Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain: Mass Mediation, Rhetoric, Interpellation

In what ways is Holocaust Memorial Day commemorated in Britain?

In order to make sense of Britain and its Holocaust cultures, this book analyses data and discourses from multiple sites: fifteen years of TV and radio programmes broadcast ‘to mark’ Holocaust Memorial Day; the national Commemoration Ceremony in the four years it has been broadcast on British television, both as a whole as well as rhetorical analysis of specific speakers; participant observation of three Holocaust Memorial Day Trust workshops; interviews with participants and organisers of all these workshops; and an embodied and emplaced rhetorical ethnography of a later national Commemoration Ceremony.

Commemorative events play a subtle role in the garnering of public consensus and are tied to collective identity, politics and power in complex and mutually informed ways. Across 10 chapters, Richardson adopts a discourse analytic approach, and focuses on the rhetorical, normative and affective dimensions of Holocaust commemoration, exploring these issues in close detail.