This dissertation investigates the relation between collective memories of violence and contemporary sites of injustice. With the emergence of global memory discourses, cultural memory has become a vital new site of conflict, political contestation and potential dialogue between disparate experiences of violence. In this context, my primary theoretical argument is that an ethics of memory requires creating connections between historical violence and new dimensions of suffering. My methodological goal is to create a framework for analyzing the politically equivocal mobilizations of particular memories of violence. For while the memory of historical violence can play a critical role in confronting contemporary injustice, it can also function as a powerful means of reproducing identity-based violence in the present. The first three chapters build a theoretical and methodological framework for evaluating traumatic cultural memory and draw heavily on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin. Chapters Four and Five elaborate these theoretical stakes in relation to two sites of Holocaust memory that illuminate the political dilemmas and ethical possibilities of traumatic cultural memory. I begin with a highly contested site: mobilizations of Holocaust memory in relation to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I investigate traumatic cultural memory in a wide variety of Israeli memory-sites, including Israel's Declaration of Independence, highly publicized Holocaust trials, Knesset debates and political demonstrations. I proceed to analyze a series of Holocaust monuments and counter-memorials in Germany. These sites, I argue, provide a basis for explaining the ways that specific communication technologies transform historical memory into public spaces---spaces in which historical memory can be brought into critical dialogue with contemporary violence and injustice.;By looking at how cultural memory spatializes a history of violence, this dissertation hopes to clarify and further the ethical promise of memory to combat contemporary injustice. The hope which motivates my work is the possibility of historical identification with the dead that is transformed into a geographic solidarity with contemporary others. I define this transformation as a new time-space of political agency: where a temporal ethics becomes a spatial politics through the globalization of memory discourses.
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