“Never Trust a Survivor”: Historical Trauma, Postmemory and the Armenian Genocide in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard

The article focuses on Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser-known and underappreciated 1987 novel Bluebeard, which is analyzed and interpreted in the light of Marianne Hirsch’s seminal theory of postmemory. Even though it was published prior to Hirsch’s formulation of the concept, Vonnegut’s novel intuitively anticipates it, problematizing the implications of inherited, second-hand memory. To further complicate matters, Rabo Karabekian, the protagonist-narrator of Bluebeard, a World War II veteran, amalgamates his direct, painful memories with those of his parents, survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Both the novel and the theory applied to it centre on the problematics of historical and personal trauma, engendered by two genocides which are often the object of comparative analyses: the Armenian Genocide, also referred to as the Armenian Holocaust, and the Jewish Holocaust. The latter is central to Hirsch’s interdisciplinary work in the field of memory studies, encompassing literature, the visual arts and gender studies. In Bluebeard, Vonnegut holds to account a humanity responsible for the atrocities of twentieth-century history: two world wars and two genocides for which they respectively established the context. The article examines the American writer’s reflection on death and violence, man’s destructive impulse and annihilation. In a world overshadowed by memories of mass extermination, Vonnegut interrogates the possibility of a new beginning, pointing to women as agents of renewal and sociopolitical change. He also identifies the role that art plays in the process of potential reconstruction, the story of Karabekian, a failed artist and highly successful art collector, being a Künstlerroman with a feminist edge.

Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia

Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European Union, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city in the face of the country’s widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the Christian god. Stridently assertive, these affectively charged mediations of religion, masculinity, Christian privilege and subjectivity are among the myriad ephemera of war, from rumors, graffiti, incendiary pamphlets, and Video CDs, to Peace Provocateur text-messages and children’s reconciliation drawings. Orphaned Landscapes theorizes the production of monumental street art and other visual media as part of a wider work on appearance in which ordinary people, wittingly or unwittingly, refigure the aesthetic forms and sensory environment of their urban surroundings. The book offers a rich, nuanced account of a place in crisis, while also showing how the work on appearance, far from epiphenomenal, is inherent to sociopolitical change. Whether considering the emergence and disappearance of street art or the atmospherics and fog of war, Spyer demonstrates the importance of an attunement to elusive, ephemeral phenomena for their palpable and varying effects in the world. Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Failure Leads Protest Movements to Support More Radical Tactics

Most social movements will encounter setbacks in their pursuit of sociopolitical change. However, little is known about how movements are affected after protestors fail to achieve their aims. What are the effects of failure on subsequent engagement in various conventional and radical actions? Does failure promote divergent reactions among protestors and/or dissatisfaction with democracy? A meta-analysis of nine experiments ( N = 1,663) assessed the effects of one-off failure on protestors’ reactions, subsequent tactical choices, and support for democracy; and iterative stochastic simulations modeled the effects of failure over multiple protests over time. Results indicated that initial failure gives rise to divergent, somewhat contradictory responses among protestors and that these responses are further influenced by the repeated failure (vs. success) over time. Further, the simulations identified “tipping points” in these responses that promote radicalization and undermine support for democracy.

West African-diasporic social media users facing COVID-19: Care, emotions and power during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic

The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in (West) Africa announced a health crisis that required increasing levels of care, on the physical as well as on the emotional level. At the same time, societies had to respect social distancing rules that impeded regular care relationships. This article analysed social media as one means for West African-diasporic actors to practice care in this situation of physical immobility. It is based on a critical discourse analysis of postings on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and WhatsApp. This analysis showed that West African-diasporic actors used social media to perform emotional practices of care through informing on COVID-19-related issues, raising awareness and encouraging compliance with anti-COVID-19 measures. In addition, these practices of care unveil negotiations of sociopolitical power relations that oscillate between opportunities for solidarity and sociopolitical change, on the one hand, and intersectional exclusions, on the other hand.

