itourist?

a paul antick edit: working on the symposium flyer with syd. title of the symposium was orginally ‘Journeys through the ‘holocaust’’. main reason for the ‘journeys through’ bit is that it allows – or at least justifies – our efforts at inclusivity. richard w hill is doing something on the genocide of native americans and we plan to screen elle flanders’ feature length movie, ‘zero degrees of separation’ which examines the israel/palestine conflict from the point of view of two gay couples living in israel (palestinian man with israeli man / palestinian woman with israeli woman). the word ‘holocaust’ is in parentheses in order to indicate a concern with the H/holocaust as a contemporary discursive and ideological phenomena, as opposed to the event itself, which is to say, the ‘Holocaust’. in other words the symposium, like the billboards, is concerned with representations of the Holocaust as opposed to the thing itself. having said all that i woke up in a panic at 2 this morning worried about the fact that the parentheses might be misconstrued. that they might be taken to mean that we are of the opinion that the Holocaust has only ever existed at the level of representation – that the thing itself never actually happened. i wrote to someone at the parkes institute for advice and they wisely, i think, advised me to get rid of the parentheses and convert the little ‘h’ to a big ‘H’. as he rightly said, ‘we could be inviting a lot of unnecessary hassle.’ although i agree, i can’t help feeling disappointed. that said, syd’s done a great job on the flyer.