History, Writing and Memory

When Yugoslavia was invaded by Nazi Germany and its allies in April 1941, what followed was as much a Yugoslav civil war as a war of occupation and liberation. Several hundred-thousand civilians were killed by other Yugoslavs in large-scale massacres or concentration camps, and the horrific events left the country ruined and deeply divided.
USABLE HISTORY? examines the way in which the history of Yugoslavia's internal problematic past was presented and used politically, and asks how a society can cope with such an "unmasterable" history. How did Yugoslav historians and politicians represent and explain this history and how did these representations interact with the cultural developments, political demands and societal needs? By investigating political documents, histioriography and popular representations of history such as films, songs and literature, the book reveals a disturbing narrative of historical (mis)interpretation and (mis)use.

Overalt i Spanien tilbagetrækkes gadenavne, monumenter og statuer, der på en eller anden måde hylder general Francisco Francos oprør og hans efterfølgende diktatur. Dette sker på baggrund af vedtagelsen af Ley de Memoria Histórica  i oktober 2007. Loven blev foreslået af premierminister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero fra PSOE , og den anerkender ofre fra begge sider af borgerkrigen og det frankistiske diktatur. Denne lov har fået stor omtale både i Spanien og i resten af Europa, hvor man i den danske presse har diskuteret, om spanierne nu er villige til at ruske op i deres sorte fortid.

Med en blodig borgerkrig og et næsten 40 års langt diktatur i bagagen, var grundsøjlerne for en fredelig overgang til demokrati stilhed og forglemmelsespagter. Med det måtte mange spaniere, frivilligt eller ufrivilligt, putte fortidens forbrydelser i glemmebogen. I 1990'erne opstod der en ny bevægelse, der nægtede at nøjes med den ’ene side af historien’ og som krævede at få sandheden frem i lyset. Blandt disse forkæmpere finder vi den spanske undersøgelsesdommer Baltasar Garzón, der, med sin ’oprydning’ i tidligere diktaturstyrede lande som Chile, nu er gået i gang med Spanien. Han kræver massegrave åbnet, så de efterladte kan give deres afdøde en anstændig begravelse, samt at få stillet de skyldige til ansvar for deres blodsudgydelser. Modstanderne af Ley de Memoria Histórica er at finde i de fleste højreorienterede grupperinger. Det konservative parti PP  mener, at denne lov blot er et ensidigt forsøg på at omskrive historien og slette fortidens spor, fuldstændig som Franco forsøgte at gøre efter den 2. Republik. Et sted som mange højreorienterede frygter loven vil modificere, er Valle de los Caídos . Husende både Francos og Falangens grundlægger José Antonio Primo de Riveras grav, er denne dal selve indbegrebet af fascismen og krigens grusomheder. Men det er samtidig et hvilested for mange tusinde mennesker, både republikanere og nationalister. Ley de Memoria Histórica forbyder al politisk aktivitet og mindehøjtideligheder ved dalen, men der har længe været uvished omkring dens fremtid. Det diskuteres om monumentet skal gøres til et museum med en forsonet erindring til ære for alle de faldne i borgerkrigen, mens andre helt mener, at den kun skal have funktion som en almindelig kirke.

While memory guarantees a degree of continuity between past and present, it is not without shortcomings. Powerless in the face of the future and threatened by oblivion, memory has the ability to imprison individuals and communities alike in a version of the past that has been promoted to the level of historical truth. This is why the work of Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad (a rising figure in the world of French-language theatre) generally prefers the international kind of memory provided by literature to the historical ties commonly invoked in family retellings of the past. Mouawad’s reworking of memory is particularly present in his best-known play, Littoral (1997), which addresses the various ways in which institutionalized forms of memory prevent the development of individual identities.
This article concentrates on his more recent play Incendies (2003), where historical
memory no longer yields to literary memory, but rather superimposes itself on an intertextual canvas. While obviously rewriting the Oedipus myth as told by Sophocles (whose Oedipus Rex becomes a “palimpsestuous” plot for Incendies), Mouawad’s text is also replete with references to the civil war in his native Lebanon. Most historical episodes (e.g. the burnt-out bus of 1975, the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacres of 1982) are reworked in function of the dramatic plot, and it would be unfair to reduce Incendies to a “message” or any other traditional form of “commitment”. Yet Mouawad does not fit the profile of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “irresponsible” writer either: Lebanon’s civil war, far from being a mere screen onto which the action is projected, informs this play as much as the oedipal plot does. It is indeed the combination of both semantic networks that allows a real working through of memory, which is what is at stake here.

La critica condivisa da Paci e Sini alla concezione scientifico-matematica di spazio e tempo che sorregge la concezione tradizionale di storia e la concezione razionalistica dell’architettura si sostanzia dell’appello al mondo della vita, alla spazialità e temporalità della vita vissuta, della durata e della relazione.
Nell'indagare il rapporto tra memoria e progetto tutto ciò ha un ruolo essenziale, così come l'apertura d'orizzonte offerto dalla genealogia e dalla sua costitutiva capacità di farsi carico di
quella circolarità delle estasi temporali per cui il passato necessita del futuro per acquistare il suo senso compiuto.

