Submerged memories: Memory, history, and displacement around Lake Asad, Syria

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Lange

Temporalizing frameworks promoted under Syria’s dominant Baʿth Party have significantly shaped representations of temporality and historicity of, and in, the inhabitants of northern Syria until the early twenty-first century. In particular, the construction of the Euphrates Dam, Baʿthist Syria’s showcase modernization project, between 1968 and 1973, provided a symbolically highly loaded pivotal point for a progressivist discourse about the national historical trajectory which incorporated assumptions of internal temporal heterogeneity in its very core: while it promoted the image of a progressive, modern Syrian nation, it simultaneously removed the inhabitants of this part of the country to the realm of the backward and obsolete recent past and present, thus devaluing their actual lifestyles and aspirations and legitimizing their physical displacement following the submersion of their villages and fields under the emergent lake. Before this background, this article draws on literature research and intermittent ethnographic fieldwork in Syria between 2001 and 2011 to ask how the submerged memories of these people were articulated 40 years after the flooding. By including written, oral, as well as embodied expressions, the article argues that diverse facets of remembering the past in the Euphrates valley were valued very unevenly and that the relations between them were gendered and political.

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
TONY SHAW ◽  
TRICIA JENKINS

Film has been an integral part of the propaganda war fought between the United States and North Korea over the past decade. The international controversy surrounding the Hollywood comedy The Interview in 2014 vividly demonstrated this and, in the process, drew attention to hidden dimensions of the US state security–entertainment complex in the early twenty-first century. Using the emails leaked courtesy of the Sony hack of late 2014, this article explores the Interview affair in detail, on the one hand revealing the close links between Sony executives and US foreign-policy advisers and on the other explaining the difficulties studios face when trying to balance commercial and political imperatives in a global market.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-90
Author(s):  
Brooke Holmes

Abstract This essay examines, from a position within Classics, different angles on critiques of historicism and the turn to anachronism in History, Art History, Medieval Studies, and Queer Theory before proposing the idea of ‘kairological history’, on the model of the artist Paul Chan’s ‘kairological art’. On this analysis, ‘kairological history’ engages the critical and creative resources of anachronic thinking alongside tools of historicism (e.g. empiricism, successionism, periodization, alterity) in making choices about ‘telling time’. These choices reflect a critical understanding of how temporality shapes the valuation of the past, particularly in relation to a ‘classical’ past; the negotiation of identity and difference between past and present; and the kinds of communities that history aims to support. The second half of the essay examines two instances of anachronism within the history of anatomy, one from Galen and one from the early twenty-first century. Both cases represent problems that historicism can correct. But the modality of correction, in itself, is anaemic and risks the very teleology that linear history is so often faulted for. The essay therefore explores what gets lost and what gets found when temporality is aligned with linearity, as well as non-linear modes of telling time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-330
Author(s):  
Jennifer G. Eidson ◽  
Christina J. Zamon

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) was adopted as the first standard for encoding finding aids using archival description in 1998. Since then, rapid changes in technology and archival standards have influenced access, use, and adoption of EAD across a variety of institutions. This article was inspired by an initial survey conducted by one of the authors. The results led to a broader survey and a twenty-year literature review surrounding EAD and online finding aids. The authors developed a twenty-five-question survey to reach a broader audience and delve deeper into the initial questions. The purpose was to answer the following questions: Is there a specific year or time period when a mass adoption of the standard can be identified? What factors influenced whether or not an institution adopted the standard? To what extent has technology influenced the usage of EAD? By surveying archivists across the United States, we gathered their input as to why they did or did not use EAD and how changes in technology and tools influenced their adoption and usage of EAD over the past twenty years. This article explores past trends and predictions, as well as current thoughts by archivists about the past, present, and future of this standard.


Author(s):  
Deepak Nayyar

This chapter analyses the striking changes in the geographical distribution of manufacturing production amongst countries and across continents since 1750, a period that spans more than two-and-a-half centuries, which could be described as the movement of industrial hubs in the world economy over time. Until around 1820, world manufacturing production was concentrated in China and India. The Industrial Revolution, followed by the advent of colonialism, led to deindustrialization in Asia and, by 1880, Britain became the world industrial hub that extended to northwestern Europe. The United States surpassed Britain in 1900, and was the dominant industrial hub in the world until 2000. During 1950 to 2000, the relative, though not absolute, importance of Western Europe diminished, and Japan emerged as a significant industrial hub, while the other new industrial hub, the USSR and Eastern Europe, was short lived. The early twenty-first century, 2000–2017, witnessed a rapid decline of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan as industrial hubs, to be replaced largely by Asia, particularly China. This process of shifting hubs, associated with industrialization in some countries and deindustrialization in other countries in the past, might be associated with premature deindustrialization in yet other countries in the future.


