(Re)Made in America: Survivorship after the Shoah

Abstract

Until the l970s, ‘survivor’ referred predominantly to individuals who outlived others in the aftermath of disaster, or stood to inherit the remains of an estate; it was not imbued with evaluative connotations. In the United States today, however, survivorship abounds with positive meanings. This transvaluation rests on three intersecting trajectories that together transformed survivorship from denoting that one sustained or was spared a hardship to signifying a superior social status. The first trajectory follows the aftermath of the Shoah, when survivors acquired moral authority as victims of and public witnesses to a new violation, ‘crimes against humanity’. The second tracks the stigmatization of the term ‘victim’ in American public discourse. A consequence of struggles over the welfare state and other progressive policies, victimhood is now associated less with specific harms or injuries, and more with the supposed negative attributes of the victim herself. The third traces how survivorship became integral to the recuperative strategies of new therapeutic disciplines addressing the traumatized – from war veterans and rape victims to cancer patients. These three processes coalesced to create and legitimize a hierarchical opposition between ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’, transforming these terms into political categories and emblems of personal and group identity. In this essay, I argue that the victim/survivor binary constitutes one juncture where neoliberalism converges with Trump-era populism.