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Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission

English and Comparative Literature, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia

Leo Spitzer

History, Columbia, Dartmouth

Focusing on a book of recipes and a miniature artists' book from the Terezín and Vapniarka concentration camps, this essay argues that such material remnants can serve as testimonial objects that carry memory traces from the past and embody the process of its transmission. Inspired by Roland Barthes's notion of the punctum, we read such testimonial objects as points of memory—points of intersection between past and present, memory and postmemory, personal and cultural recollection. They call for an expanded approach to testimony, one in which a consideration of gender can play an important interpretive role. Testimonial objects enable us to consider crucial questions about the past, about how the past comes down to us in the present, and about how gender figures in acts of memory and transmission.