Download or read book Memory and Complicity written by Debarati Sanyal and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of violence, namely that of colonialism. These works produced what Debarati Sanyal calls a “memory-in-complicity” attuned to the gray zones that implicate different regimes of violence across history as well as those of different subject positions such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator. Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity develops an inquiry into the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than affect based discourses of trauma, shame and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work? As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.
Download or read book Political Violence and the Imagination written by Mathias Thaler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a variety of theoretical reflections and empirically grounded case studies, this book examines how certain kinds of imagination – political, artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to various forms of political violence. Understanding political violence is a complex task, which involves a variety of operations, from examining the social macro-structures within which actors engage in violence, to investigating the motives and drives of individual perpetrators. This book focuses on the faculty of imagination and its role in facilitating our normative and critical engagement with political violence. It interrogates how the imagination can help us deal with past as well as ongoing instances of political violence. Several questions, which have thus far received too little attention from political theorists, motivate this project: Can certain forms of imagination – artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to unprecedented forms of violence? What is the ethical and political value of artworks depicting human rights violations in the aftermath of conflicts? What about the use of thought experiments in justifying policy measures with regard to violence? What forms of political imagination can foster solidarity and catalyse political action? This book opens up a forum for an inclusive and reflexive debate on the role that the imagination can play in unpacking complex issues of political violence. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
Download or read book Northern Light written by Kazim Ali and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the lingering effects of a hydroelectric power station on Pimicikamak sovereign territory in Manitoba, Canada. The child of South Asian migrants, Kazim Ali was born in London, lived as a child in the cities and small towns of Manitoba, and made a life in the United States. As a man passing through disparate homes, he has never felt he belonged to a place. And yet, one day, the celebrated poet and essayist finds himself thinking of the boreal forests and lush waterways of Jenpeg, a community thrown up around the building of a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River, where he once lived for several years as a child. Does the town still exist, he wonders? Is the dam still operational? When Ali goes searching, however, he finds not news of Jenpeg, but of the local Pimicikamak community. Facing environmental destruction and broken promises from the Canadian government, they have evicted Manitoba’s electric utility from the dam on Cross Lake. In a place where water is an integral part of social and cultural life, the community demands accountability for the harm that the utility has caused. Troubled, Ali returns north, looking to understand his place in this story and eager to listen. Over the course of a week, he participates in community life, speaks with Elders and community members, and learns about the politics of the dam from Chief Cathy Merrick. He drinks tea with activists, eats corned beef hash with the Chief, and learns about the history of the dam, built on land that was never ceded, and Jenpeg, a town that now exists mostly in his memory. In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power?and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to. Praise for Northern Light An Outside Magazine Favorite Book of 2021 A Book Riot Best Book of 2021 A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2021 “Ali’s gift as a writer is the way he is able to present his story in a way that brings attention to the myriad issues facing Indigenous communities, from oil pipelines in the Dakotas to border walls running through Kumeyaay land.” —San Diego Union-Tribune “A world traveler, not always by choice, ponders the meaning and location of home. . . . A graceful, elegant account even when reporting on the hard truths of a little-known corner of the world.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Ali’s] experiences are relayed in sensitive, crystalline prose, documenting how Cross Lake residents are working to reinvent their town and rebuild their traditional beliefs, language, and relationships with the natural world. . . . Though these topics are complex, they are untangled in an elegant manner.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)
Download or read book Multidirectional Memory written by Michael Rothberg and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-15 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time to put forward a new theory of cultural memory and uncover an unacknowledged tradition of exchange between the legacies of genocide and colonialism.
Download or read book Complicated Complicity written by Martina Bitunjac and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-21 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complicated Complicity is about the forms taken, motives and spectrum of actions of European collaboration with the Nazis. State authorities, local military organizations and individual players in different countries and areas including France, Scandinavia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, Italy, Portugal and the countries of the former Yugoslavia are discussed in the context of the history of World War II, the history of occupation and everyday life and as an essential influencing factor in the Holocaust. New forms of right-wing populism, nationalism and growing intolerance of Jewish fellow citizens and minorities have made such historically sensitive studies considerably more difficult in many countries today. In this time of increasing historical revisionism in Europe, such elucidating discourse is particularly relevant.
Download or read book Civil Obedience written by Michael Lazzara and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boldly breaks new ground in studies of Latin American postdictatorial memories by tackling a taboo topic--civilian complicity with the Pinochet regime--that Chilean society has strategically avoided.
