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How do young Israelis and Germans communicate about National Socialism and the Holocaust? In this collection of essays, authors from both societies elaborate on the past, their present and, respectively, their identity. They ponder various switches of track through German-Israeli exchange as well as social and political realities in both countries. By highlighting marginalised memories such as Palestinian and migrant ones, they challenge monolithic national memory discourses. Altogether, a trans-national memory discourse emerges - albeit a dissonant and highly subjective one, truthfully reflecting some of the fragmentations that actually exist in both societies.
This book addresses wide-ranging dilemmas that social researchers may face as a result of silences, neglected feelings, and blind-spots in their research. In every research endeavour, thoughts, intuitions, biases, feelings or sensations may be left aside as the researcher attempts to come to terms with the complexities of material and figure out what the ‘main issue’ is. Researchers may pay attention to their own emotional responses during the interview, but often only in their field notes. Rarely do feelings of shock, irritation, boredom or, for that matter, amusement, excitement and delight find their way into the analysis itself. In addition, researchers are all susceptible to blind-spots, often unaware of what is being avoided in research or omitted from it. However, reflection about precisely these gaps or silences may prove essential for developing new and interesting questions as well as comprehensive, responsive, and responsible research practices. In this volume, an international, cross-disciplinary cohort of researchers think critically about the silences, neglected feelings, and blind-spots in their own work, and offer insights for enhancing research practices. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in research methods and methodology.
As much as any other nation, Germany has long been understood in terms of totalizing narratives. For Anglo-American observers in particular, the legacies of two world wars still powerfully define twentieth-century German history, whether through the lens of Nazi-era militarism and racial hatred or the nation’s emergence as a “model” postwar industrial democracy. This volume transcends such common categories, bringing together transatlantic studies that are unburdened by the ideological and methodological constraints of previous generations of scholarship. From American perceptions of the Kaiserreich to the challenges posed by a multicultural Europe, it argues for—and exemplifies—an approach to German Studies that is nuanced, self-reflective, and holistic.
In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the ‘Holy Land’ for the predominantly devout Christian Filipina women and is at the center of an often violent conflict, which affects Filipinos in many ways. In the literature, migrant domestic workers are often described as being subject to racial discrimination, labour exploitation and exclusion from mainstream society. Here, the author provides a more nuanced account and shows how Filipina caregivers in Israel have succeeded in creating their own collective spaces, as well as negotiating rights and belonging. While maintaining transnational ties and engaging in border-crossing journeys, these women seek to fulfill their dreams of a better life. During this process, new socialities and subjectivities emerge that point to a form of global citizenship in the making, consisting of greater social, economic and political rights within a highly gendered and racialized global economy.
In recent years, there has been an increased attention to temporality in political theory, and such attention is sorely needed. For too long political theory, with the exception of occasional phenomenological forays, has remained grounded in a particular experience of time as linear and sequential. This book aims to unsettle the dominant framework by putting time itself, and the experience of time in everyday life, at the center of its critical analysis. Smita Rahman focuses on the experience of time as one where past, present, and future intermingle with each other and refuse to adhere to a sequential structure. Rather than trying to tame the flux of time, this book places this "out of joint" experience of time at the center of its analysis of global politics. Rahman takes the highly abstract concept of time and decenters it to speak to a wide range of political issues across disciplines. She does so by exposing the cultural construction of the foundational concept of time in political theory and attending closely to the challenges of cultural incommensurability that it encounters in a globalized world of difference. Specifically, the book looks at interrogation practices in Afghanistan, the challenges of coping with the burdens of collective memory in Algeria, South Africa, and Rwanda, the difficulty of uncritically applying such a framework to the Muslim world through the language of secularism, and finally at the beginnings of democratic emergence in Bangladesh to explore a politics of contingency. By focusing on issues of contemporary global politics through the lens of political theory, this book draws on literature across disciplines and explores the complex image of time by engaging the work of thinkers for whom time and memory have emerged as a critical issue of analysis, and unpacking the politics of contingency that emerge from such a reading. The book’s new insights on political temporality will interest scholars of contemporary political theory, comparative political theory, critical theory, human rights, conflict studies, and religion and politics.