This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a German Holocaust document, Erica Fischer’s Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (1994), in the context of the emergence of increasingly global gay and lesbian movements in the 1990s. Aimée & Jaguar invited collective identification as victims by tapping into the contemporary gay/lesbian discourse that used the Holocaust as a metaphor for the plight of homosexuals, further resonating with a series of AIDS dramas from the era that did the same. The text’s reception and selective (dis)identification by Fischer and audiences alike raise questions about the ownership and appropriation of Holocaust memory as well as about the impact of globalizing social movements and mass media on post-Holocaust identity politics.

Book of interviews in Estonian with twelve renowned historians: Peter Burke, Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davies, Carlo Ginzburg, Reinhart Koselleck, Jacques Le Goff, Jacques Revel, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Tzvetan Todorov, Paul Veyne.

„Writing Feminist Historical Crime Fiction as an Opportunity for a New Understanding of History” in Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing ed. Nina Lykke. Routledge, New York, London 2014. pp. 80-95.

„Editorial Introduction”, Nina Lykke, Anne Brewster, Kathy Davis, Redi Koobak, Sissel Lie, Andrea Petö, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert. in Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing  ed. Nina Lykke. Routledge, New York, London 2014. pp. 1-17.

Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century.
eds. Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle

The book reflects on how narratives are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The contributions address such issues as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, the relationship between various individuals’ versions of war narratives and the ways in which events are brought together to serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Drawing upon the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yugoslav wars, and considering narrative genres that include film, schoolbooks, novels, oral history, archives, official documents, personal testimony and memoirs, readers are introduced to a range of narrative forms and examples that highlight the complexity of narrative in relation to war.

Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and taken together, analysis of these narratives contributes to our understanding of the causes, experience, dynamics and consequences of war, making it the ideal book for those interested in twentieth-century war history and the history of memory and narrative.

In the following article I aim at bridging some of the sources that have critically addressed the invention of Quintana Roo in the regional historiography with the need of rethinking its contemporary relation to time after the takeoff of tourism in the 1970s. I contend that by means of thoroughly reinterpreting the politics of the vacuum and the historiographical particularities of Quintana Roo, we will be able to find some clues for understanding the need to rewrite history in a shorter scope, as a way of taking a fresh look at pending issues concerning new myth-making and ethnic memory processes and their relation to broader narratives such as the regional historical time and the overheated Mexican nationalism.

The destruction of District Six in Cape Town was a seminal event for coloured South African writers during apartheid. As many of them hailed from D6 themselves - and were victims of the Group Areas forced removals - they registered their protest to the brutalities of white rule by writing stories about the impact it had on residents of the District.

In this thesis, I trace the genealogy of literature produced from the 1960s to the 1990s, showing that District Six exercised an important function in the mobilization of resistance to apartheid and the imagination of new forms of communal cohesion and memory. I propose that there are three discrete periods, each related to the status of the district’s integrity, which directly inform the production of coloured literature.

The first period (pre-1966) was a time when the community lived under the threat, but not the actuality, of relocation. Literature of this era is typified by the minute detailing of District Six's material conditions, or what we can call “portrait protest.” The second period (1966-1982) relates to the protracted demolition of the area, in which coloured writing focused on individuals’ psychic and relational trauma which the Group Areas Act effected. The third period (post-1983) was after District Six was cleared, renamed, and reserved for whites, an era where coloured literature turned toward communal nostalgia in the form of romanticized autobiography.

This periodization helps reveal the structural forces impacting coloured artistic expression, showing how the District was an important symbol and organizing principle writers used to protest apartheid and create a new sense of community out of the dislocating removals.

Since the 1990s we have seen an increasing number of studies in the history of national history writing, in the ways in which peoples construct nations through the production of historiography. But a major breakthrough was made with a five-year ESF Scientific Programme “Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe" (2003–2008), resulting in a eight-volume book series “Writing the Nation” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008–2015. This review essay delineates, first, the general architectonics of the series, to give an overview of its main results and findings. Then, secondly, some critical- methodological points are raised and some perspectives for future research suggested.

"Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), ed. Jonatan Meir, Three volumes, Mosad Bialik, Jerusalem

Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), first published in Vienna in 1819, is one of the sharpest and wittiest pieces of Jewish literature written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is perhaps the most important piece of Hebrew prose composed before the stories of Mendele Mocher Seforim. A sly and complex story deriding Hasidism and Hasidim, it is told through the correspondence between the beadles of Hasidic courts and contemporary rabbis, and it presents a dark picture of  avaricious frauds and swindlers whose main concern was control over territory and the souls of believers, a goal achieved by beguiling the authorities and attacking all opponents. Perl lends his book a ‘Hasidic’ feel both in its physical design and in its language, presenting a Maskilic version of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov that lays Hasidism bare so that no reader will ever be able to look at that, or any other Hasidic book, in the same way again. In addition to the book’s satiric sting, which would have been enough to bring its readers a dual pleasure, Perl’s hints at contemporary people and places, hidden within anagrams and numerological tricks. With the unraveling of these clues, which also include the use of actual Hasidic sources, the book is a valuable, contemporary view of historical reality. A meticulous reading of the book may therefore open a window on the hidden worlds of Hasidism and the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century.


