An interdisciplinary issue reflecting on historical memory, family separation, racism, migration, and trauma through essays connecting past histories of violence and displacement with contemporary political and ethical questions.
An interdisciplinary issue reflecting on historical memory, family separation, racism, migration, and trauma through essays connecting past histories of violence and displacement with contemporary political and ethical questions.
It is an old black and white, grainy photo of a small child, maybe a year old, perhaps even less. It is hard to tell because the face is very serious. His dark eyes are not looking into the camera, but downwards, towards hands neatly folded on the breast. The child doesn’t smile, his lips are pressed together. The expression on his face is worried, grown-up somehow. He …
A documentary poem reacting to a film about the separation of children from their parents in Nazi camps The poem in Romanian follows the English text. The child Fred is told by his mother: “You must not look back.”And he did not look back – and he survived – and his mother did not.Orpheus was not as strong you were, Fred – he looked back, the poor thing.On …
After I had seen the film once, and then once more, I was overcome with a sadness, a deep sadness that settled over me like a mist. The next morning, I was drawn to a sentence in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. In Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway has returned from the bookstore run by the lovely Sylvia Beach, who is very nice to him, letting him borrow books …
Growing up, my sister and I often retained the same posture in our photos. She stood on the left side and nuzzled me up to her chest with her right hand. We used to spend every summer together at our grandparents’ apartment in Hefei, a wet, fragile city in southeastern China. I thought of her as I watched Sylvia and Frances – throughout their testimony, they couldn’t help …
Six thoughts about engaging with a post-historical past (1) “History” as an academic discipline – and I am trying to articulate a possible vanishing point of Reinhart Koselleck’s life work here – “History” as a discipline would never have come into being without the existence of the “historical world view” as a specific social construction of temporality (we can call it a specific “chronotope”) with its own relationship …
In mid-September 2020, allegations surfaced in the media that Spanish-speaking female detainees in a privately-owned ICE immigration center in the American state of Georgia were being given hysterectomies without their consent. The claim, now being investigated, combines such an unholy and ghoulish combination of ingredients – women’s bodies, misogyny, racism, eugenics, immigration, incarceration – that it got my attention even in an endless news cycle saturated with unholy, …
Having dealt with memories of historical violence for the past fifteen years in my academic work as a literary scholar, the question of historical comparison is very familiar to me. In the past decade the field of cultural memory studies has been dominated by Michel Rothberg’s (2009) idea of the multidirectionality of memory and his suggestion that in order to be articulated publicly, memories of violence need the …
