Description
Book SynopsisA personal memoir and examination of the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes, from rape to genocide, inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss.
Trade Review“[An] aching, concentric rumination on loss, in which writing through the aftermath leads to insights on letting go and holding on.”
—Karen Rigby Foreword Reviews
“A difficult, painful, and compelling book in which Levitt weaves a complex analysis of the materiality and meaningfulness of what remains of the quotidian (objects, clothing, detritus) as testimony and witness to trauma.”
—Elizabeth Castelli,author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making
“How does evidence function in the pursuit of justice? Laura Levitt was violently raped decades ago, and The Objects That Remain attends to the reverberations of that experience. Rare in her capacity to create a book both analytically rigorous and imaginatively capacious, Levitt here juxtaposes a remarkable range of events, objects, archives, and stories that she has gathered from extensive research. She tracks how official histories are told, and how she remembers what is lost and forever gone. As she does this work, the book turns toward a new horizon of justice and an underdetermined future.”
—Christina Crosby,author of A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain
“At times provocative and uncomfortable, yet persistently inquisitive, The Objects That Remain is an autobiographically framed investigation—a forensic search, if you will—for traces of evidence in the objects that carry sexual and state violence. The book is an imaginative rethinking of sensory knowledge across multiple scales and eras, and it marks a memorable contribution to cultural analyses of material artifacts as carriers of a crime and a silence.”
—Simone Gigliotti,editor of The Memorialization of Genocide
“The Objects That Remain . . . represents a tour de force and a significant contribution to Jewish studies and to feminist perspectives in religious studies more broadly.”
—Laura Kassar Canadian Jewish Studies
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Prelude: An Affection for Objects, A Memory of Blood
Introduction
Part I: Sacred Texts, The Red Parts
Chapter One: The Allure of Bloody Garments: A Medieval Interlude
Chapter Two: In the Poet’s Hand: The Red Parts
Chapter Three: In the Potter’s Hands: Containers of Loss
Part II: The Arts and Rites of Holding
Chapter Four: The Art of Custody: Police Property Management
Chapter Five: The Arts of Conservation and Collections Management
Chapter Six: Tending to Sacred Objects and Their Afterlives
Coda/Conclusion: Returning to Atlanta, Carrying On
Notes
Bibliography
Index