The first volume (Imagined Hasidism) serves as an introduction to the complex satirical writings of Josef Perl of Tarnopol (1773-1839). At the center of the book stands an analysis of the satires, Megaleh Temirin (1819) and Bochen Tzadik (1838), including a systematic treatment of the ‘characters’ in the central works and a discussion of the dozens of manuscripts to be found in the Perl Archive in Jerusalem. Perl’s writings are analyzed here in the fuller context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in general and Maskilic and Hasidic literature in particular, as well as other polemical writings and governmental records critical of Hasidism. The study thus presents a complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between literature and history, between the anti-Hasidic reports and the more complicated historical reality, and lays the groundwork for further research into the genre of nineteenth-century Maskilic satire.

The second and third volumes (Megaleh Temirin) present for the first time an annotated edition of Megaleh Temirin. It is based on the first edition and the scattered manuscripts and it includes a comparison to its Yiddish translation. The book is accompanied by appendices on its origins and contents, including fundamental treatments of several passages: an explication of the encoded names, the Hasidic sources used by the author, and the variants found in the manuscripts and in the only edition of the book in Yiddish.

The editor of the book, Professor Jonatan Meir, teaches in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. He has published several articles on the Haskalah of Eastern Europe, Hasidism, and a number of varied topics in twentieth-century Kabbalah.


Contents

Volume 1  - Critical Edition

Concerning this edition
Key personalities
Sefer Megale Temirin – Critical Edition


Volume 2 - Appendixes:
1. Glossary, Abbreviations, Acronyms
2. Explanation of the Speaking Names
3. Perl’s Hasidic Sources
4. Manuscripts of Sefer Megale Temirin
5. Yiddish Introduction to Sefer Megale Temirin
Bibliographic Abbreviations

-------------------------------
Reviews:
(1) Dan Meron, 2013, ‘Megaleh Temirin’, Kivunim Hadashim 29, 55 pages (Hebrew)
(2) David Assaf, 2014, ‘Hasidim will not Read it but Tear it’, Haaretz, Tarbut ve-Sifrut, p .6 (Hebrew) http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/blog-post_18.html
(3) Eliezer Brodt, 2014, 'New book Announcement- Megale Temirin', The Seforim Blog http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/new-book-announcement-megale-temirin.html
(4) Matan Hermoni, 2014,  הסבתא המופקרת של הספרות העבריתHaaretz, Sfarim (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/.premium-1.2382365
(5) Shinichi Yamamoto, 2015, 山本　伸一, "ヨナタン・メイール編著『想像のハシディズム』", ユダヤ・イスラエル研究　第28号  http://www.waseda.jp/assoc-jsjs/jistudies.html
(6) David Biale and David Assaf,, 2015, 'Revealer Revealed', Jewish Review of Books, pp. 17-21  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1454/revealer-revealed/
(7) Hillel Halkin, 2015, "Sex, Magic, Bigotry, Corruption- and the First Hebrew Novel', Mosaic Magazine,  http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/05/sex-magic-bigotry-corruption-and-the-first-hebrew-novel/
(8) Tomer Persico, 2015, "Interview", Lula'at haEl Blog, http://tomerpersico.com/2015/08/10/meir_perl/

Cancún fue levantado en 1970, en la costa norte de Quintana Roo, como el primero y más exitoso de los Centros Integralmente Planeados (CIP) creados por el Banco de México (Banxico) para el turismo. En menos de 50 años, se dice que ha pasado de cero a un millón de habitantes, convirtiéndose en la ciudad más pujante de la península de Yucatán, el segundo puerto aéreo de México y el complejo turístico de playa más importante de América Latina. Desde su creación, Cancún ha representado una bisagra en la historia quintanarroense al ser punta de lanza hacia el progreso de un estado que, pese a su juventud, reclama su lugar como raíz de México (cuna del mestizaje y del encuentro de dos mundos, y heredero de la cultura maya ancestral). No obstante, mientras que a Quintana Roo se le definió como “rincón ardiente de mexicanidad” (Martínez, 1986: 13) en un momento clave de su búsqueda de identidad territorial, a Cancún se le ha atribuido el hecho de “no parecer México”. Esta confusión se explica, en parte, al entender que el proceso acelerado por el cual este último pasó de periferia a centro representa un salto abrupto y anacrónico que no encuentra cabida fácil en la narrativa histórica tradicional del estado. En este sentido, en un gesto de desconocimiento de su historia y a falta de herramientas para ponderar sus propios criterios de historicidad, sigue pesando sobre Cancún el fardo de “no tener identidad”.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The present paper explores the shifting roles and understandings of the Singapore Straits from the latter Middle Ages until the opening decades of the eighteenth century. In pursuing this task, I will develop a set of basic questions that historicize and problematize the roles, functions and understandings of the Straits across the centuries, and also tease out historical and historiographical paradigms shaping and underpinning the understanding of the region’s past. In pursuing this programme I will make use of a broad range of sources including chronicles and histories, letters and treaties, navigational instructions and travel literature, as well as (European) cartography of the 16th to 18th centuries. In order to gain deeper appreciation of the multi-faceted roles and understandings of the Singapore Straits across the longue durée, I  not only adduce and evaluate materials of European colonial origin, but importantly also heed special attention to sources of Asian origin in general, and specifically to materials that have originally been written in Arabic, Malay, Chinese and have been made accessible to the wider reading public in various contemporary translations. The modes of enquiry and the insights brought to paper here differ both in terms of scope and objectives from my earlier findings expounded in The Singapore and Melaka Straits published in 2010.

