"Memory and Erasure brings together young and established Zimbabwean scholars and activists who explore with fresh eyes the failure to overcome the terrible legacies of this period. At its heart is recognition that justice cannot be achieved while Gukurahundi’s perpetrators remain in power and sti...ll seek to control the memory of that period. The chapters explore the failures of peacebuilding, finding only a negative peace, the weighty obstacle to reform of the ‘securocratic state’, and the weaknesses of transitional justice efforts and institutions, from the late 1980s to the present. They focus on ‘linguistic genocide’, noting not only the use of linguistic difference to violently divide and target during Gukurahundi, but the use of Gukurahundi as metaphor for a structural violence that has carried on in the daily life of Ndebele speakers into the present. A highly original chapter focuses on the layered and gendered silences, powerfully rooted in shame and humiliation, that continue to shroud victims of sexual violence. The book ends with an important chapter on popular efforts at making counter-memory, through public lectures, the subversion of official celebrations, the reclaiming of statues, and above all an ongoing battle over the memorialisation of Bhalagwe camp, where thousands of people were detained, tortured and killed by state agents. This is a lonely, dangerous struggle, but it also underlines the ultimate failure of the party-state’s ‘anti-memory’. This book engages with wide-ranging theoretical work on transitional justice and memory, and makes revealing comparisons with cases from the former Yugoslavia to Namibia and South Africa." (Publisher)
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"Los medios de comunicación son grandes aliados en la sensibilización y apropiación del legado de la Comisión de la Verdad. El Informe Final brinda la oportunidad de difundirlo a través de una variedad de formatos innovadores que vayan más allá del registro de historias. Los contextos explica...tivos que incluye el Informe Final se convierten en información novedosa para desarrollar durante un largo tiempo. Al momento de contrastar la información es recomendable escuchar y dar cabida a todas las voces. Procurar un relato humanizante. Ir más allá de lo evidente. Evidenciar los factores de persistencia del conflicto." (Algunas sugerencias y oportunidades periodísticas para el abordaje del Informe, p.209)
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"The exhibition focuses on how young people envision their identities in their respective countries: what mental images do they collectively have about their life experiences. Thus, this project seeks to present collective memories from different parts of the world in an exhibition that will promote... visual culture. It explores the way in which parts of the world presents themselves within a contemporary space. This exhibition therefore aims at giving the younger generation an edge in the visualization and narration of their understanding of the past through various means of artistic expressions. The expectation is that, these students’ works, created and exhibited from a wide and divergent cultural experience would provide some sort of emotional templates and indicators for the understanding of other cultures." (Introduction, p.5)
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"... The past does not really exist: it is only a story we tell ourselves. But what happens when we tell this story not only to ourselves but also to our followers, when it is recorded not only on our social media pages but also on the pages of hundreds or thousands of others, making it something th...at can be viewed and referenced forever? Social media networks are becoming vast digital archives in which the past merges seamlessly with the present, slowly erasing our capacity to forget. And yet at the same time, our memory is being outsourced to systems that we don't control and that could become obsolete at any time, cutting us off from our memories and risking total oblivion." (Back cover)
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"The aim of this chapter is to consider the past, present, and future of journalism and memory in two senses: first, as time periods in the evolution of this area of research and, second, as thematic elements in the scholarship on journalism and memory. In other words, how does journalism address so...cieties’ past, present, and future through its memory work? Reflecting this twofold purpose, the chapter moves from the roots and founders of this subfield to four main contemporary areas of research focusing on: (1) journalists’ direct engagement with the past through practices such as commemorative/anniversary journalism; (2) the various ways in which memory is used by journalists in their coverage of current events; (3) the relationship between memory and journalism’s orientation to the future; and (4) the memory of journalism itself and how journalists use it to establish their identity, boundaries, and authority. In addition to surveying key studies and concepts with regards to these themes, each of these four sections also discusses remaining challenges and questions. The concluding section of the chapter presents a broad agenda for future research." (p.420-421)
