Towards a Narrative Pachacutic

Andean Truths ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 107-133
Author(s):  
Anne Lambright
Keyword(s):  
Intercultural Communication ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Reconciliation Process ◽  
Andean Culture

This chapter studies Rosa Cuchillo (1997), by indigenous-mestizo writer, Oscar Colchado Lucio. Narrated by three indigenous characters, the novel portrays both the Shining Path’s and the state’s inability to understand indigenous Andean culture, while modeling an Andean-driven truth and reconciliation process. The novel relies almost exclusively on Andean characters who call upon autochthonous discourse, knowledge, and spirituality to create an Andean historical, political and affective archive that contrasts with that created and disseminated through other, official processes. In recounting the past and imagining the future, Rosa Cuchillo becomes a model of “intercultural communication” and “epistemological decolonization” (Quijano), and by channeling the therapeutic processing of the conflict through Andean modes of interpretation, it suggests one outcome could be a cultural, if not political, Pachacutec—an Andean revolution.

Listening to thunder in the silence on Tiananmen: Politics and ethics of the memory of the June Fourth Movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 0920203X2095656
Author(s):  
Bin Xu
Keyword(s):  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
The Future ◽  
Chinese State ◽  
Repressive Regime ◽  
Reconciliation Process

‘Forgetting’ has been widely used in academic and public discourses of the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. The term, however, is conceptually unclear, empirically ineffective, and ethically problematic. Conceptually, it relies on a problematic assumption that silence means forgetting. Empirically, it lumps together different states of memory: ‘don’t remember, don’t talk about, don’t know, and don’t care.’ Ethically, it allows a broad, unjust moral accusation of those who remember but remain silent for various reasons. I argue that ‘silence’ provides greater conceptual precision, more analytical subtlety, and less ethical liability. Silence does not mean forgetting. Nor does it always mean the complete absence of sound. Rather, it refers to the absence of certain discourses about the past. I propose a perspective based on different forms of silence – ‘silencing, silenced, and silent’ – and illustrate it in an analysis of the memory of Tiananmen. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the analysis shows that the Chinese state initially intended to create a ‘covert silence’ – forcing people to remember rather than forget the official stories and silencing other narratives – and then an ‘overt silence’ in which all mention of the event was absent. Even underneath overt silence, however, are various experiences with ambiguities and nuances. The term silence also recognizes individuals’ ethical-political dilemmas under a repressive regime and aims to provide a language for an equal and inclusive truth-and-reconciliation process in the future.

scholarly journals Imperiets genfærd – Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden og den dansk-grønlandske historieskrivning

Nordlit ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Thisted
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Asymmetrical Power ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Reconciliation Process

<p align="LEFT">While the official Denmark has declined taking part in a reconciliation process with Greenland, its former colony, a large literary audience has embraced the novelist Kim Leine, who puts colonial history and Danish-Greenlandic power relations on the <span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">agenda. Originally published in 2012, his novel </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden </span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">(English title: </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">The Prophets of Eternal Fjord</span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">) has received huge attention and several </span>prestigious literary awards, but it has also been the target of criticism for painting a distorted picture of Denmark’s conduct in Greenland. The article examines how the novel relates to the established narratives about Danish colonialism and how it contributes to the ongoing negotiations. The novel’s use of narrative modes is analysed in light of the assumption that certain modes are associated with certain plots, where a particular framing of the past defines a space of possibility for the way we shape the future. It is argued that the novel draws on the anticolonial dream of ‘total revolution’ and supports the struggle of the colonised to break free from the colonial power and establish their own nation state. Its key narrative mode, however, is not the preferred mode in anticolonialist literature, heroic romance; instead it is tragedy. The novel portrays the profound transformation of society and subjectivity that is brought about by modernity with Christianity and colonialism as its vehicle. As a consequence of this transformation, resistance cannot be posited from a point outside modernity but arises from within modernity itself. Thus the protagonists of the novel are not only portrayed as equals but as actors in the same universe, regardless of the highly asymmetrical power relations between Danes and Greenlanders. In this sense, the book participates in efforts to reframe the Danish-Greenlandic relationship based on the new language of equality and partnership found in the Act on Greenland Self-Government.</p>