History.  What is ‘history’?  Is it simply a ‘record of past events’ as my Collins Concise Dictionary suggests?  What about past events which aren’t recorded?  Are they still part of history?  And whose record counts?  Does mine?  Does yours?  Which one is the most accurate, and more importantly, whose account is right?  As I embark on research for my novel, Legacy, strands of which are historically based, I have begun to ask the questions which all writers of historical fiction must ask.

In his contribution to the roundtable in Museum Anthropology on the Confederate memorial debate, Mark Auslander critically reflects on proposals to move these memorial into museum spaces.    Museum Anthropology, Vol. 41, Iss. 2, pp. 137–39 © 2018

This is a story on how Belgian history has been written by a public history pionneer. Jean Schoonjans was a Roman catholic priest, high school teacher and university lecturer. He was educated in history at the catholic university of Louvain and ended his career at the Faculté Saint-Louis in Brussels. Besides writing school textbooks, he developped an interest in illustrated youth historical litterature. In association with two artists, he conceived and wrote the 6 volumes series « Nos Gloires » (Our Glories), telling the Belgian past from the cave men to the present. As far as to the implication of a professional historian, the medium was new : children and parents had to collect points on consummation goods and to exchange them for chromo’s. The pictures are amazing and so the albums are now sought by collectors. But the historical interpretation was one-sided and partly out-dated, despite its commitment to historical accuracy and patriotic consensus. Authorial and biographical circumstances may account for this paradox. This is the first scholarly work ever devoted to Jean Schoonjans’s life and career. It includes a full bibliography of his publications.

Building upon the efforts made by scholars over the past twenty years to enrich our understanding of the vibrancy and sophistication of literary cultures fostered within English communities of women religious during the central Middle Ages, this article offers evidence of these women keeping their communities’ histories and preserving their saints’ cults through their own writing. This evidence is uncovered through comparative analysis of the two extant versions of the post-mortem miracula of the late Anglo-Saxon saint, Edith of Wilton (c.961–c.984): the vita et translatio Edithe composed by the Flemish hagiographer Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c.1040–d. after 1107) circa 1080 and the early fifteenth-century Middle English Wilton Chronicle. This analysis not only confirms that the Wilton women provided the necessary patronage and oral and written reports for the authoring of their saint’s life and miracles, but also discloses the very histories that these women first recorded.

Much of the literature on post-violent contexts addresses problems of transitional justice, memory studies, and post-conflict reconciliation. This volume inscribes an innovative domain of inquiry, situating itself creatively amidst these discussions but building upon the literatures of museum and heritage studies. The contributors (themselves practitioners, artists, curators, activists and academics) draw from a broad range of geographical and theoretical material, and explore new ways of bearing witness vis-a-vis curatorial practice, heritage work and memorializing the past, to examine the challenges and limitations of such endeavors.


Authors:
ERICA LEHRER is Assistant Professor in History and Anthropology-Sociology at Concordia University in Montreal, where she also holds the Canada Research chair in Post-Conflict Studies. She is author of Revisiting Jewish Poland: Heritage, Memory, Reconciliation (2012), and has undertaken experimental curatorial work on Jewish heritage and memory in contemporary Poland.

CYNTHIA E. MILTON is Canada Research Chair in Latin American History and Associate Professor in the Département d'histoire at the Université de Montréal, Canada. She is author of The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (2007), editor of The Arts of Truth-telling in Post-Shining Path Peru, and co-editor of The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005).

MONICA EILEEN PATTERSON is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of numerous publications, and co-editor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (2011).




Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Witnesses to Witnessing; E.Lehrer & C.E.Milton

PART I: BEARING WITNESS BETWEEN MUSEUMS AND COMMUNITIES
'We were so far away': Exhibiting Inuit Oral Histories of Residential Schools; H.Igloliorte
The Past is a Dangerous Place: the Museum as a Safe Haven; V.Szekeres
Teaching Tolerance through Objects of Hatred: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia as 'Counter-Museum'; M.E.Patterson
Politics of the Past: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide at the Kigali Memorial Center; A.Sodaro

PART II: VISUALIZING THE PAST
Living Historically through Photographs in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reflections on Kliptown Museum, Soweto; D.Newbury
Showing and Telling: Photography Exhibitions in Israeli Discourses of Dissent; T.Katriel
Visualizing Apartheid: Re-framing Truth and Reconciliation through Contemporary South African Art; E.Mosely

