Tag: Memory studies

Today In History

 

Statehood Day is a holiday that takes place on June 25th in Slovenia & Croatia to commemorate both countries’ declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.

On related subjects from Berghahn Central & Eastern Europe List:

 

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STRANGERS EITHER WAY
The Lives of Croatian Refugees in their New Home
Jasna Čapo Žmegač
Translated by Nina H. Antoljak and Mateusz M. Stanojević

 

Croatia gained the world’s attention during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In this context its image has been overshadowed by visions of ethnic conflict and cleansing, war crimes, virulent nationalism, and occasionally even emergent regionalism. Instead of the norm, this book offers a diverse insight into Croatia in the 1990s by dealing with one of the consequences of the war: the more or less forcible migration of Croats from Serbia and their settlement in Croatia, their “ethnic homeland.” This important study shows that at a time in which Croatia was perceived as a homogenized nation-in-the-making, there were tensions and ruptures within Croatian society caused by newly arrived refugees and displaced persons from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Refugees who, in spite of their common ethnicity with the homeland population, were treated as foreigners; indeed, as unwanted aliens. Continue reading “Today In History” →

In History

June 6th marked the 70th anniversary of The Normandy landings, the day when Western Allies landed in northern France, opening the long-awaited “Second Front” against Nazi Germany. The largest seaborne invasion in history, the operation began the invasion of German-occupied Western Europe, led to the restoration of the French Republic, and contributed to an Allied victory in the war.

 

On related topic, please take a look at some of Berghahn’s WWII books.

 

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EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY
The Second World War in Europe
Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens

Modern military history, inspired by social and cultural historical approaches, increasingly puts the national histories of the Second World War to the test. New questions and methods are focusing on aspects of war and violence that have long been neglected. What shaped people’s experiences and memories? What differences and what similarities existed in Eastern and Western Europe? How did the political framework influence the individual and the collective interpretations of the war? Finally, what are the benefits of Europeanizing the history of the Second World War? Experts from Belgium, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, and Russia discuss these and other questions in this comprehensive volume.

 

 

Continue reading “In History” →

Simulated Shelves: Browse May’s New-Book Library

This month, Berghahn’s library will expand by eleven books. The soon-to-be-published titles make up a distinct lot, ranging from Abigail Loxham’s Cinema at the Edges to Anne Eriksen’s Antiquities to Heritage to Philip Ther’s The Dark Side of Nation-States. The following list of new volumes is complete with brief descriptions of the books and a peek at each cover.

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NEGOTIATING IDENTITY IN SCANDINAVIA

Women, Migration and the Disaspora

Edited by Haci Akman

Continue reading “Simulated Shelves: Browse May’s New-Book Library” →

Marking Museum Week: #AskTheCurator or View the Book

This week hundreds of museums across the United Kingdom and Europe are participating in Twitter’s first Museum Week campaign. Each day during this week is associated with a hashtag, from #DayInTheLife to #MuseumMemories, all intended to hit on various delightful aspects of the museum world. Today’s hashtag, #AskTheCurator is an opportunity to engage with museum experts. But for those who prefer to engage with experts the classic way — by way of their books — we have curated a collection of some of our Museum Studies titles in the following gallery.

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EXTREME COLLECTING

Challenging Practices for 21st Century Museums

Edited by Graeme Were and J. C. H. King

By exploring the processes of collecting, which challenge the bounds of normally acceptable practice, this book debates the practice of collecting ‘difficult’ objects, from a historical and contemporary perspective; and discusses the acquisition of objects related to war and genocide, and those purchased from the internet, as well as considering human remains, mass produced objects and illicitly traded antiquities. Much of the book engages with the question of the limits to the practice of collecting as a means to think through the implementation of new strategies. Continue reading “Marking Museum Week: #AskTheCurator or View the Book” →

Hot Off the Presses – New Book Releases

SilvermanPalimpsesticNewly released titles from Berghahn’s film studies, cultural studies, and anthropology lists:

Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-torn Communities, Hariz Halilovich

The Colours of the Empire: Racialized Representations During Portuguese Colonialism, Patrícia Ferraz de Matos

The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent, Suzanne Rinner

Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film, Max Silverman

Behind the Cover: The Improbable Story of the Image on the Cover of Holocaust Survivors

Behind the Cover is an occasional series on book covers and the stories that accompany them.

Cover images: the all-important marketing tool that can perfectly capture the content and feel of a book—or cause people to glance over it, bored. Some images we toil over, going back and forth between options because co-editors disagree, we disagree, or the perfect image remains elusive despite our perseverance. Then there are the no-brainers when the authors have pre-picked images that work perfectly and after the original design is chosen the image hardly gets a second thought.

Holocaust Survivors by Dalia Ofer, Françoise S. Ouzan, and Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz was one of the latter. The editors had a number of images they found at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. In image after image of expectant, haunting faces of liberated concentration camp prisoners, their eyes shone with a glint of freedom. After everything, they still had some hope for life. Perfect.

A few months later when it was time to publish the book, we faced a typical scramble to get a high resolution picture with proper permissions and then the book was off to press! It was the end of the year and as I headed upstate for the holidays, the only things on my mind were those sugar plums.

But then four months later, I found an excited email in my junk mail box. It was a woman asking about the image on the cover of Holocaust Survivors. Continue reading “Behind the Cover: The Improbable Story of the Image on the Cover of Holocaust Survivors” →

Hot Off the Presses- New Book Releases

Recent Releases from Berghahn Books:
Ambiguous Pleasures: Sexuality and Middle-Class Self-Perceptions in Nairobi, by Rachel Spronk
Collaborators Collaborating: Counterparts in Anthropological Knowledge and International Research Relations, edited by Monica Konrad
Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany, edited by David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Daniel C. Riley, and Warren Sabean
Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual, edited by Chris Horrocks
Czechs, Germans, Jews: National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia, by Kate?ina ?apková, translated by Derek and Marzia Paton
Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War, by Simon Harrison
Marginal at the Center: The Life Story of a Public Sociologist, by Baruch Kimmerling, translated by Diana Kimmerling
Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions, edited by Maruška Svašek
Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics: Europe, Russia, Japan, and the United States in Comparison, edited by Ulbe Bosma, Jan Lucassen, Gert Oostindie
Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe, edited by Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward