Disorientalism Today

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone
Keyword(s):  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust

While Chapter 4 explored the benefits of using ideas from Holocaust studies to analyse a novella about a colonial genocide, this chapter analyses the risks involved in such a process. Looking at a range of texts from the 1990s to the 2010s about genocide and atrocity in Africa, and drawing on postcolonial scholarship, it suggests that there are ambiguous limitations in using the ideas taken from our readings of the literature of the Holocaust, widely defined, to understand accounts of the Rwandan genocide and other atrocities in Africa and begins to advance some concepts for reading these other accounts of genocide. The authors evaluated include, amongst others, Ishmael Beah, Gil Courtemanche, David Eggers, Uzodinma Iweala, and Paul Rusesabagina.

Obecny stan badań nad Zagładą na Ukrainie

2014 ◽  
pp. 889-915
Author(s):  
Anna Abakunkova
Keyword(s):  
Future Development ◽  
The State ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Educational Organizations ◽  
Major Research ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Future

The article examines the state of the Holocaust historiography in Ukraine for the period of 2010 – beginning of 2014. The review analyzes activities of major research and educational organizations in Ukraine which have significant part of projects devoted to the Holocaust; main publications and discussions on the Holocaust in Ukraine, including publications of Ukrainian authors in academic European and American journals. The article illustrates contemporary tendencies and conditions of the Holocaust Studies in Ukraine, defines major problems and shows perspectives of the future development of the Holocaust historiography in Ukraine.

“From This Far Place”: On Justice and Absence

2011 ◽  
Vol 105 (4) ◽  
pp. 750-764 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. JAMES BOOTH
Keyword(s):  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Historic Injustice ◽  
Wide Swath

Addressing historic injustice involves a struggle against absence. This article reflects on the foundations of that challenge, on absence and justice. I ask what it means to address the absent victims of deadly injustice given the distance of time and death that separates us from them. This topic embraces a wide swath of events of interest to students of politics. Some are as recent as the Rwandan genocide; others are by now historical: the Holocaust or slavery in antebellum America. All have in common that they and their victims are distant from us, a separation that makes doing them justice deeply perplexing. In response, I sketch an argument that the absent victims of injustice are not nullities but retain a status, a presence as claimants on justice that defines our efforts to address the wrongs done them.

CONFRONTING THE COMMUNAL GRAVE: A REASSESSMENT OF SOCIAL RELATIONS DURING THE HOLOCAUST IN EASTERN EUROPE

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1054-1077
Author(s):  
JAN BURZLAFF
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
East European ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Modern Mass

AbstractThis historiographical review focuses on the complex interactions between Nazi Germany, local populations, and east European Jews during the Holocaust. Braving fierce historical revisionism in eastern Europe and the Baltic states, recent studies have shifted the spotlight from Germans to Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, and other ethnicities. As a result, the analytic categories with which most historians still work – notably ‘perpetrator/victim/bystander’ and ‘collaboration/resistance’ – have outlived their usefulness. A more complex picture of the Nazi-occupied territories in eastern Europe has emerged and now awaits new theoretical frameworks. This article argues that past paradigms blinded scholars to a range of groups lost in the cracks and to behaviours remaining outside the political sphere. Through four criteria that shed light on the social history of the Holocaust in eastern Europe, it draws connections between central and east European, German, Jewish, and Soviet histories, in order to engage with other fields and disciplines that examine modern mass violence and genocide. As Holocaust studies stands at a crossroads, only a transnational history including all ethnicities and deeper continuities, both temporal and geographical, will enhance our knowledge of how social relations shaped the very evolution of the Holocaust.

Dangerous Parallels

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Chaouat
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Islamic Terrorism ◽  
Multidirectional Memory ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The U.S

In Chapter 3, I probe the theory of multidirectional memory propounded by literary scholars in Europe and the U.S. The multidirectional-memory hypothesis was born from what those scholars call “the colonial turn” in literary and Holocaust studies. Scholars in postcolonial studies are increasingly turning to the Holocaust to approach the history and memory of colonialism, slavery, and more specifically, the events of the Algerian war. Their stated goal is to use the history and memory of the Holocaust to shed light on colonialism, especially in its French incarnation, or rather, to trigger a dialogue among collective memories. I argue that despite a praiseworthy attempt at rejecting the paradigm of competition among victims, that paradigm returns to haunt multidirectional memory. In order to legitimate its effort at finding consensus by uniting collective memories of suffering and persecution, multidirectional memory tones down the specificity of the Holocaust, and ends up neutralizing complex aspects of the Algerian war (notably, conflicting narratives of victimized groups) and more recent manifestations of Islamic terrorism and Islamic antisemitism. Not only do those blind spots prevent vigorous confrontation with resurgent antisemitism, they utterly obliterate that resurgence.

On Inhumanity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Livingstone Smith
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Mind

The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again—that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche—deeper than prejudice itself—leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. This book looks at the mechanisms of the mind that encourage us to see someone as less than human. There is something peculiar and horrifying in human psychology that makes us vulnerable to thinking of whole groups of people as subhuman creatures. When governments or other groups stand to gain by exploiting this innate propensity, and know just how to manipulate words and images to trigger it, there is no limit to the violence and hatred that can result.

Literature of the Personal Document as a Source in Holocaust Research (a Methodological Reconnaissance).

2008 ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Jacek Leociak
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narratives ◽  
General Context ◽  
Specific Character ◽  
Methodological Challenge ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust

In this article I focus on two areas: first – the genre typology of texts that belong to the sphere of the so-called personal document, their specific character as a historical source for Holocaust studies; second –the methodological challenge this type of sources posits for the historiography (not only) of the Holocaust. I raise the following questions: what is the value of personal documents for Holocaust historians, being a formally diverse record of experiences; how are they used in their research; how do they read those personal narratives? A more general context for these considerations is the debate on the conditions for Holocaust historiography going on among contemporary theoreticians of history. One one form of this debate could be described as a conflict between “historical discourse” and ”memory discourse”.

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