Through its unique kaleidoscopic lens, this book analyzes the work of Algeria’s first postcolonial woman writer to publish a novel in Arabic, Ahlam Mosteghanemi. Her novels Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses return to the trauma of the Algerian War of Independence to address the lingering anxieties of national belonging and memory in postcolonial Algeria at a time when the nation is caught between two forces: entrenched bureaucratic-political elites and populist Islamists, who imagine a return to a pre-modern, utopian past. This book argues that Mosteghanemi’s polyphonic narratives reveal that national narratives are always multiple—“unity” is not one, all-encompassing narrative, but instead an ever-evolving Bakhtinian dialogism accommodating multiple perspectives, memories, and stories. The study interprets Mosteghanemi’s metaphor of the bridge as a powerful device for exploring tensions between reality and imagination, exile and belonging, and traditional concepts of gender in ways that reimagine nationhood and gesture towards a new, collective future.
How do foreign schemas and objects enter into indigenous ways of understanding the world? How are the cultural self and the cultural other constructed in acts of remembering? What is memory's role in the generation or degeneration of cultural meanings? In contemporary Pacific societies these questions are not merely the subject of scholarly debate but speak to pressing life concerns. This volume offers fruitful responses to such questions, providing insights into colonial memory and its limitations and proposing explanations that illumine cultural memory processes. These processes, in turn, elucidate ways of authoring cultural history and shed light on cultural identity, which, like other forms of identity, is built from a remembered self. Contributors explore valorizations of certain aspects of the remembered past, amnesias about other aspects. Both are part of the rhetoric of colonizing cultures and of cultural identity and nationhood in many contemporary Pacific societies. The provocative analyses and responses offered here are both academic and personal: close engagement with individuals and their ways of life is evident. These are at once intellectual journeys through the colonial landscapes of Pacific memory and attempts to understand the problems of politics and personhood, cultural identity and meaning, for real people in real places. Cultural Memory confronts many of the most central anthropological issues of our time.
Divided societies, tormented pasts, and unrepentant perpetrators. Why are some countries more intent on vanquishing uncomfortable pasts than others? How do public and often unsightly attempts at memorialisation both fail the victims and valorize their oppressors? This book offers fresh and original perspectives on dictatorship, fascism and victimization from the bloodiest decades in Europe’s, Australia’s and Central America’s colonial and modern history. Chapters include analyses of Francoist memorials in Spain, assessments of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, the forgetting of frontier colonial violence in Tasmania, Romania’s treatment of its Roma populations in the midst of Holocaust memorialisation in Bucharest’s urban development, and whether or not the Holocaust continues to serve as an instructional model or impossible aspiration for cross-cultural genocide memorialisation strategies. In an era of ongoing political, ethnic and religious conflict, and unrepentant insurgent activity around the world, this collection reminds readers that genocidal actions, wherever and whenever they occurred, must be held to account by more than rhetoric and concrete memory. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.
Leave behind negative patterns of thinking and behaviour which give rise to unwanted emotions and hold you back in life. This book offers a combination of theory and sound practical strategies, proven time and time again in David Rahman's workshops and courses to really show people how to live happier lives.
Race and privilege are issues that cry out for new kinds of attention and healing in American society. More specifically, we are being called to surface the dynamics of whiteness especially in contexts where whites have had the most power in America. The church is one of those contexts--particularly churches that have traditionally been seen as the stalwarts of the American religious landscape: mainline Protestant churches. Theologians and Presbyterian ministers Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Marcia Mount Shoop invite us to acknowledge and address the wounds of race and privilege that continue to harm and diminish the life of the church. Using Eucharist as a template for both the church's blindness and for Christ's redemptive capacity, this book invites faith communities, especially white-dominant churches, into new ways of re-membering what it means to be the body of Christ. In a still racialized society, can the body of Christ truly acknowledge and dress the wounds of race and privilege? Re-membering Christ's broken and betrayed body may be just the healing path we need.