David Mitchell’s Inefficiency

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-183
Author(s):  
Thom Dancer
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
The Future ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
And Function ◽  
Prior State ◽  
Cultural Force

David Mitchell’s fiction provides an opportunity to reconsider the claims of modesty in the context of globalization. This chapter draws upon the arguments of the previous ones to put critical modesty to its most difficult test. Are minor achievements enough given the massive scale of planetary life and of urgent global problems facing humanity, not the least of which is environmental ruin? I argue that Mitchell’s novels directly face the problems of scaling that cast into doubt the place and function of the novel as a relevant cultural force in the twenty-first century and beyond. Mitchell’s work helps us to reconcile realism as a kind of modest speculation. Where the novel has long been understood as a form that easily scales from the local to the global, Mitchell emphasizes the discontinuity afforded by novelistic thinking. The efficient causality that has subtended literary realism aims to retroactively recreate the events that lead inevitably from the past to the future. Mitchell’s formal investment in discontinuity resists the tyranny of the inevitable by narrating moments of bifurcation in which a new possibility for action suddenly and unexpectedly emerges. Thus, his novels adopt an inefficient causality that give expression to the feeling that things might be different than they are, that inevitability (optimistic or pessimistic) is a dangerous trap. The challenge that Mitchell poses for himself and other novelists is to imagine a disposition modest enough to nurture and shepherd into being these moments of bifurcation when, by definition, there is nothing in the prior state that predicts them.

Investing in Fictions: Faith, Abstraction and Materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Eoin Flannery
Keyword(s):  
Financial Burden ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Credit Crisis ◽  
Celtic Tiger ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Finance Capitalism ◽  
The Relationship

One of the central contentions of this essay is that Paul Murray's novel, The Mark and the Void, addresses questions of faith, fictionality, literary form and the relationship between abstract finance and material sociality. The novel engages with and exposes the arcane vernaculars of finance capitalism, while at the same time registering the inalienable materiality of their effects in terms of impoverishment, displacement and terminal indebtedness. As we shall detail, for Murray, the purpose of ‘finance fiction’ is neither to confirm nor further mythologize the transcendental fictionality of high finance. In crafting such a literary critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland, Murray invokes an increasingly common trope – the zombie. In doing so, The Mark and The Void partakes of a figuration that acknowledges ‘the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis’. In a sense, enlisting the metonymic figure of the zombie speaks to the undead nature of indebtedness, and it is an apt figuration of the past that continues to haunt in the present and into the future. As the narrative suggests, debt is the financial burden that refuses to die, and the literary zombie represents communities of Celtic Tiger debtors metonymically.

Cervantine Criticism since 2000 and into the Future

2021 ◽  
pp. 647-680
Author(s):  
Bruce R. Burningham
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Current Century ◽  
Critical Perspectives ◽  
The Way

The past two decades have seen an explosion in Cervantes scholarship. Indeed, it would perhaps not be an exaggeration to suggest that the last twenty years arguably represent the Golden Age of Cervantes criticism: slightly more than half of scholarly works written since 1888 have been published during the last two decades. In other words, during the last twenty years, the body of Cervantes knowledge has more than doubled, greatly expanding our variety of critical perspectives along the way. This chapter discusses the ‘across the centuries’ trend resulting from the various anniversary celebrations related to Cervantes, the ‘Cervantes and the Americas’ collections, Cervantes’s treatment of Islam, and the modernity of the novel, among other trends that have expanded Cervantine criticism since the turn of the current century.

scholarly journals The Issue of Genre in Pekić's Early Opus

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Pticina
Keyword(s):  
Central Point ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Definition Of

