Liat Steir-Livny, Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation Survivors in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. 376 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 273-275

This chapter assesses Liat Steir-Livny's Remaking Holocaust Memory (2019). This book is the first comprehensive English-language study of the Israeli Third-Generation engagement with the history of the Shoah in documentary films. In analyzing “how Third-Generation documentaries provide new ideas and concepts to commemorate and preserve the memory for future generations,” Steir-Livny contrasts Third-Generation documentary films with the works of second-generation directors and explores an extensive number of films in five key areas. These key areas include the role of gender; the changing attitudes toward Germany; the use and exploration of historical film footage in Third-Generation documentary films; the function of testimonies that feature in Third-Generation documentaries “in more complex ways”; and the representation of perpetrators and bystanders in Third-Generation films. Throughout her study, Steir-Livny discusses the documentaries against the background of documentary film theories, on the one hand, and Israeli/Zionist Holocaust memory, on the other.

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Vimbai Moreblessing Matiza

Dramatic and theatrical performances have a long history of being used as tools to enhance development in children and youth. In pre-colonial times there were some forms of drama and theatre used by different communities in the socialisation of children. It is in the same vein that this article, through the Intwasa koBulawayo performances, seeks to evaluate how drama and theatre are used to nurture children and youth into different developmental facets of their lives. The only difference which this article will take into cognisance is that the performances are done in a different environment, which is not the one used in the pre-colonial times. Although these performances were like this, the most important factor is the idea that children and youth are socialised through these performances. It is also against this backdrop that children and youth are growing up in a globalised environment, hence the performances should accommodate people from all walks of life and teach them relevant issues pertaining to life as they live it now. Thus the main task of the article is to spell out the role of drama and theatre in the nurturing of children and youth through socio economic and political development in Intwasa koBulawayo festivals.


Author(s):  
David Hardiman

Much of the recent surge in writing about the practice of nonviolent forms of resistance has focused on movements that occurred after the end of the Second World War, many of which have been extremely successful. Although the fact that such a method of civil resistance was developed in its modern form by Indians is acknowledged in this writing, there has not until now been an authoritative history of the role of Indians in the evolution of the phenomenon.The book argues that while nonviolence is associated above all with the towering figure of Mahatma Gandhi, 'passive resistance' was already being practiced as a form of civil protest by nationalists in British-ruled India, though there was no principled commitment to nonviolence as such. The emphasis was on efficacy, rather than the ethics of such protest. It was Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, who evolved a technique that he called 'satyagraha'. He envisaged this as primarily a moral stance, though it had a highly practical impact. From 1915 onwards, he sought to root his practice in terms of the concept of ahimsa, a Sanskrit term that he translated as ‘nonviolence’. His endeavors saw 'nonviolence' forged as both a new word in the English language, and as a new political concept. This book conveys in vivid detail exactly what such nonviolence entailed, and the formidable difficulties that the pioneers of such resistance encountered in the years 1905-19.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Béla Mester

Abstract The role of the diaries and memoirs in the process of the conscious self-reflection and their contribution to the emergence of modern individual personalities are well-known facts of the intellectual history. The present paper intends to analyze a special form of the creation of modern individual character; it is the self-creation of the writer as a conscious personality, often with a clearly formulated opinion about her/his own social role. There will be offered several examples from the 19th-century history of the Hungarian intelligentsia. This period is more or less identical with the modernization of the “cultural industry” in Hungary, dominated by the periodicals with their deadlines, fixed lengths of the articles, and professional editing houses on the one hand and the cultural nation building on the other. Concerning the possible social and cultural role of the intelligentsia, it is the moment of the birth of a new type, so-called public intellectual. I will focus on three written sources, a diary of a Calvinist student of theology, Péter (Litkei) Tóth, the memoirs of an influential public intellectual, Gusztáv Szontagh, and a belletristic printed diary of a young intellectual, János Asbóth.


Author(s):  
Jeanne Clegg ◽  
Emma Sdegno

Our contribution concerns a phase in the history of the building that gives the University its name. When Ruskin came to Venice in 1845 he was horrified by the decayed state of the palaces on the Grand Canal, and by the drastic restorations in progress. In recording their features in measurements, drawings and daguerreotypes, Ca’ Foscari took priority, and his studies of its traceries constitute a unique witness. This work also helped generate new ideas on the role of shadow in architectural aesthetic, and on the characteristics of Gothic, which were to bear fruit in The Seven Lamps and The Stones of Venice. In his late guide to the city, St Mark’s Rest, Ruskin addressed «the few travellers who still care for her monuments» and offered the Venetian Republic’s laws regulating commerce as a model for modern England. Whether or not he knew of the founding of a commercial studies institute at Ca’ Foscari in 1868, he would certainly have hoped that it would teach principles of fair and just trading, as well as of respectful tourism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
Andreas Langenohl

Abstract Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology has been written with the intention to offer lessons from the historical trajectory of economic redistribution in societies the world over. Thereby, the book suggests learning from the political-economic history of ‘social-democratic’ policies and societal arrangements. While the data presented speak to the plausibility of looking at social democracy, as understood by Piketty, as an archive for learning about the effects of redistribution mechanisms, I argue that the book, or future interventions might profit from integrating alternative archives. On the one hand, its current line of argumentation tends to underestimate the significance of power relations in the international political economy that continued after formal decolonization, and thus form the flip side of social democracy’s success in Europe and North America. On the other hand, the role of the polity might be imagined in a different and more empowering way, not just-as in Piketty-as an elite-liberal democratic governance institution; for instance, it would be interesting to explore the archive of the French solidaristes movement more deeply than Piketty does, as well as much more recent interventions in economic anthropology that deal with ‘economic citizenship’ in the Global South.