PART III: MATERIALITY AND MEMORIAL CHALLENGES
Points of No Return: Cultural Heritage and Counter-Memory in Post-Yugoslavia; A.Herscher
Defacing Memory: (Un)tying Peru's Memory Knots; C.E.Milton
(Mis)representations of the Jewish Past in Poland's Memoryscapes: Nationalism, Religion and Political Economies of Commemoration; S.Kapralski

Afterward: The Turn to Pedagogy: a Needed Conversation on the Practice of Curating Difficult Knowledge; R.I.Simon

Index

Copyright © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Review:
'How to put difficult knowledge on public display is one of the biggest challenges for curators. It is also of major importance in contemporary civic life: what should be said and shown in museums, and how? This raises fascinating and complex intellectual and political questions. This book exposes and tackles these brilliantly through excellent discussion of a wide range of provocative cases. It should be read by anybody concerned with the dilemmas of curating difficult knowledge.' - Sharon Macdonald, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK

Senza dubbio è un'impresa molto ardua dare una definizione esauriente e onnicomprensiva di SCRITTURA. In questa sede, sia per limiti di spazio e di tempo, sia per ragioni scientifiche, ci concentreremo, naturalmente, solo su qualche aspetto della SCRITTURA; nello specifico, di quegli aspetti della pratica scrittoria che entrano in stretta relazione con il linguaggio umano. La SCRITTURA è generalmente intesa come una serie di segni grafici disposti su di una superficie 1 in un certo ordine e in una certa sequenza, in modo che questa serie sia suscettibile di essere interpretata (letta) da un eventuale interprete (lettore) che possa attribuire dei significati a quei segni. Per potere essere interpretata correttamente, questa sequenza di segni grafici deve appartenere ad un qualche SISTEMA DI SCRITTURA, conosciuto e condiviso da perlomeno due utenti: colui che scrive e colui che legge 2 . Questa sequenza di segni può trasmettere delle unità di significato (semèmi) direttamente oppure attraverso un filtro linguistico. Spesso in seno ad una società linguistica che condivida lo stesso SISTEMA DI SCRITTURA entrambe le pratiche (linguistica e non linguistica) sono in uso. Possiamo definire l'oggetto del nostro studio la SCRITTURA-SEGNALE, ovvero un sistema di segni grafici che "non ristruttur[a] il piano dell'espressione dello schema linguistico e lasci[a] inalterato quello dei 'contenuti di segni' o plerematie, pur 1 Nell'era informatica la necessità di avere una superficie fisica su cui scrivere è venuta meno; consideriamo superficie qualsiasi tipo di supporto, come quello virtuale dello schermo del computer. Anche l'aria può fare da supporto, se pensiamo alla scrittura in cielo degli aeroplani. 2 Ovviamente, di solito una scrittura, per essere presa in considerazione, ha ben più di due utenti. 12 manifestando una parziale non-conformità con l'espressione fonica tanto a livello dello schema grafematico quanto a livello degli usi 3 ". Seguendo questa definizione di SCRITTURA, tralasceremo le pittografie e le ideografie (che con le loro unità grafiche esprimono unità di significato più ampie di quelle corrispondenti nella lingua orale) e considereremo invece le logografie (i cui significanti grafici svolgono lo stesso ruolo dei loro omologhi nella lingua orale) e le fonografie (alfabeti, sillabari, abjad, abugida) 4 . Vediamo di chiarire meglio cosa intendiamo con logografie e fonografie, seguendo l'uso che propone Florian Coulmas 5 : • un SISTEMA DI SCRITTURA può essere innanzitutto pleremico (basato su concetti, su parole o su morfemi) o cenemico (basato sulla sillaba o sul fonema); detto diversamente, un sistema pleremico tende a trasporre graficamente unità del piano del contenuto mentre un sistema cenemico annota unità del piano dell'espressione. Un sistema pleremico può quindi essere: o pittografico se i suoi elementi rappresentano un oggetto e la loro forma grafica ricalca, in modo più o meno stilizzato, la forma di quell'oggetto; gli elementi di un sistema pittografico sono detti pittogrammi; si trovano esempi di pittogrammi nella scrittura dell'Antico Egitto o, senza voler andare troppo lontano, nella segnaletica stradale o anche banalmente nelle istruzioni per il lavaggio di capi in lavatrice; esempi: w pittogramma egizio rappresentante il sole; 3 Perri, A., "Trasposizione, segnale, meta semiotica (non scientifica). Spunti per una grafematica (post)hjelmsleviana e per una tipologia semiotica dei segni grafici", in

C’est à la veille de la guerre civile au Liban (1975) que Etel Adnan entame la composition de ce qui deviendra L’Apocalypse arabe, et dont l’écriture vient boucler ce que nous pouvons considérer à titre rétrospectif comme sa trilogie apocalyptique composée de: Jébu (1967), L’Express Beyrouth ⇾ Enfer (1970), et L’Apocalypse arabe (1975-1976). Ces trois textes constituent ensemble une apocalypse profane sui generis, où l’auteure emprunte le ton et le style de la tradition apocalyptique juive et chrétienne pour retranscrire le déroulement de l’histoire tout en interrogeant ses fondements politico-religieux. Elle porte ainsi la profanation à son apogée à travers trois poèmes du désastre comme seules les périodes de grandes catastrophes historiques peuvent en susciter.