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"This book mobilises the concept of kitsch to investigate the tensions around the representation of genocide in international graphic novels that focus on the Holocaust and the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. In response to the predominantly negative readings of kitsch as meaningless or in...appropriate, this book offers a fresh approach that considers how some of the kitsch strategies employed in these works facilitate an affective interaction with the genocide narrative. These productive strategies include the use of the visual metaphors of the animal and the doll figure and the explicit and excessive depictions of mass violence. The book also analyses where kitsch still produces problems as it critically examines depictions of perpetrators and the visual and verbal representations of sexual violence. Furthermore, it explores how graphic novels employ anti-kitsch strategies to avoid the dangers of excess in dealing with genocide." (Publisher)
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"Wie wird koloniale Gewalt historisch thematisiert? Wie gehen dokumentarische Filme und geschichtspolitische Diskurse mit ihr um? Robert Stock nähert sich diesen Fragen mit kritischem Blick auf den Kolonialkrieg Portugals in Afrika und den nationalen Befreiungskampf Mosambiks. Dabei fokussiert er s...eine Untersuchung auf die Gestaltung, Funktion und Reflexion historischer Zeugenschaft. Am Material von bislang wenig beachteten Filmproduktionen über die Dekolonisierungsprozesse zwischen Mosambik und Portugal seit den 1970er Jahren analysiert er die sich verändernden Deutungsweisen der kolonialen Vergangenheit." (Verlag)
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"Die Fallanalyse hat gezeigt, dass eine Erzählung vom Krieg 1992-93 propagiert wird, die einer abchasischen Version des Narrationsschemas 'Die Vertreibung von fremden Feinden' entspricht. Ein zentrales Element der Erzählung ist zudem, so ergab die Interpretation, eine betont positive Darstellung d...es Kriegsalltags. Durch sie wird einerseits das bereits existierende Bild der heldenhaften Soldaten gestützt. Andererseits wird der Nachkriegsgeneration 20 Jahre nach Kriegsende eine gewissermaßen harmlose Version des Kriegsgeschehens angeboten, mittels Film und Konzerten werden begleitend affektive Erlebnisse ermöglicht. So soll die Identifikation der Nachgeborenen mit diesem Teil des abchasischen Gründungsmythos, den sie selbst nicht erlebt haben, angeregt werden." (S. 37)
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"In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima's Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Investigating how hand-drawn comics has come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by d...iverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war. Hillary L. Chute traces how comics inherited graphic print traditions and innovations from the seventeenth century and later, pointing out that at every turn new forms of visual-verbal representation have arisen in response to the turmoil of war. Modern nonfiction comics emerged from the shattering experience of World War II, developing in the 1970s with Art Spiegelman's first 'Maus' story about his immigrant family's survival of Nazi death camps and with Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa's inaugural work of 'atomic bomb manga,' the comic book Ore Wa Mita (I Saw It), a title that alludes to Goya's famous Disasters of War etchings. Chute explains how the form of comics - its collection of frames - lends itself to historical narrative. By interlacing multiple temporalities over the space of the page or panel, comics can place pressure on conventional notions of causality. Aggregating and accumulating frames of information, comics calls attention to itself as evidence. Disaster Drawn demonstrates why, even in the era of photography and film, people understand hand-drawn images to be among the most powerful forms of historical witness." (Publisher)
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"The central thesis of Crtl+Z is that a digital right to be forgotten is an innovative idea with a lot of possibilities and potential. The idea simply needs to be opened up, reframed, and restructured. The extreme options currently on the table limit the many ways to think about digital redemption a...nd polarize regions. By utilizing new theories of privacy, breaking down the concept to organize its many meanings, and reframing the problem as one of information stewardship instead of information permanence, a host of choices become available for consideration. In order to make these difficult choices once they are on the table, the issues must be configured to fit within a digital discourse, existing legal cultures, and the international community. My approach to analyzing digital redemption is inherently comparative. The right to be forgotten is indisputably a European creation, but there is a great deal to be gained from studying digital redemption beyond European borders. The right to be forgotten sits at the intersection of change: change in national and transnational policy and change in everyday information technology practices, demands, and expectations. Situated in this unique position, the right to be forgotten encompasses many of the big questions surrounding information technologies and offers a particularly valuable site and moment for comparison of democratic information societies. Comparison among regional treatments of information technology should help us make sense of legal particularities and assumptions that otherwise go unnoticed." (Introduction, p.21)