Author(s):  
Raminder Kaur

The chapter considers the scope of film to act as what is described as a ‘docu-drama-ment’ for conveying affective engagements with political history. It does so with a focus on unique incidents in the history of Indian popular cinema with the example of the film, Aman (Mohan Kumar, 1967). The discussion centers on the cameo appearance of a British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, in the film along with phantasmal invocations of Indian anti-nuclear weapons protagonists such as India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and reproductions of the 1945 atomic attack in Hiroshima and subsequent nuclear tests in the Pacific. The chapter considers how the film may be viewed in terms of a ‘corporeal compound lens’ on the political vicissitudes of the 1960s. With such an approach – on the one hand to do with the assemblage of a historical film, and on the other, to do with the way this intersects with compound lines of reflexive reception – the author shows how the ‘docu-drama-ment’ moves away from linear equations of the filmic signifier with the signified - or the film and the represented - to one that revels in affective residues and resonances that are a constitutive force in socio-political realities of the Cold War era. 


Buddhism ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Gutschow

The very existence of a “Women and Buddhism” entry but no “Men in Buddhism” entry implies a set of methodological lacunae in Buddhist studies. On the one hand, Buddhist studies have often proceeded as if the history of men in Buddhism stands in for Buddhist history, with little effort made to mention or recover the significance of women. On the other hand, systematic methodological choices, such as the discounting of feminist analysis and the privileging of text over other sources of knowledge, have exacerbated the tendency to elide the role of women in Buddhism. This elision of women, or their marginalization, in Buddhist analyses where “man” or “male” is assumed to represent “human” has prompted a countersurge of analyses. These latter analyses have found ample evidence for the centrality of gender and women in shaping Buddhist society and soteriology. Although works are now available that cover the role of women and gender in most Buddhist eras or societies, these have only scratched the surface of an extraordinarily rich set of material and questions. It remains to be seen how well Buddhist scholarship can give gender and women their proper place in developing its central concerns.


Author(s):  
Nalini Bhushan ◽  
Jay L. Garfield

This is an intellectual and cultural history of India during the period of British occupation. It demonstrates that this was a period of renaissance in India in which philosophy—both in the public sphere and in the Indian universities—played a central role in the emergence of a distinctively Indian modernity. This is also a history of Indian philosophy. It demonstrates how the development of a secular philosophical voice facilitated the construction of modern Indian society and the consolidation of the nationalist movement. We explore the complex role of the English language in philosophical and nationalist discourse, demonstrating both the anxieties that surrounded English, and the processes that normalized it as an Indian vernacular and academic language. We attend both to Hindu and Muslim philosophers, to public and academic intellectuals, to artists and art critics, and to national identity and nation-builidng. We also explore the complex interactions between Indian and European thought during this period, including the role of missionary teachers and study at foreign universities in the evolution of Indian philosophy. We show that this pattern of interaction, although often disparaged as “inauthentic” is continuous with the cosmopolitanism that has always characterized the intellectual life of India, and that the philosophy articulated during this period is a worthy continuation of the Indian philosophical tradition.


Author(s):  
Vinh Nguyen

Vietnamese Canadian refugee aesthetics are the diverse expressions of how hundreds of thousands of refugees and their descendants experienced the Vietnam War and its aftermath. They are shaped on the one hand by a history of war in, and forced migration from, Vietnam and on the other by resettlement in multicultural Canada. Significantly, Vietnamese Canadian refugee aesthetics are produced within a distinct context of Canadian “forgetting of complicity” in the Vietnam War. A major shaping force of this aesthetics is the idea that Canada was an innocent bystander or facilitator of peace during the war years, instead of a complicit participant providing arms and supporting a Western bloc victory. This allows, then, for a discourse of Canadian humanitarianism to emerge as Canada resettled refugees in the war’s wake. Vietnamese Canadian refugee aesthetics are produced and received in relation to the enduring narrative of Canadian benevolence. In this way, they celebrate the nation-state and its peoples through gratitude for the gift of refuge. More importantly, however, they illuminate life during and in the wake of war; the personal, political, and historical reasons for migration; the struggles and triumphs of resettlement; and the complexities of diasporic existence. Refugee aesthetics are driven by memory and the desire to commemorate, communicate, and make sense of difficult pasts and the embodied present. They often take the form of literary works such as memoirs, novels, and poetry, but they are also found in community politics and activism, such as commemoration events and protests, and other popular media like public service videos. Produced by refugees as well as the state, these aesthetic “texts” index themes and problematics such as the formation of voice; the interplay between memory, history, and identity; the role of autobiography; and the modes of representing war, violence, and refuge-seeking.


1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. A. Hooker

In recent times it has become fashionable to emphasize the role of conceptual change in the (philosopher's) history of science. To judge from recent writers (Feyerabend 5-9, Kuhn 18), every significant theoretical change in science is first and foremost a revolution in scientific concepts—a conceptual revolution. According to this view, every level of experience is affected by each fundamental theoretical change: physical theory, experimental practice and even perceptual experience. The Aristotelian patrician who watched the sun sink beneath the horizon not only had different beliefs (theory) about the phenomenon but actually saw something different from the Newtonian gentleman who saw the horizon rise above his eye-sun line, and the Einsteinian professional who saw the sun's varying geometrical relations to the world light-geodesics on which successive temporal stages of his eye world-line lay. Moreover, such is the completeness of the conceptual-experiential shifts undergone in a fundamental scientific change that it is impossible to meaningfully discuss the one theory within the confines of the other or, indeed, to provide any systematic, cumulative comparison of successive theories.


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