Until the early twentieth century, the lack of native written documents hindered the study and understanding of pre-hispanic Philippine history. Information had to be gleaned from sparse archaeological artifacts and oral narratives in the form of epics and legends. Then in 1912, a Filipino antiquarian named Jose E. Marco produced several ‘discoveries’ of ancient documents, including the fifteenth-century penal code of local chief, Datu Kalantiaw. For more than 50 years, Marco’s discoveries influenced how Philippine scholars reconstructed and taught pre-hispanic Philippine history until they were exposed as deliberate fabrications. The implications of the ensuing controversy extended beyond the boundaries of academia and into the politics of public memory and the projection of national identity. This controversy exposes the subjectivity of History as a discipline, while at the same time, asserts that the prerogatives of the nation take precedence over the quest for historical truth.

The Keppres (Keputusan Presiden Republik Indonesia) Number 2 of 2022 recognised the 1 March date (with reference to the Serangan Umum of 1 March 1949) as the Day of the Upholding of National Sovereignty (Hari Penegakan Kedaulatan Negara). However, since Suharto's name was not mentioned as the operational commander of the Republican forces (Brigade10 of Wehrkreise III) which wrested a brief control of the Dutch-occupied Republican capital, Yogyakarta for a nine-hour period (06.00-15.00), there is a strong sense that the Keppres was an opportunity missed. Instead of  bringing the two sides of the historical divide (pro-HB IX and pro-Suharto/ New Order) and the nation more widely together, it drove them further apart with bitter recriminations and rivalries aired on social media ever since the publication of this Keppres on 24 February 2022.

While what was claimed during the New Order (1966-98) about Suharto’s key role in conceiving and planning the operation was clearly false  - the idea of the operation was very much the brainchild of HB IX -  Suharto was still the operational commander on the day. As CO of Brigade 10 of Wehrkreise III, he led and directed the troops on the day of the assault. The technical military aspects of the operation were in fact carried out to excellent effect. It was a well timed and well executed operation which had the desired effect internationally. In any such situation you need people like Suharto who can carry out operational plans conceived by those with a greater grasp of strategy like Sri Sultan (HBIX). So it is not an either/or situation - both men deserve credit and respect for what they achieved. By singling out the sultan alone as the auctor intellectualis of the operation, the Keppres has missed an opportunity to bring the nation together around a shared history. In brief, it has  has had a divisive effect on Indonesian Society, and should be seen as a warning of what not to do by governments with regard to the manipulation of history.

The present author was the co-author of 'Gelora Api Revolusi' (GAR) (Born in Fire) project with my senior colleague, the late Colin Wild (1934-2013), head of the Indonesian section of the BBC (in office, 1972-92) in 1984-6 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Indonesian independence, and it was Colin who interviewed the Sultan in his hotel in London in late 1984/ early 1985. So we were able to hear direct from His Highness about how the idea for the Serangan Umum 1 Maret came about. And this interview confirmed it was very much the Sultan’s initiative based on his close monitoring of foreign language broadcasts and his knowledge of how international diplomacy works through the Security Council meetings and high level international negotiations. Suharto had no concept of that high level dimension at that time and was far too low down the line of command to be proposing such an operation at the time. So the storyline proposed by the Alam Surawidjaja and Abbas Wiranatakusuma's film 'Janur Kuning' (1980) and the Monumen Serangan Umum 1 March 1949 in the Taman Budaya Yogyakarta was clearly manipulated to suit New Order political priorities. But this does not mean that Suharto's role as operational commander should be entirely ignored and his name written out of the script as the recent Keppres has attempted to do.

In order to set the record straight I am publishing an online Indonesian copy here of HB IX;s interview given to my senior colleague, Colin Wild, in London for the purposes of the 'Gelora Api Revolusi' (Born in Fire) broadcasts. Here it can be seen that Sri Sultan specifically mentions his meeting with Suharto in the Yogya kraton (palace) on 14 February 1949 when the 1 March operation was planned and agreed. My op-ed piece in the Jakarta Post, "Contested Histories: Soeharto and the March 1 Attack on Yogyakarta", which appeared on Saturday, 19 March 2022, is appended at the end.

Chi si serve oggi del medioevo? Tutti.
La politica attuale lo usa come una miniera da cui estrarre esempi e modelli ritenuti utili per capire il presente. Identificato con i «secoli bui», il medioevo è presentato come modello perfetto per spiegarci i «nuovi barbari», lo «scontro di civiltà» e il terrore che il nostro mondo stia per finire. Al contrario, se considerato come il tempo dei cavalieri e delle origini eroiche, il medioevo assume una funzione mitica per moltissimi gruppi politici e comunità organizzate, che lo usano per affermare la propria originale identità.
Questa attualizzazione del medioevo, spesso una vera e propria invenzione delle tradizioni, va sotto il nome di «medievalismo». La sua analisi è una chiave nuova e inusuale per leggere la società contemporanea e gli indirizzi che sta percorrendo.
Dalla militanza politica allo svago new age, dai tornei cittadini al tradizionalismo identitario cattolico, fino ai richiami alle origini dell'Europa unita e alla mitologia della Lega Nord, Tommaso di Carpegna propone con gli strumenti del medievista, ma con lo sguardo puntato all'attualità, un appassionante percorso che si snoda dagli anni Sessanta e raggiunge i drammatici giorni degli attentati in Norvegia del «templare » Breivik.

