Category: From Idea to Book
Of Soldiers and Dreamers: Peter Lilienthal in Latin America
by Claudia Sandberg
Claudia Sandberg is the author of Peter Lilienthal : A Cinema of Exile and Resistance.
Sitting at a wooden bench, the young woman Marcela follows the teacher attentively. She has decided to take part in the literacy campaign that was launched by the Unidad Popular government. In a group with other woman, they have gathered in the meeting place and school of the shanty town community La Victoria, situated at the fringes of the Chilean capital, to get trained for this task. The teacher in front holds up a poster that shows a family of three generations. Below appears the Spanish word HOGAR (home). Marcela protests that this image surely does not represent the reality of many people. The other women chime in by referring to their own situation; they are married, divorced, or widowed, they live alone, with their children or with their parents. The word home means something different to each one of them.
Continue reading “Of Soldiers and Dreamers: Peter Lilienthal in Latin America”TRANSBORDER MEDIA SPACES: AYUUJK VIDEOMAKING BETWEEN MEXICO AND THE US
Ingrid Kummels
As a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, social arrangements allowing people to carry on despite the restrictions on mobility forced upon them became predominant across the world. From work (home office) and education (home schooling) to birthday parties, meetings, conferences and political campaigns (Zoom, etc.) diverse aspects of life were reoriented to adapt to the requirements of “social distancing” – although this term is a misnomer, since the actual challenge consists of overcoming physical distance. Even countries that are leaders in high-tech have had a hard time adjusting, since they had failed to consider the necessary widespread availability of equipment, training and creativity to remotely organize a community, its social life and leisure for long periods of time.
Continue reading “TRANSBORDER MEDIA SPACES: AYUUJK VIDEOMAKING BETWEEN MEXICO AND THE US”On Archival Access in a Pandemic
Catherine A. Nichols
Exchanging Objects and my broader research agenda considers how and why certain objects left museums, institutions so often associated with preservation, archiving, and keeping. It can be an odd thing, to go to a museum to intentionally study things that aren’t there. When the idea for this research was suggested to me by anthropologist Nancy Parezo, I admit I was first puzzled, then intrigued.
Continue reading “On Archival Access in a Pandemic”When They Came For Me: The Hidden Diary of An Apartheid Prisoner
When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, John Schlapobersky was a political prisoner in Pretoria and knew nothing about it – he was in solitary confinement. When he learnt about the landing, he looked for the moon without success from the window of his cell.
Continue reading “When They Came For Me: The Hidden Diary of An Apartheid Prisoner”Book Preview: Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art
Did scenes in rock art create new ways of seeing the world? In the spirit of the SAA annual conference we are delighted to provide a book preview (along with striking images) of Iain Davidson and April Nowell’s title, MAKING SCENES: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art.
Continue reading “Book Preview: Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art”Birds of Passage: Hunting and conservation in Malta
Mark-Anthony Falzon
My interest in, and love for, nature go back to my early childhood. There was something Victorian about the books I read on butterflies: they contained descriptions and beautiful illustrations of (British, usually) species, but they also taught you how to catch butterflies, kill them using potassium cyanide, and set them on mounting boards. I wondered why our local chemists would not supply me with potassium cyanide, and experimented with alternative methods. My butterfly collection became a source of mounting unease in my teens, when I joined two societies for nature and bird conservation. I realised that, while both were rooted in the same passion, collecting and conservation could be hard to reconcile. By the time I joined the Malta Ornithological Society (now Birdlife Malta), I knew which side I was on. I wrote angry missives to the press, joined street protests and did everything I could to thwart the murderous designs of Malta’s thousands of hunters.
Continue reading “Birds of Passage: Hunting and conservation in Malta”A Taste for Oppression
An interview with Ronan Hervouet following the 2020 Belarus Election
13 August 2020
Continue reading “A Taste for Oppression”Do Petitions matter? Rethinking Jewish Petitioning during the Holocaust
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan and Wolf Gruner
Raul Hilberg’s path-breaking 1961 study The Destruction of the European Jews rightfully remains on the reading list of any serious student of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Hilberg’s insistence on European Jews‘ alleged “almost complete lack of resistance” has been subjected to frequent scholarly criticism. He partially based this claim on a cursory reading of petitions: “Everywhere, the Jews pitted words against rifles” and “everywhere they lost.”
Continue reading “Do Petitions matter? Rethinking Jewish Petitioning during the Holocaust”Meet the Author: Gaëlle Fisher
Dr. Gaëlle Fisher’s recent monograph, Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989, explores some of the more complex reverberations of World War II. It is the third volume in Berghahn’s growing Worlds of Memory series, published in collaboration with the Memory Studies Association.
Continue reading “Meet the Author: Gaëlle Fisher”