The Biographical Landscapes Of Raphael Lemkin

The book is the first biography of Raphael Lemkin to draw on a comprehensive body of research into Lemkin as a person and his background and will be of interest to both non-specialists and academics. Drawing on archival materials, a nuanced description is provided of the ethnically mixed Belarusian-Polish-Jewish border region where Lemkin grew up and which shaped him, clarifying at the same time some of the misinterpretations that have surrounded Lemkin’s life. Lemkin’s professional career and intellectual interests up to the time of his flight from Poland after the German aggression of 1939 are exhaustively described. In the latter part of the book, the author poses, among other things, the question of how Lemkin’s activities in the United States were influenced by the experience of the first almost 40 years of his life.

For over a decade, the world has experienced an accelerating erosion of a language that took hundreds of years to emerge. It is a language ordering time and space with words, such as enlightenment, reason, rationality, modernization, and the most recent by-word, globalization. However, it is a language that has been accompanied by colonialism, imperialism, racism, the exploitation of people and nature, an unequal distribution of the world’s resources, pogroms, genocides, and world wars. There has been a gap between assumptions underlying a visionary ambition and the often-brutal practices that have accompanied it. Moreover, it is a language that expresses European values, with the implicit or explicit suggestion that they pertain to the whole world, a civilizing mission from a European centre. Although the established narrative argued that there was continuous progress, it was a conclusion reached through hindsight. The idea of progress had to be repeatedly recreated through new visionary projects that attempted to live up to the high ideals their predecessors failed to achieve. Against the backdrop of this meta-normative point of departure, the book argues that a convincing grand narrative has failed to materialize since the discrediting of globalization. In the search for a new narrative, it argues at a meta-normative level for a reformulation of the term ‘global’ away from its close connection to the globe as an unbounded self-propelling market that exists beyond human influence. ‘Global’ should no longer be reduced to auto-playing market fiction but instead be connected to the planet, Terra, the Earth. With reference to Latour and Chakrabarty, ‘global’ and ‘planetary’ mean cohabitation; life on earth is seen as an infinite symbiotic system, nurtured, and protected, but also destroyed, by human action. The book argues that a new conceptualization of ‘the global’ and ‘the planet’ requires input from African and Asian language cultures. The book explores in depth the history of the two political African key concepts of ujamaa and ubuntu and argues that they are cases showing how work on a new global/planetary narrative might look. The investigation of the two concepts demonstrate that translations are juxtapositions that point up what is shared and what isn’t between concepts in two or more languages. The point of comparison is not to develop a uniform, global perspective, even if that were possible, but to develop a global understanding of difference and, through that, to begin to look for a common ground. Translations of political key concepts are the source of a growing understanding of difference.

This book casts a fresh look at what to date has been a relatively unexplored question: the enormous value and usefulness of the metaphor in the understanding and writing of history (and at the historical culture reflected by these metaphors). Mapping a wide range of tropes present in historiography and public discourse, the book identifies some of the key metaphorical resources employed by historians, politicians, and journalists to represent time, history, memory, the past, the present, and the future and examines a selection of analytical concepts of a temporal nature, built upon unmistakeably metaphorical foundations, such as modernity, event, process, revolution, crisis, progress, decline, or transition. The analysis of these and other pillars on which modern history has been built, whether as a philosophy of history, as an academic discipline, or as a set of events, will interest graduates and scholars dealing with the historical and social sciences and the humanities in general. Key Metaphors for History offers a broad overview of historiography and historiosophy, from an unfrequented point of view, halfway between conceptual history, theory of history and metaphorology. Moreover, it constitutes a form of self-reflection of the historian on his or her own positionality when researching and writing history.

What is the role of aesthetic expression in responding to discrimination, tragedy, violence, even genocide? How does gender shape responses to both literal and structural violence, including implicit linguistic, familial, and cultural violence? How might writing or other works of art contribute to healing? Art from Trauma: Genocide and Healing beyond Rwanda explores the possibility of art as therapeutic, capable of implementation by mental health practitioners crafting mental health policy in Rwanda. This anthology of scholarly, personal, and hybrid essays was inspired by scholar and activist Chantal Kalisa (1965–2015). At the commemoration of the nineteenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, organized by the Rwandan Embassy in Washington DC, Kalisa gave a presentation, “Who Speaks for the Survivors of the Genocide against Tutsi?” Kalisa devoted her energy to giving expression to those whose voices had been distorted or silenced. The essays in this anthology address how the production and experience of visual, dramatic, cinematic, and musical arts, in addition to literary arts, contribute to healing from the trauma of mass violence, offering preliminary responses to questions like Kalisa’s and honoring her by continuing the dialogue in which she participated with such passion, sharing the work of scholars and colleagues in genocide studies, gender studies, and francophone literatures.

Monarch's Gambit: Tudors versus Spain By: Constance M Knepp-Holt Monarch's Gambit is a detailed account of the behind-the-scenes events that surrounded and fueled the 123-year "chess game" between Spain and the Tudor dynasty. As this work thoroughly demonstrates, these events did not just affect the key players of the monarchs but also filtered down to the commoners, and even crossed oceans.

This book explores the impact of September 11, 2001 upon interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy in the liberal arts. Since “the day that changed everything”, many forces have transformed institutions of higher education in the United States and around the world. The editors and contributors consider the extent to which the influence of 9/11 was direct, or part of wider structural changes within academia, and the chapters represent a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives on how the production and dissemination of knowledge has changed since 2001. Some authors demonstrate that new forms of inquiry, exploration, and evidence have been created, much of it focused on the causes, consequences, and meanings of the terror attacks. Others find that scholars sought to understand 9/11 by applying old theoretical and empirical insights and reviving lines of questioning that have become relevant. The contributors also examine the impact of 9/11 on higher education administration and liberal arts pedagogies. Among the many collective findings is that scholars in the humanities and critical social sciences have been most attentive to the place of 9/11 in society and academic culture. This eclectic collection will appeal to students and scholars interested in the place of the liberal arts in the twenty-first century world.

At no point in recorded history has there been an absence of intense, and heated, discussion about the subject of how to conduct relations between women and men. This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to these omnipresent issues and debates, mapping the present and future of thinking about feminist theory. The chapters gathered here present the state of the art in scholarship in the field, covering: Epistemology and marginality Literary, visual and cultural representations Sexuality Macro and microeconomics of gender Conflict and peace. The most important consensus in this volume is that a central organizing tenet of feminism is its willingness to examine the ways in which gender and relations between women and men have been (and are) organized. The authors bring a shared commitment to the critical appraisal of gender relations, as well as a recognition that to think ‘theoretically’ is not to detach concerns from lived experience but to extend the possibilities of understanding. With this focus on theory and theorizing about the world in which we live, this Handbook asks us, across all disciplines and situations, to abandon our taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and interrogate both the origin and the implications of our ideas about gender relations and feminism. It is an essential reference work for advanced students and academics not only of feminist theory, but of gender and sexuality across the humanities and social sciences.

This volume brings together leading sociologists and anthropologists to break new ground in the study of cultural violence. First sketched in Raphael Lemkin’s seminal writings on genocide, and later systematically defined by peace studies scholar Johan Galtung, the concept of cultural violence seeks to explain why and how language, symbols, rituals, practices, and objects are so frequently in the crosshairs of socio-political change. Recent conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, along with renewed public interest in the repertoire of violence applied to the control and erasure of indigenous populations, highlights the gaps in our understanding of why cultural violence occurs, what it consists of, and how it relates to other forms of collective violence.