The paper presents the analysis of genre definition of Pekić’s prose. Genre definition of the prose work The time of miracles is mainly analysed and explained, which theoreticians define differently, determining it as a chain, stories, but also as a novel. The analysis of the corpus, that is, the works The time of miracles and New Jerusalem is conducted through the prism of Bakhtin’s theory on the novel, with a brief resistance of Lukacs’ theory to Bakhtin’s when it comes to the analysis of Pekić’s prose. After the explanation of the characterisation of The time of miracles as a novel, we deal with chronotope, as genre definition, where the most common chronotopes that we encounter in Pekić’s prose are indicated. The novelties that Pekić brings to Serbian literature are reflected in one complete novelistic image, a parallel world, documented by historical sources, the witness’ stories, archeological sites. Generally speaking, the central point of his work is occupied by problematising man’s position in the world in general – so, also in the past, present, but in the future as well. And precisely that and such his relation towards culture and existence – erudite, problematising, predictive, revealing – is “analogous to the correlations between chronotope within the work“ (Bakhtin, 1989, p. 386).

scholarly journals Picturing truth and reconciliation

Temida ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 73-76
Author(s):  
Marian Liebmann
Keyword(s):  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Vulnerable Group ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

This is an account of the workshop run at the conference Truth and reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia: Where are we now and where to go? Even in such a short workshop, it seemed that it was possible to share difficult areas of the past, and move on to looking at hopes for the future. The use of art materials seemed to facilitate the expression of aspects difficult to put into words. There seems to be potential for extending this method. Yet it is not without its dangers, if used with a vulnerable group of people, or in an insecure situation, or in an insensitive way. It could open doors which are difficult to shut again. The ability of art to bring up memories and emotions is both its strength and its risk.

scholarly journals The Last Day and Brexit: Delusions of Future Past

Porównania ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
Justyna Jajszczok
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ideological Background

The paper aims to show how the traditions of science fiction and, above all, invasion literature provide the ideological background for reading Andrew Hunter Murray’s The Last Day as a novel about Brexit. As it draws on anxious visions of the future, in which the enemy lurks around every corner, and the only salvation is complete isolation from the world, Murray’s work is read here as a Brexit dream come true, in which Britain is once again great, independent and uncontaminated by foreign elements. By evoking the myths that focus only on glory and conveniently “forget” the dark sides of the empire, the novel demonstrates that the fantasies of the past are as distant as the fantasies of the future; the loss of the world that never was is reworked in The Last Day into the loss of ecologically viable planet.

Wavering in Delight

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-76
Author(s):  
Myrto Drizou
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The Past ◽  
Models Of Teaching ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Sister Carrie

In this chapter, Drizou argues that Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) questions the rationalization of modern progress by depicting the turn of the century as a moment that wavers between the urgent incalculability of the future and the conventional knowledge of the past, embodied in the two main plotlines of the novel: Carrie’s hasty anticipation of the future and Hurstwood’s steady retreat to the past. For many scholars, the intersecting plotlines of Sister Carrie suggest the contrasting narratives of progress and decline that confirm the irreversibility of fate in turn-of-the-century naturalist texts. Dreiser complicates the teleology of this model, however, by dramatizing the temporal unpredictability of evolutionary tropes (change, adaptability, and chance) to illustrate wavering as a mode that allows his characters to measure their options and remain open to the future. This wavering mode furnishes a new paradigm of thinking about the fin de siècle as an incalculably open jangle that welcomes (and embodies) the resistance to rationalized discourses of modernity. In this sense, Dreiser’s novel prompts us to question and rethink our contemporary processes of rationalization, such as the standardization of knowledge through period-based models of teaching and temporally restrictive paradigms of scholarship.

“If They Don’t Start Listening to Us, the Future Is Going to Look the Same as the Past”: Young People and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 509-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Magill ◽  
Brandon Hamber
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Young People ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Major Factors ◽  
Reconciliation Process

This article, based on empirical research from Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, explores how young people conceptualize reconciliation and examines the meaning this concept holds for them. Qualitative data are collected through one-to-one interviews with young people aged 16 to 18 living in Northern Ireland ( N = 15) and Bosnia and Herzegovina ( N = 15). Results indicate that young people’s conceptualizations of reconciliation are largely relationship based. In terms of their role in the reconciliation process, young people see themselves as both potential peacemakers and potential troublemakers. They feel that politicians and the older generations have a significant impact on whether the role of young people in the future would be constructive or destructive. The research finds that a lack of political and economic change was one of the major factors that negatively influenced the potential for reconciliation, as did the lack of intergenerational dialogue. The research also indicates that it is vital to include young people in the debate about reconciliation.

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