Articult ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 137-148
Author(s):  
Evgenia I. Vinogradova ◽  
◽  
Evgeny V. Kilimnik ◽  

The article analyzes the work of Western and Russian scientists, conducted in the past three decades, on the relationship of psychology and architecture. It is shown that in the West, the neuropsychological aspects of the relationship of psychology and architecture are studied thanks to modern neurobiological equipment, while in Russia there is a clear gap between the representatives of neuroscience, their technical support, and the architectural scientific community. As a result of the analysis conducted in the article, it is concluded that two research blocks can be distinguished. The first of them highlights the relationship between the psyche of the viewer and architecture. This may include research, both revealing the features of the perception of objects, and the influence of an architectural object on the viewer. Another block of research is connected with the psyche of the architect: and here the features of the design process itself are examined, as well as the influence of the personality of the architect on the features of the architectural object. It is concluded that the topic of reflecting the individual or individually-typological psychological characteristics of the personality of an architect in a specific architectural work remains undeveloped both in the West and in Russia, although it is extremely relevant today.


Author(s):  
Emma Dench

This chapter argues that certain traits associated with the Second Sophistic have attracted a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention in recent years: preoccupation with the past, Greekness, and the quirky performance of multiple identities. It emphasizes that these traits coexist with articulations of being and belonging that appeal less to early twenty-first-century sentiment, such as common descent, heredity, and “purity.” Finally, it focuses on the Second Sophistic not as a broad cultural or literary phenomenon reaching far beyond the individuals named by Philostratus, but as a group constructed by Philostratus, a variation on the proliferating contemporary groups in the Roman Empire that appealed to traditional modes of articulating being and belonging despite not being based primarily on fatherland, family descent, or place of residence.


2018 ◽  
pp. 223-240
Author(s):  
Walter Frisch

To paraphrase one of the most famous lines in movie history, we are not in Kansas—or in Oz—anymore. Nevertheless, the songs of The Wizard of Oz have continued to resonate well beyond the 1939 MGM film, extending deep into the political, cultural, and social contexts of the early twenty-first century. This chapter explores something of the afterlives of the songs, with a special focus on the most popular one, “Over the Rainbow,” which has achieved iconic status over the past eighty years. And if there is any overarching legacy of the songs, it is perhaps the idea that however much we dream or hope, we should not give up our home, our roots.


2019 ◽  
pp. 87-112
Author(s):  
Jennie Bristow

This chapter examines ‘generationalism’ — using the language of generations to narrate the social and political. It argues that generationalism means that we are in danger of taking historical stories way too personally. The chapter shows that the generationalism of the Sixties was as much about the failure of established institutions and ideologies to grasp what was happening as it was about the experience of the kids and the counterculture. Moving on half a century, the generationalism of the early twenty-first century tells us as much about our present anxieties as it does about the Sixties as a historical period. Whereas the Sixties Boomer was, until fairly recently, a source of wistful fascination, often bringing with it a romanticised nostalgia for a time when people felt they could think and live outside the box, the Boomer-blaming of the present day mobilises the stereotype as an example of everything that is seen to be wrong with the past.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-280
Author(s):  
Lu Leng ◽  
Zhenyu Gao ◽  

The past three years have seen a steady growth of interest in researching and practicing Philosophy for Children (P4C) in educational settings in China because many educators and administrators consider it as a coherent curriculum for developing student critical, creative, caring and collaborative thinking. Excited and gratified with children’s philosophical sensitivity and enthusiasm, three representative Elementary Schools in mainland China, namely South Station Elementary School from Yunnan Province, Shanghai Liuyi Elementary School, and Washi Elementary school from Zhejiang Province, started to practice P4C in the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century. Without succumbing to the aggravated uniformity of the educational system, the three schools demonstrated innovative ways to reform their educational practice, which helped to develop a different form of Chinese educational praxis. This study provides a review on three schools’ P4C practice from the perspective of motivation, development of school-based curricula, the mode and effect of P4C. The three schools found Lipman’s P4C curriculum inspiring but, for the most part, culturally and contextually inappropriate, thus developed their own P4C textbooks, pedagogy and conceptual framework. The study further offers glimpses of P4C historical development in the past thirty years in the model schools, and discusses the challenges, opportunities, existing methodological approaches, theoretical and practical tensions that Chinese P4Cers experienced when P4C being practiced. Then it proposes methodological advancements and possibilities of future P4C practice and research in mainland China.


Anafora ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-468
Author(s):  
Jelena Šesnić

The text examines the well-known late-nineteenth century novel The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) by Sarah Orne Jewett and the early twenty-first century novel Olive Kitteridge (2008) by Elizabeth Strout, and sets them in several distinct but intersecting contexts within a larger argument about the reading methodology motivated by age studies and their growing appreciation in the humanities. This argument is then extended in the sections focusing on pastoralism and the way it incorporates, or evades, the question of age and ageing. The next section takes up the possibilities opened up by the pastoral mode and links them to another strain of fiction to which both texts belong despite the temporal distance, that of regionalism and its long tradition specifically in New England fiction examined from the vantage point of age. Finally, the last section of the argument adds further considerations not only of the parallels but also of telling differences between the two texts due to the different temporal and cultural context in which they strive to represent age and ageing. By focusing on emotions and their display as part of the narrative of ageing, both texts (Olive Kitteridge in particular) meaningfully illustrate the issue of age with its many ramifications for the contemporary Western societies. The two texts thus show a transition in American culture in the representations of age and ageing from its pre-scientific phase (in Jewett’s text) to the current medicalized and scientific view of age and its consequences (in Strout’s text).


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