Ezra Sharpe from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford is the winner of the 2023 prize for Best Undergraduate Dissertation for their project entitled: Infernal music and the silent burrow: fabulating the archive to explore the spaces and sounds of the human during the Holocaust.

Many congratulations Ezra on a fantastic project! It was an exceptionally strong field this year, with submissions from Criminology, Politics, Art History, Law, and Geography. The assessment committee were impressed by the originality of the topic and theoretical approach on the role of sound in the meanings ascribed to being ‘human’ within the necropolitical spaces of the Holocaust. The thesis successfully draws from Derrida, Agamben, Mbembe and Arendt to examine how sound intersected with speciesism and created bestialising and bestial camp spaces where the Jewish subject would be negated the humanly capacity for logos. It also distinguishes the camps from the Kafkaesque ‘burrow’ hiding places and demonstrates how the necropolitical burden was lived in everyday spaces. We also noted the original engagement with Sadiya Hartman’s work and its potential for contributing to carceral geographers working with archives and with events that included erasure of testimony.

Overall, the thesis demonstrates the ability to engage in original and cutting edge research. Congratulations and well done Ezra! The Prize awards £50 and the opportunity to present research at our Early Career Perspectives in Carceral Geography seminar series.

Dissertation Title: Infernal music and the silent burrow: fabulating the archive to explore the spaces and sounds of the human during the Holocaust.

Abstract

This dissertation uses sound as an analytical code to explore the meanings ascribed to being ‘human’ within the necropolitical spaces of the Holocaust. As an intervention on Giorgio Agamben’s thesis on the camp, I argue that an appreciation of sound and logos helps to unearth the topological realities of life in the Auschwitz and Theresienstadt camp archipelagos. More specifically, I draw on Derrida’s theory of zoopolitics to suggest that sound and speciesism intersected to create bestialising and bestial camp spaces. Here, I argue, the Jewish subject would be rendered into the cannibalising barbarian with no humanly capacity for logos. Situating this work in the turn towards vertical space in geographical scholarship, I also examine Kafkaesque ‘burrow’ hiding places to grapple with the necropolitical burden on everyday spaces during the Holocaust. Conceptualising the burrow as a space of absolute exclusion distinct from the camp, I argue, reveals flaws in Agamben’s universalising narrative on the spaces of exception. To make such arguments, I deal with three different archival bodies: published testimonies written by Holocaust survivors, The Wiener Holocaust Library, and the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive. In dealing with these sources, I was forced to con front the limits of what can be known in an archive where the stories of the ‘real’ witnesses remain closed and unthumbed for all of time. Embracing a new creative tradition of critical fabulation unsettles de-subjectification and paves the way for a lively encounter with the Holocaust archive.