The 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine attracted the attention of the international community and became known as the Orange Revolution. The Orange Revolution symbolized the birth of civil society in Ukraine and created a feeling of great optimism. However, nearly half of the population voted for Viktor Yanukovych and disapproved of the Orange Revolution. They not only voted for another candidate, but also voted in a totally different manner, making their choice based on different criteria in accordance with a different set of values and orientations. It would be naive to attribute millions of votes for Yanukovych only to falsifications. This article explores the question of why Donbass, Yanukovych's stronghold, almost unanimously voted for him. Donbass is terra incognita for many Ukrainians and the broader international community. A significant number of Ukrainians envision an industrial Donbass based on old stereotypes. This article considers these stereotypes, the history of their development, and their influence on the electoral campaign. It addresses important characteristics such as roots, culture, the concept of the Donbass character, and the mass media's role in shaping public opinion. This article asserts that despite Yanukovych's loss, Donbass business and political elites still have the potential to influence major socioeconomic processes in the country and see their future only within Ukraine.

In the century and a half since Emancipation, slavery has remained a central topic at Somerset Place, a plantation-turned-state historic site in northeastern North Carolina, and programmers and audiences have thought about and interpreted it in many different ways. When North Carolina's Department of Archives and History first adopted the former plantation into its Historic Sites System in 1967, Somerset was dedicated to memorializing the planter, Josiah Collins III; the enslaved rarely made it into the site's narrative at all, and if they did it was as objects rather than subjects. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Somerset Place began to celebrate the lives of the 850 slaves who lived and worked at the plantation during the antebellum era, framing their history as a story about kinship, triumph and reconciliation. Both versions of the story-as well as the many other stories that the site has told since the end of slavery in 1865-require careful historical analysis and critique. This dissertation considers Somerset's history and varying interpretations since the end of Reconstruction. It examines the gradual invention of Somerset Place State Historic Site in order to explore the nature and implications of representations of slavery, and the development of Americans' historical consciousness of slavery during their nation's long transition into freedom. It employs manuscript sources; oral histories and interviews; public documents, records and reports; and material artifacts in order to trace Somerset's gradual shift from a site of agricultural production to one of cultural v representation, situated within North Carolina's developing public history programming and tourism industry. This research joins a rich body of literature that addresses southern history, epistemology, memory, and politics. It is comparative: it sets two centuries side by side, excavating literal cause-and-effect-the ways in which the events of the nineteenth century led to those of the twentieth-and their figurative relationship, the dialectical play between the ante-and post-bellum worlds. By examining the ways twentieth-century Americans employed the antebellum era as an intellectual and cultural category, this dissertation sheds light on slavery's diverse legacies and the complexity of living with collective historical traumas.

Ancient Mesopotamia, “the cradle of civilization,” was the birthplace of some of the earliest citiesof human history, a sophisticated writing system, complex bureaucracies and literary tradition, andthe highly skilled production of artifacts. Te Euphrates and igris River basins form the backboneof this historical geography: Mesopotamia—literally “land between the rivers” in ancient Greek—the land of cities, agricultural prosperity, scribal culture, and textile production.

En el artículo se estudian las percepciones que los indígenas de la gobernación de Antioquia, sujeta a la Audiencia de Santa Fe, tuvieron acerca de los tratos y de los abusos que  recibían de encomenderos y mineros a comienzos del siglo XVII. A partir de la visita del oidor Francisco Herrera Campuzano a la gobernación de Antioquia entre 1614 y 1616, se analiza cómo la memoria de las comunidades indígenas sobre las arbitrariedades y violencia de los españoles en una región productora de oro, se transformó en declaraciones individuales complejas y ricas en detalles para denunciar tales abusos. Se propone que las visitas ofrecieron a los nativos nuevas herramientas jurídicas  para demandar justicia ante la real audiencia.

The article explores the perceptions that the indigenous people of the governorship of Antioquia, subject to the Audiencia of Santa Fe, had about the treatment and abuses they received from encomenderos and miners at the beginning of the 17th century. From the visit of the oidor Francisco Herrera Campuzano to the governorship of Antioquia between 1614 and 1616, it analyses how the memory of indigenous communities of the arbitrariness and violence of the Spaniards in a gold-producing region, was transformed into complex and detail-rich individual declarations to denounce such abuses. It proposes that the visits offered the natives new legal tools to demand justice before the Royal Court.

