Awkward Objects: Expanding the Boundaries of the Holocaust Archive

For the last thirty years, Holocaust Studies has grappled with "the limits of Holocaust representation." 1 Yet despite a range of impactful formal experiments to visualize genocide 2 and expand the accepted categories of Holocaust witnessing, 3 the realm of Holocaust testimony is still neither impartial nor fully encompassing.While the field has paid substantial attention to some forms of witnessing and celebrated them as valuable sources of knowledge, it has marginalized other forms; discarded them as unreliable, unworthy, incidental, and bizarre; and overlooked potential domains for systematic scholarly scrutiny even when they existed in full public view.Holocaust representations that appeared during the war or were produced in its aftermath-such as folk or "nave" art, hand-drawn maps, three-dimensional dioramas, sketches accompanying oral testimony, graffiti and wall-markings, as well as vernacular camp verse and laborers' often coarse chants-exemplify "awkward" documents that scholars have disregarded as oddities and thus relegated outside of mainstream Holocaust discourse.This special issue reconsiders the boundaries of the established Holocaust archive by exploring sources that occupy the blurred edges of acceptability.While the progressive inclusion of a widening array of testimonial forms has characterized the development of Holocaust Studies 4 -as has the expansion of the witness category, 5 most recently extending even beyond human subjects 6 -researchers have yet to fully exhaust the landscape of potential source materials.Unacknowledged Holocaust curiosa and varia challenge us to further consider what counts as a legitimate historical document or representation.By fostering more complex and fully plural perspectives, such nontraditional documents can also serve as vehicles to critically assess the ethics of how the history of the Holocaust is written.Recent calls to reassess power relations and partialities in Western epistemology and parallel efforts to reclaim marginalized knowledge inspire our approach.By illuminating overlooked voices, genres, and objects, we aim to expand and further democratize the Holocaust archive, pushing