Putting the past into action: How historical narratives shape participation in collective action

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Freel ◽  
Rezarta Bilali
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Past

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Helen Keller ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Biographical scholarship provides a means by which to understand the past. Disability biography writes disabled people into historical narratives and cultural discourses, acknowledging power, action, and consequence. Disability biography also analyzes the role of ableism in shaping relationships, systems of power, and societal ideals. When written with skilled storytelling, rigorous study, nuance, and insight, disability biography enriches analyses of people living in the past. Disability biography makes clear the multiple ways by which individuals and communities labor, make kinship, persevere, and both resist and create social change. When using a disability analysis, biographies of disabled people (particularly people famous for their disability, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Helen Keller) reveal the relationality and historically embedded nature of disability. In an ableist world, such acts can be revolutionary.

The Specter of the Past: Reconstructing Conservative Historical Memory in South Korea

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-362
Author(s):  
Myungji Yang
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
New Right ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Right

Through the case of the New Right movement in South Korea in the early 2000s, this article explores how history has become a battleground on which the Right tried to regain its political legitimacy in the postauthoritarian context. Analyzing disputes over historiography in recent decades, this article argues that conservative intellectuals—academics, journalists, and writers—play a pivotal role in constructing conservative historical narratives and building an identity for right-wing movements. By contesting what they viewed as “distorted” leftist views and promoting national pride, New Right intellectuals positioned themselves as the guardians of “liberal democracy” in the Republic of Korea. Existing studies of the Far Right pay little attention to intellectual circles and their engagement in civil society. By examining how right-wing intellectuals appropriated the past and shaped triumphalist national imagery, this study aims to better understand the dynamics of ideational contestation and knowledge production in Far Right activism.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION: HISTORY FROM BETWEEN AND THE GLOBAL CIRCULATIONS OF THE PAST IN ASIA AND EUROPE, 1600–1950

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
LEIGH K. JENCO ◽  
JONATHAN CHAPPELL
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Subjective Feeling ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Introduction History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Abstract This article argues for a ‘history from between’ as the best lens through which to understand the construction of historical knowledge between East Asia and Europe. ‘Between’ refers to the space framed by East Asia and Europe, but also to the global circulations of ideas in that space, and to the subjective feeling of embeddedness in larger-than-local contexts that being in such a space makes possible. Our contention is that the outcomes of such entanglements are not merely reactive forms of knowledge, of the kind implied by older studies of translation and reception in global intellectual history. Instead they are themselves ‘co-productions’: they are the shared and mutually interactive inputs to enduring modes of uses of the past, across both East Asian and European traditions. Taking seriously the possibility that interpretations of the past were not transferred, but rather were co-produced between East Asia and Europe, we reconstruct the braided histories of historical narratives that continue to shape constructions of identity throughout Eurasia.

Historical Narratives and Understanding

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Stefan Petkov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epistemic Criteria

This paper defends the view that narratives that bring understanding of the past need not be exhaustively analyzable as explanatory inferences, nor as causal narratives. Instead of treating historical narrative as explanations, I argue that understanding of history can be analyzed by the general epistemic criteria of understanding. I explore one such criterion, which is of chief importance for good historical narratives: potential inferential power. As a corollary, I dispute one of the distinctive features of narratives described by some philosophers: the non-aggregativity of narrative histories. Instead, I propose that historical narratives modestly aggregate and this aggregation depends on the success of the colligatory concepts they offer.

Battered bodies: Characterizing Johannesburg’s apartheid past and present in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 213-228
Author(s):  
Addamms Mututa
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Narrative Spaces ◽  
The City

Narratives of traumatic citizenship not only raise questions about the past, but also they give voice to contemporary stories about this past. In post-apartheid South Africa, these questions, markers of apartheid temporality, are embodied in, among other sites, the representation of battered Black bodies in cinema. This article critiques the characterization of Blacks as narrative spaces to illustrate the temporality of distress and trauma from apartheid to post-apartheid Johannesburg in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi. It argues that the film posits Black characters as latent archives of intergenerational historical narratives that probe the apartheid past and speculate on the post-apartheid future in the city of Johannesburg. Consequently, the juxtaposition of embodied narrative archives and apartheid temporality, the article posits, is a crucial model in the theorization of battered Black bodies’ contiguous nostalgia.

BRINGING HISTORY BACK IN: PAST, PRESENT, AND CONFLICT IN RWANDA AND THE EASTERN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
GILLIAN MATHYS
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Republic Of Congo ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past

AbstractThis article argues that on the borderland between eastern DRC and Rwanda, the past and its representations have been constantly manipulated. The cataclysmic events in both Rwanda and Congo since the 1990s have widened the gap between partial and politicized historical discourse and careful historical analysis. The failure to pay attention to the multiple layers in the production of historical narratives risks reproducing a politicized social present that ‘naturalizes’ differences and antagonisms between different groups by giving them more time-depth. This is a danger both for insiders and outsiders looking in. The answer is to focus on the historical trajectories that shape historical narratives, and to ‘bring history back in’.

scholarly journals Contriving the Future by Tampering with the Past: A Deferral Tactic in Chinese Internet Censorship

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
YUSUNG SU ◽  
Siyu Sun ◽  
Jiangrui Liu
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Online Discussions ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Political Event ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Internet Censorship

How do Chinese information inspectors censor the internet? In light of the assumption that inspectors must follow specific rules instead of ambiguous guidelines, such as precluding collective action, to decide what and when to delete, this study attempts to offer a dynamic understanding of censorship by exploiting well-structured Weibo data from before and after the 2018 Taiwanese election. This study finds that inspectors take advantage of time in handling online discussions with the potential for collective action. Through this deferral tactic, inspectors make online sentiments moderately flow regarding an important political event, and thereafter, past discussions on trendy topics will be mostly removed. Therefore, reality is selectively altered; the past is modified, and the future will be remembered in a ``preferable" way.

scholarly journals Memory as a social and discursive practice in monuments. A case study of the Tapio Rautavaara Monument

1970 ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Tuuli Lähdesmäki
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
The Past

Monuments are protagonists in many historical narratives. They “tell” fascinating stories of past times and past heroes and “advise” us to commemorate and reminisce. But who is actually doing the telling and to whom? How are the stories formed? In monuments the past and present, memory and history, meet in a complex way and form a structure of meanings reflecting the narratives and values of the so-called imagined community. Discursive and narrative practices play a crucial role in the formation and production of the meanings of monuments. 

Doing Justice to History

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barrie Sander
Keyword(s):  
International Criminal ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Historical Justice ◽  
Mass Atrocity ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Historical Function

As communities—both local and international—have struggled to make sense of mass atrocity situations, expectations have increasingly been placed on international criminal courts to render authoritative historical accounts of the episodes of mass violence that fall within their purview. Taking these expectations as its point of departure, Doing Justice to History seeks to understand international criminal courts through the prism of their historical function—critically examining how such courts confront the past by constructing historical narratives concerning both the culpability of the accused on trial and the broader mass atrocity contexts in which they are alleged to have participated. The book argues that international criminal courts are host to struggles for historical justice, discursive contests between different actors vying for judicial acknowledgement of their preferred interpretations of the past. By examining these struggles within different institutional settings, the book surfaces the legitimating qualities of international criminal judgments—illuminating, in particular, what tends to be foregrounded and included within, as well as marginalised and excluded from, the narratives of international criminal courts in practice. What emerges from this account is a sense of the significance of thinking about the emancipatory limits and possibilities of international criminal courts in terms of the historical narratives that are constructed and contested both within and beyond the courtroom in different institutional and societal contexts.

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