Uranium–Thorium Dating of Speleothems

Speleothems are important timekeepers of Earth’s climate history. A key advantage of speleothems is that they can be dated using U–Th techniques. Mass spectrometric methods for measuring U and Th isotopes has led to vast improvements in measurement precision and a dramatic reduction in sample size. As a result, the timing of past climate, environment, and Earth system changes can be investigated at exceptional temporal precision. In this review, we summarize the principles and history of U–Th dating of speleothems. Finally, we highlight three studies that use U–Th dated speleothems to investigate past changes to the Asian monsoon, constrain the timing of sociopolitical change in ancient civilizations, and develop a speleothem-based calibration of the 14C timescale.

Protest, Internet Activism, and Sociopolitical Change in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa has been the scene of a sizeable wave of social and political protests in recent years. These protests have many aspects in common, while at the same time there is a certain historic continuity connecting them to previous protests, with which they also have much in common. What makes them new, however, is a hybrid nature that combines street protest and online action, making them similar to protests occurring in other parts of the world during the same period. Based on a literature review and field work on three countries, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this article addresses some of the main features of what some authors have called the “third wave of African protests.” The study points out how the digital environment is galvanizing a new process of popular opposition and enabling both greater autonomy for actors promoting the protests and greater interaction at the regional level. With the sociopolitical impact in the short and medium term still uncertain, the third wave of African protests is giving birth to a new political and democratic culture in the region as a whole.

Ideology and science: The story of Polish psychology in the communist period

This article presents a fragment of the history of psychology in Poland, discussing its development in the years 1945–56, which saw sweeping political and geographical transformations. In that maelstrom of history, psychology was particularly affected by the effects of geopolitical changes, which led to its symbolic ‘arrest’ in 1952, when psychological practice was prohibited and all psychology courses were abolished at universities. Amnesty was declared only in 1956, with the demise of the so-called Stalinist ‘cult of personality’ and the onset of a turbulent period when the crimes of the Stalinist era were prosecuted. We have adopted three time frames for our description and analysis of this dramatic period in the development of psychology in Poland. ‘The past’ is a story about the flourishing of Polish psychology before World War Two and the hopes for the discipline’s restoration after the war. ‘The present’, as the core of this narrative, represents the events of 1950–56. ‘The future’ refers to the period when Stalinist abuses were prosecuted during the Thaw, following the collapse of the Stalinist dictatorship, and the resurgence of Polish psychologists’ hopes for resurrecting their discipline. In all these periods, the narrative is interwoven with the story of the Polish psychologist Mieczysław Kreutz, who offers a model example of the hypothesized dependence of scientific research on sociopolitical change.

Covid-19 and the Apocalypse: Religious and Secular Perspectives

The current Covid-19 pandemic has led to existential crises. One way of finding meaning in this is through apocalyptic narratives. We differentiate between religious (based upon eschatology) and secular apocalypticism (based upon radical political and economic change) and argue that both are to be found in the wake of Covid-19 infection. For religious believers, the apocalypse signifies the rapture of the faithful into heaven while those on earth will undergo the tribulations. For secular believers, the apocalypse signifies sociopolitical change. The paper ends by speculating upon the socio-political and economic changes during and after the pandemic- the New Jerusalem.

Vapor Memory, or, memory in the ruins of history

This article explores vaporwave’s appropriation of the past and future to constitute a (non)-site for the displacement of the present. In doing so, vaporwave – an electronic music genre that samples sights and sounds from 1980s and 1990s popular culture – masquerades itself as a radical project that decentres the subject’s location within the linear matrix of time (Tanner 2016) and houses the potential to oppose the humanistic territorializations of late capitalism (Killeen 2018; Whelan and Nowak 2018). I argue that these arguments focus too closely on vaporwave’s style and aesthetic dimension without considering its maintenance of various structures of oppression and appropriation indicative of globalized capitalism. The result is a misattribution of transgressive potential to vaporwave that ignores its incredibly conservative undertones. To engage with vaporwave then demands a bifurcation of its outward, rhizomatic veneer and the codes, conventions and axiomatics that underwrite it. I make this argument by drawing upon Jean Baudrillard’s (1981, 1993, 1994, 2010) scepticism of any accelerationist and technologist politics of subversion to mount effective sociopolitical change. Additionally, I make use of many feminist and critical race approaches to highlight the affinities between vaporwave’s appropriate style and the logics of late capitalism.