Looking backward to the future: Counter-memory as oppositional knowledge-production in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifat Gutman
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Temporal Shift ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Justice ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Future ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
Activist Groups

This article examines a strategy of peace activism that gained visibility in the last decades: memory activism. Memory activists manifest a temporal shift in transnational politics: first the past, then the future. Affiliated with the globally-circulating paradigm of historical justice, memory activist groups assume that a new understanding of the past could lead to a new perception of present problems and project alternative solutions for the future. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis among memory activists of the 1948 war in Israel since 2001, the article examines the activist production of counter-memory during active conflict. Using Coy et al.’s typology of oppositional knowledge-production, the article shows how the largest group of memory activism in Israel produced ‘new’ information on the war, critically assessed the dominant historical narrative, offered an alternative shared narrative, and began to envision practical solutions for Palestinian refugees. However, the analysis raises additional concerns that reach beyond the scope of the typology, primarily regarding the unequal power relations that exist not only between the dominant and activist production of oppositional knowledge, but also among activists.

scholarly journals The fiction of History: recalling the past and imagining the future with Caesar at Troy.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Richard Alston
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Site

This essay considers the nature of historical discourse through a consideration of the historical narrative of Lucan’s Pharsalia. The focus is on the manner in which Lucan depicts history as capable of being fictionalised, especially through the operation of political power. The discourses of history make a historical account, but those discourses are not, in Lucan's view, true, but are fictionalised. The key study comes from Caesar at Troy, when Lucan explores the idea of a site (and history) which cannot be understood, but which nevertheless can be employed in a representation of the past. yet, Lucan also alludes to a ‘true history’, which is unrepresentable in his account of Pharsalus, and beyond the scope of the human mind. Lucan’s true history can be read against Benjamin and Tacitus. Lucan offers a framework of history that has the potential to be post-Roman (in that it envisages a world in which there is no Rome), and one in which escapes the frames of cultural memory, both in its fictionalisation and in the dependence of Roman imperial memory on cultural trauma.

scholarly journals HISTORY AS FUTURE—TIME, PREDICTION, AND HISTORICAL NARRATIVE IN THE ZUO ZHUAN

Early China ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 29-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Gibas
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Future Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Prediction ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
The Future ◽  
Moral Qualities ◽  
Zuo Zhuan

AbstractThis article demonstrates that historical narrative in the Zuo zhuan is founded on the concept of “timeliness,” that is, on the understanding of time as being endowed with moral qualities. The choice between a “timely” (shi 時) or “untimely” (bu shi 不時) course of action determines the success or failure of the person involved in it. The origins of the ideas of time that shape the historical narrative of Zuo zhuan can be traced to mantic literature of the same period, such as almanacs.Early Chinese writers of history—like diviners—strove to explain the past in order to predict the future. Seen in this light, “knowing history” implies understanding and mastering the mechanisms that drive it; and looking into the past is tantamount to “knowing” the future.

scholarly journals Peak Document and the Future of History

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Relative Significance ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Future

Abstract Among the ongoing revolutions in historical research is the flood of new information about the past that comes not from written documents but from the natural sciences and archaeology. What might this mean for the profession of history, and for our training and institutional practices? How might it affect our research and interpretations of the past? Which fields of history will be most and least affected? I argue for a cautious embrace of the new data about the past coming from the paleosciences, offering a few examples of the promise and perils presented by the work of our natural science and archaeology colleagues. With each passing year, the proportion of our knowledge of the past that derives from the kinds of documents we have learned to read and interpret will shrink, and the proportion that derives from what to most of us are unfamiliar sciences will mount. This has implications. First, the deeper past might make a comeback. The last century or two are the best documented and will likely be least affected by the flood. The intellectual excitement may tip toward the study of earlier centuries where relative significance of information in other formats is greater. Second, the ways in which we train historians may need to change. A possible partial guide to our future as historians is the experience of precolonial Africanists, who are accustomed to research without written documents.

scholarly journals The Diasporic Narrative: Identity Crisis in Ghasan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Raed Ali Alsaoud Alqasass
Keyword(s):  
Present State ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
The Past ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The Future

This study examines Ghasan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun as a representative novella of the Palestinian identity crisis among the Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the Nakba in 1948. Kanafani’s emplotment of this identity crisis is couched in a diasporic narrative that lays bare a double plot, one before 1948 and another following it. The narrative split reveals a sharp contrast between the present state of the characters on their journey to Kuwait, the promised land, and the past as revealed in their reminiscences of homeland. The paradisaic images of homeland are woven with images of Hellish existence under the scorching sun of the desert. This double narrative is indicative of the split psyche of the characters which is symptomatic of an identity crisis. Their pursuit of a way out of this conflicting state ends with a collective, tragic disillusionment; they end up dead and thrown on a garbage heap without even a proper burial place. Kanafani weaves the different mini narrative threads into one tragic denouement since his novella is not about the fate of individual characters but that of a nation. The silence of the characters prior to their death is a Kanafanian prophecy of the future of the Palestinian Cause after it has lost its power of speech and ended, like the characters, dead on the garbage heap of history.

