Geographies of Perpetration: Re-Signifying Cultural Narratives of Mass Violence

By Brigitte E. Jirku and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca.

This volume maps cultural representations of Mass Violence from the perpetrators’ perspective. It analyzes spaces where political crimes have been committed and how these places have undergone successive resemanticization in collective memories. The chapters comparatively examine scenes of Mass Violence carried out in very diverse regions of the globe, from the Third Reich to the Argentinian Dictatorship, from the Gulag to Francoist Spain, from the Cambodian genocide to terrorism. They explore, from a “cultural” point of view, how the events have been represented, i.e. visualized and narrated, and how the crime scenes have been reappropriated for the sake of memory, mourning, and prevention, in accordance with political, social, and ideological frameworks.

Brigitte E. Jirku is a professor of German Studies at the University of Valencia. Her research centers on the study of gender, especially in relation to discourses of power and violence, on literary spaces, and on the problematic victim-perpetrator paradigm in contemporary German literature.

Vicente Sánchez-Biosca is a professor of Visual Culture at the University of Valencia. He leads the research project From Spaces of Perpetration to Sites of Memory and has worked on the Spanish Civil War, the Shoah, and the Cambodian Genocide. His book La muerte en los ojos: qué perpetran las imágenes de perpetradores (2021) is a global study of perpetrator images.

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