The Architectural History of Disappearance

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 556-578
Author(s):  
Karen Elizabeth Bishop

The architectural history of the clandestine detention and torture center begins when a space selected for its invisibility becomes legible in a landscape. How that visibility is integrated into postdictatorship societies and accounted for historically often becomes a matter of public debate playing out in the press, in local and national calls for proposals for what to do with the sites, and in architectural competitions. In The Architectural History of Disappearance: Rebuilding Memory Sites in the Southern Cone, Karen Elizabeth Bishop argues that the proposals to reappropriate the spaces of disappearance reveal important temporal disjunctions that impede or facilitate the integration of the memory of the disappeared into civil society. Examples of the competing temporalities at work in the construction of memory sites and the productive incompleteness these can provide for are examined in an analysis of proposals put forth to rehabilitate two clandestine detention and torture centers that functioned during the last Argentine military dictatorship (1976–83) and Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90): the space of the former Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires and the former prison camp Tejas Verdes on the coast of Chile.

2018 ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Victoria Fortuna

The epilogue examines the 2011 human rights march in Buenos Aires on the National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice (Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia), the anniversary of the start of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). It analyzes the author’s participation with Oduduwá Danza Afroamericana (Oduduwá Afro-American Dance), a group that brought together scores of volunteers to perform choreography based in Orishá dance. Orishá dance’s Yoruban origins and connection to the African diaspora made it an unexpected addition to the demonstration given the construction of Argentina as exceptionally white among Latin American nations. The group strove to connect Orishá dance’s link to the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade with Argentina’s history of political disappearance, as well as the country’s own violence against Afro-Argentines. Oduduwá’s project reiterates the importance of dance as both a political practice and one linked to memory.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197
Author(s):  
Juliet McMains

This paper interrogates the history of same-sex dancing among women in Buenos Aires' tango scene, focusing on its increasing visibility since 2005. Two overlapping communities of women are invoked. Queer tangueras are queer-identified female tango dancers and their allies who dance tango in a way that attempts to de-link tango's two roles from gender. Rebellious wallflowers are women who practice, teach, perform, and dance with other women in predominantly straight environments. It is argued that the growing acceptance of same-sex dancing in Argentina is due to the confluence of four developments: 1) the rise of tango commerce, 2) innovations of tango nuevo, 3) changing laws and social norms around lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, and 4) synergy between queer tango dancers and heterosexual women who are frustrated by the limits of tango's gender matrix. The author advocates for increased alliances between rebellious wallflowers and queer tangueras, who are often segregated from each other in Buenos Aires' commercial tango industry.


Author(s):  
Odile Moreau

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.


Moreana ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 42 (Number 164) (4) ◽  
pp. 187-206
Author(s):  
Clare M. Murphy

The Thomas More Society of Buenos Aires begins or ends almost all its events by reciting in both English and Spanish a prayer written by More in the margins of his Book of Hours probably while he was a prisoner in the Tower of London. After a short history of what is called Thomas More’s Prayer Book, the author studies the prayer as a poem written in the form of a psalm according to the structure of Hebrew poetry, and looks at the poem’s content as a psalm of lament.


1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-328
Author(s):  
Salahudeen Yusuf

The history of Islam in part of what is known today as Nigeria datesto about the loth Century. Christianity dates to the late 18th Century. Bythe middle of the 19th Century, when Nigerian newspapers began to appearon the streets of Nigeria, both religions had won so many followers and extendedto so many places in Nigeria that very few areas were untouched bytheir influence. The impact of both religions on their adherents not only determinedtheir spiritual life, but influenced their social and political lives aswell. It therefore became inevitable that both religions receive coverage frommost of the newspapers of the time. How the newspapers as media of informationand communication reported issues about the two religions is thetheme of this paper.Rationale for the StudyThe purpose of this study is to highlight the context in which such earlynewspapers operated and the factors that dictated their performance. Thisis because it is assumed that when a society faces external threat to its territory,culture, and independence, all hands (the press inclusive) ought tobe on deck to resist the threat with all might. Were newspapers used as verbalartillery and how did they present each religion? It is also assumed thatin a multireligious society a true press should be objective and serve as avanguard in the promotion of the interest of the people in general and notcreate or foster an atmosphere of religious conflict. The study also aims atfinding out whether the papers promoted intellectual honesty and fosteredthe spirit of unity particularly when the society was faced with the encroachmentof the British who posed a threat to their freedom, culture, economy ...


2021 ◽  
Vol 246 ◽  
pp. 354-373
Author(s):  
Nicolai Volland

AbstractRed Guard newspapers and pamphlets (wenge xiaobao) were a key source for early research on the Cultural Revolution, but they have rarely been analysed in their own right. How did these publications regard their status and function within the larger information ecosystem of the People's Republic, and what is their role in the history of the modern Chinese public sphere? This article focuses on a particular subset of Red Guard papers, namely those published by radical groups within the PRC's press and publication system. These newspapers critiqued the pre-Cultural Revolution press and reflected upon the possible futures of a new, revolutionary Chinese press. Short-lived as these experiments were, they constitute a test case to re-examine the functioning of the public in a decidedly “uncivil” polity. Ultimately, they point to the ambiguous potential of the public for both consensus and conflict, liberation and repression, which characterizes the press in 20th-century China.


Author(s):  
Chanratana Chen

In December 2019, Michael Falser, of the University of Heidelberg, a specialist on heritage preservation and the art and architectural history of South and Southeast Asia, published his two-volume study, Angkor Wat: A transcultural history of heritages, which he had spent almost ten years researching. The volumes cover the history of research of the most famous monument in Cambodia, Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious monument, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1992. The two volumes include more than 1,400 black-and-white and colour illustrations, including historical photographs and the author's own photographs, architectural plans and samples of tourist brochures and media clips about Angkor Wat, which has been represented as a national and international icon for almost 150 years, since the 1860s.


1980 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Coad

We publish below a list of writers and journalists abducted by the security forces and numbered among the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina since 24 March 1976, the date of the military coup that installed General Jorge Rafael Videla in power. Two eye-witness accounts illustrate the way in which such abductions usually take place. Finally, Robert Cox, editor-in-exile of the daily newspaper Buenos Aires Herald, describes how independent-minded journalists and the families of los desaparecidos ( ‘the disappeared’) have been affected. The material is introduced by Index on Censorship's researcher on Latin America, Malcolm Coad.


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