Heritage as War

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 729-734 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosie Bsheer
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Creative Destruction ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

The construction of heritage can be a violent process. Authorizing state-sanctioned narratives and the spaces that materialize them are belligerent acts. Crafting and territorializing a singular history out of many entangled ones necessarily relies on the destruction, containment, and/or silencing of the evidentiary terrain—of people, places, and things. In this sense, the construction of the past—to play on Carl von Clausewitz's well-known maxim—is the continuation of war by other means. As networks of knowledge production and transmission, “lieux de mémoire” are everyday sites of violence that embody ongoing social relations and the attendant struggles over power. In times of peace as in war, they are terrains of symbolic and material contestation whose creative destruction can be deployed as political spectacles and projections of power. Examples of such dynamics abound, whether in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North America or Palmyra, Baghdad, and Mecca in the Middle East. In its varied forms, then, heritage is as much a cause for celebration for some as it is a cause of injury for others. Heritage reflects the power to subjugate the past to the politics of the present and to dictate the future, both of which are intrinsic to state and subject formation.

scholarly journals The Past is With Us and Yet to Come: A Hauntological Analysis of Tsutomu Mizushima’s Anime Series, 'Another'

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 65-79
Author(s):  
Luke Beattie
Keyword(s):  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Unexpected Death ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
War Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come

Japanese director Tsutomu Mizushima’s 2012 animated television series, Another, presents a narrative whereby one social group’s refusal to accept an unexpected death triggers an intergenerational curse. This paper takes a close reading of Mizushima’s anime, showing how its narrative contends that the present—and by default the future—is not self-sufficient but instead relies upon understandings of the past. The analysis uses the lens of Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology, which opens up a space for discursive accounts of the presence of the past in the present and its influence on the future, and therefore serves as a powerful tool for interrogating questions of war memory. I demonstrate that Another exemplifies the use of anime as a critical medium, showing how it uses allegory to explore the motivations and consequences of Japan’s lack of a dominant historical narrative about the war and the resulting intergenerational effects of this historical consciousness problem. As Japan continues to debate remilitarisation and the fate of Article 9 in its constitution, it seems particularly apt to revisit Mizushima’s Another, which illustrates the dangers of ignoring the spectre of history.

Underground Warfare

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphné Richemond-Barak
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Suicide Terrorism ◽  
Technological Breakthrough ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Rapid Diffusion ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Over 40 Years

This chapter builds on the past to learn about the future: How does today’s use of tunnels differ from yesterday’s? What will tomorrow’s underground warfare look like? These questions are answered through the historical narrative and a database of over 40 years of New York Times reports on the use of tunnels in conflict. The NYT data fills some of the holes left by the absence of literature and helps shape the first typology of tunnels. This chapter offers conceptual and analytical tools for understanding and contending with tunnel warfare. It also encapsulates one of the book’s major arguments that, absent a major technological breakthrough, underground warfare is likely to intensify and continue its rapid diffusion in the coming years, following a pattern resembling that of suicide terrorism.

scholarly journals Information Dynamics in Complex Systems Negates a Dichotomy between Chance and Necessity

Information ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 245
Author(s):  
Georg F. Weber
Keyword(s):  
Complex Systems ◽  
Physical Processes ◽  
Information Dynamics ◽  
Linear Processes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Thermodynamic Entropy ◽  
Decision Points ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Future ◽  
Definition Of

Entropy increases in the execution of linear physical processes. At equilibrium, all uncertainty about the future is removed and information about the past is lost. Complex systems, on the other hand, can lead to the emergence of order, sustain uncertainty about the future, and generate new information to replace all old information about the system in finite time. The Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy for events and the Kolmogorov–Chaitin complexity for strings of numbers both approximate Shannon’s entropy (an indicator for the removal of uncertainty), indicating that information production is equivalent to the degree of complexity of an event. Thus, in the execution of non-linear processes, information entropy is inseparably tied to thermodynamic entropy. Therein, the critical decision points (bifurcations), which can exert lasting impact on the evolution of the future (the “butterfly effect”), defy the definition of being either born from randomness or from determination. Nevertheless, their information evolution and degree of complexity are amenable to measurement and can meaningfully replace the dichotomy of chance versus necessity. Common anthropomorphic perceptions do not accurately account for the transient durability of information, the potential for major consequences by small actions, or the absence of a discernible opposition between coincidence and inevitability.

Circassia: Remembering the Past Empowers the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-215
Author(s):  
Charlotte Hille ◽  
Renée Gendron
Keyword(s):  
Direct Result ◽  
North Caucasus ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Impact

This article recounts the story of how the Circassians have been able to raise awareness of their deportation in the 1860s during the Caucasian Wars. After a brief methodology the authors provide an overview of the Circassian history. The second section analyses the period when the Circassian population came under Russian rule after the 1860s. The third part focuses on three broad approaches or strategies used by several Circassian groups to increase the awareness of the Circassian subjugation in the 1860s. The last two sections discuss some of the changes that have occurred as a direct result of the work undertaken by Circassian organisations. The authours argue that the Circassians have created lieux de mémoire, especially since the beginning of the 1990s, what does not always overlap with the dominant Russian perception of history in the North Caucasus. The analysis demonstrates how the Circassians have (re)discovered their story and the impact of this new information on their actions.

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