The Landscape Of Silence

Hugh Brody is renowned for his work with indigenous peoples. In the 80s he was engaged in a lawsuit brought by the Inuit people of the Arctic against the Canadian government. Brody lived with the Inuit, learned their language, recorded all their stories, which were then used as evidence in the court case - which the Inuit won. In his new book, he returns to the Arctic and is confronted by the deterioration of the situation there. The Inuit now possess the land, but the government has pressured them into living in settlements rather than out on the land. Their children are forced to go to school where they learn to speak English, losing their own language, which is the element that ties them to their land. Sexual abuse by the treachers intimidates the children into a silence that results in widespread suicide among the young. This silence ties in with Brody's own story - a mother hounded out of her home in Vienna by the Nazis, causing her to retreat into the same kind of silence that Tom Stoppard experienced from his mother, who also fled from the Nazis. As a writer and anthropologist, Brody's concern has always been with the human condition, arguing for the need to safeguard the most vulnerable from the depredations of the modern word.

This book examines the politics of landscape and heritage by focusing on the example of Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe. The controversy that surrounded the site in the early part of the 20th century, between colonial antiquarians and professional archaeologists, is well reported in the published literature. Based on long term ethnographic field work around Great Zimbabwe, as well as archival research in NMMZ, in the National Archives of Zimbabwe, and several months of research at the World Heritage Centre in Paris, this new book represents an important step beyond that controversy over origins, to focus on the site's position in local contests between, and among individuals within, the Nemanwa, Charumbira and Mugabe clans over land, power and authority. To justify their claims, chiefs, spirit mediums and elders of each clan make appeals to different, but related, constructions of the past. Emphasising the disappearance of the 'Voice' that used to speak there, these narratives also describe the destruction, alienation and desecration of Great Zimbabwe that occurred, and continues, through the international and national, archaeological and heritage processes and practices by which Great Zimbabwe has become a national and world heritage site today.

A deeply thoughtful, honest and illuminating memoir about a phenomenon too often neglected in the contemporary world.

In 1942, the Canadian government forced more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes in British Columbia. They were told to bring only one suitcase each and officials vowed to protect the rest. Instead, Japanese Canadians were dispossessed, all their belongings either stolen or sold. The definitive statement of a major national research partnership, Landscapes of Injustice reinterprets the internment of Japanese Canadians by focusing on the deliberate and permanent destruction of home through the act of dispossession. All forms of property were taken. Families lost heirlooms and everyday possessions. They lost decades of investment and labour. They lost opportunities, neighbourhoods, and communities; they lost retirements, livelihoods, and educations. When Japanese Canadians were finally released from internment in 1949, they had no homes to return to. Asking why and how these events came to pass and charting Japanese Canadians' diverse responses, this book details the implications and legacies of injustice perpetrated under the cover of national security. In Landscapes of Injustice the diverse descendants of dispossession work together to understand what happened. They find that dispossession is not a chapter that closes or a period that neatly ends. It leaves enduring legacies of benefit and harm, shame and silence, and resilience and activism.

His landscapes "express deep, deep emotions" (Paula Becker, 1898). For painter Otto Modersohn, 'simplicity' and 'integrity' were key, as was the portrayal of nature, which formed the focus of his work. The various twists and turns of life are reflected in his artistic signature, which ranges from expressive intensity and a build-up of colour, through rugged motifs with a dark palette to a dematerialised transparency in well-balanced compositions. Modersohn's silent landscapes provide striking insights through the artist's eyes into a reality that is seen but is primarily sensed.

Why is it that men and boys have been and still are violated in human conflict, be it in conventional war, insurgencies or periods of civil and ethnic strife? Above all, why, throughout history, have victims, perpetrators and society as a whole refused to acknowledge this violation, and why do episodes of male-on-male rape and sexual abuse feature so rarely in accounts of war, be they official histories, eye-witness accounts or popular narratives? Is there more to this elision of memory than simply shame? Is there more to it than the victor's desire to violate the enemy body? Amalendu Misra's startlingly original research into male sexual violence explores the meaning and role of the male body prior to its abuse and how it is altered by violation in wartime. He examines the bio-political contexts of conflict in which primarily men and occasionally women sexually violate men; he details the inadequate legal safeguards for survivors of such events; and in unearthing and analysing an ignored aspect of war, he inquires whether such violence can ever be deterred.

7. Long Lines and Earth Art -- 8. Mapping Home Ground -- 9. Soundscapes and the Resonance of Place -- Epilogue: Another Geography -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index