Download or read book Complicity written by Anne Farrow and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery “The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco Chronicle The North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies and Africa. It also discloses the reality of Northern empires built on tainted profits—run, in some cases, by abolitionists—and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line. Culled from long-ignored documents and reports—and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings—Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past.
Download or read book The Unreality of Memory written by Elisa Gabbert and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness . . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills. We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last. The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world. "A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less
Download or read book The Complicit Text written by Ivan Stacy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction identifies the causes of complicity in the face of unfolding atrocities by examining the works of Albert Camus, Milan Kunera, Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. Ivan Stacy argues that complicity often stems from narrative failures to bear witness to wrongdoing. However, literary fiction, he contends, can at once embody and examine forms of complicity on three different levels: as a theme within literary texts, as a narrative form, and also as it implicates readers themselves through empathetic engagement with the text. Furthermore, Stacy questions what forms of non-complicit action are possible and explores the potential for productive forms of compromise. Stacy discusses both individual dilemmas of complicity in the shadow of World War II and collective complicity in the context of contemporary concerns, such as the hegemony of neoliberalism and the climate emergency.
Download or read book The Implicated Subject written by Michael Rothberg and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A pathbreaking meditation . . . shifts the discussion . . . from . . . notions of guilt and innocence to the complexities of responsibility and accountability.” —Amir Eshel, Stanford University When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The Implicated Subject builds on the comparative, transnational framework of Rothberg's influential work on memory to engage in reflection and analysis of cultural texts, archives, and activist movements from such contested zones as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the afterlives of slavery. An array of globally prominent artists, writers, and thinkers—from William Kentridge, Hito Steyerl, and Jamaica Kincaid, to Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Judith Butler, and the Combahee River Collective—speak show how confronting our own implication in difficult histories can lead to new forms of internationalism and long-distance solidarity. “A significant work by a major scholar . . . .While drawing on a global range of histories and texts, the book never loses focus on the contemporary moment.” —Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London “Offer[s] a fresh vocabulary to confront our personal and collective responsibility in the face of massive political violence, past and present.” —Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University
Download or read book Memory and Complicity written by Debarati Sanyal and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A sophisticated, nuanced, and beautifully written account of the intersecting legacies of genocide and colonialism in postwar France.” —Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of violence, namely that of colonialism. These works produced what Debarati Sanyal calls a “memory-in-complicity” attuned to the gray zones that implicate different regimes of violence across history as well as those of different subject positions such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator. Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity develops an inquiry into the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than affect-based discourses of trauma, shame, and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work? As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.
Download or read book Holocaust and Memory written by Barbara Engelking and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-12-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in Polish to great acclaim and based on interviews with survivors of the Holocaust in Poland, Holocaust and Memory provides a moving description of their life during the war and the sense they made of it. The book begins by looking at the differences between the wartime experiences of Jews and Poles in occupied Poland, both in terms of Nazi legislation and individual experiences. On the Aryan side of the ghetto wall, Jews could either be helped or blackmailed by Poles. The largest section of the book reconstructs everyday life in the ghetto. The psychological consequences of wartime experiences are explored, including interviews with survivors who stayed on in Poland after the war and were victims of anti-Semitism again in 1968. These discussions bring into question some of the accepted survivor stereotypes found in Holocaust literature. A final chapter looks at the legacy of the Holocaust, the problems of transmitting experience and of the place of the Holocaust in Polish history and culture.
Download or read book Latent Memory written by Maxine Lowy and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2022-04-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generations of marginalized Jewish immigrants and refugees migrated to Chile during the first half of the twentieth century, only to live through persecution during Pinochet's military coup. Maxine Lowy asks how individuals and institutions may overcome fear, indifference, and convenience to take a stand even under intense political duress.