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This Supplement builds on a burgeoning body of research that approaches the archive not merely as the object, but as the subject of enquiry. It explores the phenomenon of record keeping in the early modern period in the context of significant ecclesiastical, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as a stimulus to it: state formation, religious reformation, and economic transformation; the advent of the mechanical press, the spread of educational opportunity, and the expansion of literacy; changing epistemological conventions, shifting attitudes towards history and memory, and new modes of self-representation. The essays that comprise it focus attention on the impulses behind the surge in public and private documentation in Europe between 1500 and 1800 and place the process by which individual, collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorised, and used under the microscope. They examine the activities of curators and scribes and analyse the issues of credibility and authenticity to which their endeavours gave rise, alongside the role of textual, pictorial, material and financial records in managing knowledge and giving expression to senses of identity. Stretching traditional, technical definitions of the record and archive, they investigate how writing and document-making of various kinds was shaped by dynamic interactions between ordinary people and by the quotidian circumstances and politics of everyday life. They also illuminate some of the multiple ways in which archives mediate and construct the past, preserving some traces of it for posterity while consigning others to permanent oblivion.

The worlding of South Asian cities has brought deep structural transformations in their governance and planning paradigms, and in the cultural bases of what constitutes desirable urban habitats and livelihoods. Contemporary literature in English on these cities tends to reflect these pervasive changes: they manifest most visibly as an abiding tension between form and content, medium and message in writings from across the region. With specific reference to literature on Delhi, this is potently apparent in Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis. Published in 2010, Trickster City is a unique literary artefact: originally in Hindi, it is a collection of anecdotes, recollections, and musings from and on various bastis in Delhi. The book emerged from the Cybermohalla project, an innovative alternative education programme which de-territorialized information and communications technology by providing open platforms to young people from bastis in Delhi to generate life narratives on their experience of and role in urban life. Operating at the cusp of the formal and informal, the materiality of these narratives in Trickster City as product, as record, and as archive of ways of life and of settlements is what interests this paper. In a context wherein regular demolition erases all tangible trace of marginalised settlements such as bastis, compilations such as Trickster City act as substitutes for the materiality of built form by narrating the unnarratable. Hence, this paper is interested in engaging with the psychosomatic wreckage of the experience of urbanisation in cities like Delhi so as to understand how their articulation acts as a publicly available, tangible record of vulnerable urbanisms in South Asia.

My doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of the Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS troops using in-depth interviews with former volunteers as the main primary source. This phenomenon, even if significant in size (depending on the source, some 15 000-20 000 Italian men volunteered in the Waffen-SS), has been hitherto largely unknown to historical research. The available literature on the Italian volunteers, mainly written by military history enthusiast journalists and methodologically weak, concentrates mainly on the combat operations and military organization, and offers a rather stereotypical profile of the volunteers.

My dissertation does not aim to reconstruct the military history of the different divisions of the Waffen-SS in which Italian volunteers operated but instead to examine the subjective, private and intimate experience of the volunteers in order to understand the motivations, attitudes, beliefs and cultural and family background, as well as their political ideas. The main objective of my doctoral dissertation is to discover the ideological precepts of the volunteers’ political credo. As the last phase of fascism and its ideology, often defined as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascism, is still the object of wide academic debate, a better understanding of the volunteers’ ideology also contributes to deepening overall knowledge of the nature of this last phase.

The theoretical frame of my dissertation lies in oral history, in particular in the postmodernist approach to oral history, through which I reconstruct the volunteers’ ideology. In-depth interviews with former volunteers are the main primary source, but multiple data collection methods have been adopted. Phone interviews and correspondence with the volunteers have also been considered as primary sources. In addition to interviews and correspondence, family archives consisting of diaries, correspondence with the volunteers’ relatives and photographic material have also been collected and examined. An ethnographic observation of the volunteers’ domestic spaces has been conducted during the in-depth interviews, and photo self-elicitation techniques have been used in cases where the volunteers were willing to share their photographs.

An exhaustive portrait of the ideological structure of the volunteers has been obtained, as well as of the cultural and social origins of the values that contributed to the rise and adoption of this ideology. Further, the volunteers’ motivations to enlist have been clearly reconstructed, together with their cultural, political, social and military backgrounds. The results of the research are particularly relevant both for comprehension of the Italian phenomenon of volunteering in the Waffen-SS and for the reconstruction of the ideological dynamics of the last phase of fascism. The volunteers’ political and ideological system, which can be defined as the Italian SS-fascist ideology, disagrees strongly with the vaguely described ideological profile offered by previous studies that describe volunteers as generically “super-fascist”. The research also offers the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the final fascist ideological trajectory, currently defined, not without a certain level of approximation, as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascist ideology.

The relationship between memory, history, and the archive has introduced new ways of engaging with questions of social power and social subordination. There is the substitution of the linear progression of historiography by one which accepts divisions and multiplicity of truth. There is an attempt made to subvert the grand narrative of history with various facets of events and cases

This special issue addresses the possible connections and mutual benefits of examining together two analytic concepts – memory and periphery. These concepts receive much attention in various scholarly discussions, yet they have done so rather independently from each other. The potential applications and utilities of combining memory and periphery and the epistemic insights they provide for various disciplins are presented in the different contributions to this issue.