Seminar by Ana Dragojlovic | ‘Violent histories and embodied memories: Affectivity of ‘The Look of Silence’

This article brings together scholarly literature of the body, embodied memories, and bodily affectivity in order to analyse effects of the historical mass violence on the children of survivors. My focus is on Indische children whose parents remained in Indonesia after its decolonization, and were imprisoned and tortured during the mass violence of 1965–1966. I explore how parental experiences of the violence that took place in 1965-1966 and of those experienced earlier in Japanese internment camps during the occupation of Indonesia (1942-1945) ‘entered our house’, as expressed by the children. Based on detailed personal narratives collected in 2014 with these children now living as adults in the Netherlands I analyse effects of the ‘The Look of Silence’ (2014), a documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and its capacity to animate embodied memories of violence.

Dr. Ana Dragojlovic is an anthropologist working at the intersections of mobility, post-colonial and critical race studies, memory studies, feminist and queer theory and masculinity studies. She is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Beyond Bali: Subaltern Citizens and Post-Colonial Intimacy, Amsterdam University Press 2016.

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