from 2008-2010 she taught art history and analysis of styles at the Accademia Italiana Skopje when she was also its Dean. From 2006 to 2008, she was the Director of the Center for Visual and Cultural Research at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Institute “Euro-Balkan” in Skopje and she taught Visual Culture to M.A. students in Gender Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College in London (2006) where she taught from 2003 to 2005. In 2004, she was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Library of Congress. . In 2004, she was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Library of Congress. Her curatorial project The Renaming Machine (2008-2010) focused on the politics of renaming and overwriting memory in art and visual culture.  In 2010 and 2011 she curated two exhibitions of contemporary art by Roma artists, Roma Protocol at the Austrian Parliament (Wiener Festwochen), and Call the Witness, BAK Utrecht which was basis for the exhibition by the same title at Roma Pavilion - a collateral event at the 54 Venice Biennale. Recently she published the book Gender Difference in the Balkans (Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2010) and edited The Renaming Machine (Ljubljana: P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute, 2010).

http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1633&l=en&bookId=526&sort