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This essay analyses the literature on the foibe to illustrate a political use of human remains. The foibe are the deep karstic pits in Istria and around Trieste where Yugoslavian Communist troops disposed of Italians they executed en masse during World War II. By comparing contemporary literature on the foibe to a selection of archival reports of foibe exhumation processes it will be argued that the foibe literature popular in Italy today serves a political rather than informational purpose. Counterpublic theory will be applied to examine how the recent increase in popular foibe literature brought the identity of the esuli, one of Italy‘s subaltern counterpublics, to the national stage. The paper argues that by employing the narrative structure of the Holocaust, contemporary literature on the foibe attempts to recast Italy as a counterpublic in the wider European public sphere, presenting Italy as an unrecognised victim in World War II.
The subject of forensic specialist‘s work with human remains in the aftermath of conflict has remained largely unexplored within the existing literature. Drawing upon anthropological fieldwork conducted from 2009–10 in three mortuary facilities overseen by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this article analyses observations of and interviews with ICMP forensic specialists as a means of gaining insight into their experiences with the remains of people who went missing during the 1992–95 war in BiH. The article specifically focuses on how forensic specialists construct and maintain their professional identities within an emotionally charged situation. Through analysing forensic specialists encounters with human remains, it is argued that maintaining a professional identity requires ICMP forensic specialists to navigate between emotional attachment and engagement according to each situation.
This article has two aims: to examine the effects of victim proximity to crematoria ashes and ash pits both consciously and unconsciously in a subset of Holocaust survivors, those who were incarcerated at the dedicated death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, as well as Auschwitz-Birkenau; and to contrast these effects, the subject positions they produce, with their suppression as the basis both for a strategy of survival during incarceration and for a reimagined identity after the war. Within a cohort of four survivors from Rudolf Reder (Belzec), Esther Raab (Sobibor), Jacob Wiernik (Treblinka) and Shlomo Venezia (Auschwitz), I trace the ways in which discrete memories and senses became constitutive in the formation of the subject prior to and after escape – the experience of liberation – so that essentially two kinds of subjects became visible, the subject in liberation and the subject of ashes. In conjunction with these two kinds of subjects, I introduce the compensatory notion of a third path suggested both by H. G. Adler and Anna Orenstein, also Holocaust survivors, that holds both positions together in one space, the space of literature, preventing the two positions from being stranded in dialectical opposition to each other.
This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Achebe; and from utopian discourse in Parry to Jameson's theorisation of empire.
Christiane Taubira's spirited invocation of colonial poetry at the French National Assembly in 2013 denounced the French politics of assimilation in Guyana . It was seen as an attempt to promote respect for difference, defend the equality of gay and heterosexual rights, and give a voice to silent social and cultural minorities. Taubira's unmatched passion for poetry and social justice, applied to the current Political arena, made her an instant star in the media and on the Internet. This book relates to the mimetic and transformative powers of literature and film. It examines literary works and films that help deflate stereotypes regarding France's post-immigration population, promote a new respect for cultural and ethnic minorities. The writers and filmmakers examined in the book have found new ways to conceptualize the French heritage of immigration from North Africa and to portray the current state of multiculturalism in France. The book opens with Steve Puig's helpful recapitulation of the development of beur, banlieue, and urban literatures, closely related and partly overlapping taxonomies describing the cultural production of second-generation, postcolonial immigrants to France. Discussing the works of three writers, the book discusses the birth of a new Maghrebi-French women's literature. Next comes an examination of how the fictional portrayal of women in Guene's novels differs from the representation of female characters in traditional beur literature. The book also explores the development of Abdellatif Kechiche's cinema, Djaidani's film and fiction, French perception of Maghrebi-French youth, postmemorial immigration, fiction, and postmemory and identity in harki.
2 Breaking the chains of ethnic identity: Faïza Guène, Saphia Azzeddine, and Nadia Bouzid, or the birth of a new Maghrebi-French women’s literature Patrick Saveau Some labels are hard to get rid of. They provide a helpful taxonomy to classify, sort out, or separate. They enable us to distinguish what can be included or excluded from the epistemological field we are exploring, and ultimately they give us a sense of order and clarity in a world that is becoming ever more complicated to understand, let alone to explain. This is particularly true in the humanities
This is a unique study of working-class writing and community publishing. It evaluates the largely unexamined history of the emergence and development of working-class writing and publishing workshops since the 1970s. The nature of working-class writing is assessed in relation to the work of young people, older people, adult literacy students as well as writing workshops. Key themes and tensions in working-class writing are explored in relation to historical and literary frameworks. This is the first in-depth study of this body of writing. In addition, a number of crucial debates are examined, for example, over class and identity, critical pedagogy and learning, relationships with audiences and the role of mainstream cultural institutions in comparison with alternatives. The contradictions and tensions in all these areas are surveyed in coming to a historical understanding of this topic.
the process through which immigrants are being assimilated into French culture. In the 1980s, the concept of beur1 culture emerged to express the feeling of belonging to two cultures: one that originated in the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia) and a French one, which has been increasingly challenged by the arrival of new immigrants from former French colonies. In the 1990s, beur literature as well as the word beur itself started to become obsolete, as this new generation felt more and more assimilated or “integrated” into French society. In 2007, a collective
representations, has become a significant trend in the academic research of recent years. The present chapter hopes to contribute to an ongoing interest in the area, as an introduction to a longer project that examines the place occupied by history when it is present as traces and fragments in the literature of immigration produced in France since the early beur novels of the 1980s. My project approaches this question through the case study of a single significant date of the Algerian War in metropolitan France, known as October 17, 1961. This specific event has been the object
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 09/13/2013, SPi 4 The emergence of an Irish humanities ethos Daniel Corkery, Sean Ó Tuama and a national literature in English Because the language question was such an important issue for education policy especially in the early years of the State, it is important to look at the work of some of the educationalists and university academics who worked extensively on Irish language literature. One of the first professors of English at University College Cork (UCC), Daniel Corkery, who later spent a great deal of time working on Irish