Download or read book Of Memory and Desire written by Gladys Swan and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1989-08-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: hese eleven compelling stories reveal the interplay and varying hues of two basic elements of human experience -- memory and desire, Gladys Swan's characters are frequently forced to shed their illusions as they struggle to shape their lives. The title story, like many of the others in the collection, has as its backdrop the beautiful but sometimes harsh landscape of the American Southwest. There a reclusive farmer known as Goat Man takes in a young Mexican boy as his companion. When the greed of a tax collector and the complicity of a community destroy Goat Man, the boy vanishes into the night but returns in the form of a legend, a reminder to the residents of the valley of their changing, crueler world. In another story a traveling carnival breaks down when a sandstorm does final damage to the dreams of the company, and a tired, almost defeated woman attempts to regroup and continue what has been so hopefully called "Carnival for the Gods." An older couple, carrying their Jewish past to a "Land of Promise." Discovers instead an alien territory and must struggle from day to day, one leaning to the past, the other inclining toward an unattainable vision of the future. In "The Ink Feather" a small, lonely girl, witness to endless quarrels between her mother and her much older brother, draws comfort from the world of her dolls and the prospect of adventure outside the mist-covered windows of her house. In "Getting an Education" a diffident young woman, "trying to be a student and to discover what she ought to be learning," finds insight in the details of the lives around her, especially the secretive, eccentric existence of one of her professors. A widowed grandmother, in "Black Hole," is impregnated during a chance encounter with a nameless stranger and shocks her family when she determines to give birth to and raise her child. Like that grandmother, all of the characters in these fictions -- whether from the comfortable middle class or the fringes of society -- are at odds with themselves and their world. It is Gladys Swan's special gift that she can so seamlessly depict the particular terrors and wonders of their lives. This is a mesmerizing collection.
Download or read book Martyrdom and Memory written by Elizabeth Anne Castelli and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilising a wide range of early sources, this title identifies the roots of the concept of Christian martyrdom, as lloking at how it has been expressed in events such as the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999.
Download or read book Hope and Memory written by Tzvetan Todorov and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both a political history and a moral critique of the twentieth century, this is a personal and impassioned book from one of Europe's most outstanding intellectuals. Identifying totalitarianism as the major innovation of the twentieth century, Tzvetan Todorov examines the struggle between this system and democracy and its effects on human life and consciousness. Totalitarianism managed to impose itself because, more than any other political system, it played on people's need for the absolute: it fed their hope to endow life with meaning by taking part in the construction of a paradise on earth. As a result, millions of people lost their lives in the name of a higher good. While democracy eventually won the struggle against totalitarianism in much of the world, democracy itself is not immune to the pitfall of do-goodery: moral correctness at home and atomic or "humanitarian" bombs abroad. Todorov explores the history of the past century not only by analyzing its spectacular political conflicts but also by offering moving profiles of several individuals who, at great personal cost, resisted the strictures of the communist and Nazi regimes. Some--Margarete Buber-Neumann, David Rousset, Primo Levi, and Germaine Tillion--were deported to concentration camps. Others--Vasily Grossman and Romain Gary--fought courageously in World War II. All became exemplary witnesses who described with great lucidity and humanity what they had endured. This book preserves the memory of the past as we move into the twenty-first century--arguing eloquently that we must place the past at the service of a just future.
Download or read book Memorylands written by Sharon Macdonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a ’memoryland’ – littered with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this ‘memory phenomenon’ is related to the changing nature of identities – especially European, national and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it provides new insights into how memory and the past are being performed and reconfigured in Europe – and with what effects. Drawing especially, though not exclusively, on cases, concepts and arguments from social and cultural anthropology, Memorylands argues for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the cultural assumptions involved in relating to the past. It theorizes the various ways in which ‘materializations’ of identity work and relates these to different forms of identification within Europe. The book also addresses questions of methodology, including discussion of historical, ethnographic, interdisciplinary and innovative methods. Through a wide-range of case-studies from across Europe, Sharon Macdonald argues that Europe is home to a much greater range of ways of making the past present than is usually realized – and a greater range of forms of ‘historical consciousness’. At the same time, however, she seeks to highlight what she calls ‘the European memory complex’ – a repertoire of prevalent patterns in forms of recollection and ‘past presencing’. The examples in Memorylands are drawn from both the margins and metropolitan centres, from the relatively small-scale and local, the national and the avant-garde. The book looks at pasts that are potentially identity-disrupting – or ‘difficult’ – as well as those that affirm identities or offer possibilities for transcending national identities or articulating more cosmopolitan futures. Topics covered include authenticity, temporalities, embodiment, commodification, nostalgia and Ostalgie, the musealization of everyday and folk-life, Holocaust commemoration and tourism, narratives of war, the heritage of Islam, transnationalism, and the future of the past. Memorylands is engagingly written and accessible to general readers as well as offering a new synthesis for advanced researchers in memory and heritage studies. It is essential reading for those interested in identities, memory, material culture, Europe, tourism and heritage.