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"This book approaches the memory sharing of groups, communities and societies as inevitable struggles over the interpretation of, and authority over, particular stories. Coming to terms with the past in memory work, alone or with others, is always unsteady ground and the activation of memory will al...ways relay imaginations of futures we want to shape and inhabit. The contributors all explore in different ways how citizens can actualize a public and how citizens and groups struggle with their pasts and presents - and other group's understandings - in their work for futures they dream of, or envision. This implies an engagement with the notion of social justice, which in turn entails trial and revision of ideas and procedures of how to share the world. But to share also requires some kind of common ground and distributed power. The anthology thus engages with a range of cases that bring views and voices back in public, demanding justice, recognition, sometimes literally triggering new trials. Some of the memory work is done strategically, in the context of communication for development and social change interventions where NGOs, community-based organizations, governments or UN agencies pursue not just voice and views, but also very material demands for social justice and social change." (Publisher)
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"El primer capítulo, titulado “Hacia una conceptualización del humor gráfico”, se propone aportar herramientas conceptuales y teóricas que nos permitan concebir al humor gráfico como un tipo particular de discurso social. El capítulo comienza con un intento de organización conceptual de l...os campos semánticos relacionados con el llamado humor gráfico (comic, historieta, cartoon, viñeta de humor, tira cómica y tira de humor) y, desde luego, de la categoría de humor gráfico misma, con el objetivo de lograr desprender de los usos habituales de estas categorías (a las que llamaremos categorías nativas) una conceptualización erudita que permita organizar y fundamentar tanto una metodología para la investigación histórica como los criterios que guían la escritura de este libro. El capítulo ofrece, asimismo, un breve mapa conceptual para ubicar al humor gráfico en el marco de la teoría psicoanalítica del humor, y finalmente, algunos lineamientos para caracterizar al humor gráfico como discurso social, a partir del cual podemos abordar tanto la dimensión representacional de la experiencia colectiva como así también el carácter político de estos actos de lenguaje, en los cuales un autor, llamado humorista, toma la palabra. En el segundo capítulo, titulado “El lenguaje del comic y el cartoon”, se ofrece una descripción sistemática de los principales elementos y componentes del género, desarrollada por la semiología estructural, y se incorporan algunos comentarios de desarrollos posteriores en el marco del posestructuralismo. Allí se describen los principales componentes del comic y sus vínculos, prestando especial atención a los mecanismos de producción de sentido en el marco de las viñetas. Los siguientes dos capítulos se abocan a la historización de los géneros vinculados con el humor gráfico. El capítulo 3 aborda la historia del comic focalizando en el desarrollo de la industria periodística estadounidense, en el seno de la cual nació el comic propiamente dicho, aunque se ofrecen también referencias permanentes a los desarrollos de géneros afines en los países europeos. Por su parte, el capítulo 4 se ocupa de la historia del humor gráfico y de la historieta en la Argentina desde el siglo xix hasta avanzado el proceso de la transición democrática. Siguiendo un criterio similar, los siguientes dos capítulos abordan un recorrido por los principales desarrollos académicos vinculados a estos géneros: el capítulo 5 se centra en los portes y debates internacionales; y el capítulo 6, en los estudios sobre el género en la Argentina, incluyendo, en ambos casos, no solo comentarios sobre las producciones académicas o eruditas, sino también sobre los circuitos de producción y circulación extraacadémicos." (Introducción, p.14-15)
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"This collection of essays and interviews offers perspectives on traumatic experience from the social and public side of the equation. Like other books in the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series, it is concerned with redressing the balance of public memory through a focus on what has been negle...cted or excluded, but traumatic memory poses special problems in this regard. Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton, the series editors, suggest that the question of how we remember has become central to historical enquiry, but the question itself is fraught with complexity. Generational change and new technologies of memory are reshaping the ways in which memory works, and the influence of trauma narratives is a factor in this. They pose another question: ‘What is “memory” under such conditions?’ Here, we focus on the distance between traumatic narratives in the public domain, and the experience of traumatic recall in the mind of a person who has been directly affected by extreme events." (Introduction, p.1)
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