Suchergebnisse

This book adapts the Arabic term nafsiyya to trace the phenomenological contours of Edward Said's analysis of the affective dimensions of colonial and imperial racism. Reflecting on what he called his "colonial education," Said rendered his Palestinian/Arab background and experience of racism an enabling component of his academic work. The argument focuses on his "personal dimension" section in his introduction to his famous volume Orientalism, discussing key notions of Said's oeuvre -- such as 'elaboration,' 'circumstance,' 'humanism,' 'worldliness,' 'inventory,' and 'critical consciousness.' Providing a lengthy study of his earlier and somewhat neglected Beginnings: Intention and Method, the book discusses the significance of the style of the essay as a key component of what the author calls Said's interventionist brand of scholarship. The final chapter outlines how Said's oeuvre can be situated in a genealogy of a radical phenomenology of racism that emerged from the colonies. Norman Saadi Nikro is a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. Having Australian and Lebanese backgrounds, he served as an Australian Volunteer Abroad in Ramallah, and was later an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Notre Dame University in Lebanon, before moving to Berlin

Milieus of ReMemory concentrates on how people in Lebanon situate and work on memories of violence and trauma, as well as exchanges of voice. Developing a critical phenomenology of social material practices, a relational notion of community and subjectivity outlines thematic discussions of intergenerational memory, gender, temporality, and transactions between personal and public memory. While emphasizing conduits and channels by which material and imaginary resources circulate as differential circuits of power and authority, the book focuses on how memory activism and memory projects constitute emergent milieus of social exchange and ethical responsibility to self and circumstance, to both publics and political cultures.

The remarkable production of fiction in Lebanon emerging from the long years of civil violence (1975-1990) and an ongoing restless aftermath is by no means confined to the Arabic language. Proliferating in a number of other languages, English has arguably become the preeminent non-Arab language in which contemporary diasporic Lebanese fiction is composed.

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Editors and Contributors -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1 Introduction: Memory Between Lieu and Milieu -- Comparative Memories -- Memory Across Lebanon and Morocco: Between Lieu and Milieu -- Works Cited -- Chapter 2 A Life of Waiting: Political Violence, Personal Memories, and Enforced Disappearances in Morocco -- The Politics of Disappearance in Morocco -- Disappearing -- Inhabiting the Temporality of Waiting -- Waiting as a Political Position -- The IER and Its Silences -- No Reconciliation Without Historical Truth -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Chapter 3 The Civil War's Ghosts: Events of Memory Seen Through Lebanese Cinema -- The Ghosts of Lebanon's Present -- Sleepless Nights: Confessing Without the Confession -- The Perfect Day Will Never Come: Restlessness in a Perfect Day and Here Comes the Rain -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Chapter 4 Transforming Memories: Media and Historiography in the Aftermath of the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission -- Introduction -- The Political Context -- Externalizing Memory -- Media Landscape -- Zamane -- Preliminary Conclusions: History and Its Discontent -- Works Cited -- Chapter 5 Testimony and Journalism: Moroccan Prison Narratives -- Journalism and Testimonial Literature in Morocco as a Transitioning Space -- Morocco as a Politically Transitioning Space -- Transitioning Through Human Rights Reforms and the Work of Memory (1955-Now) -- Memory in Literature and Journalism -- Testimonial Literature and Memory Through Journalism in Morocco -- Wide-Dissemination Period -- Reflective Period -- Some Effects of the Mnemonic Work on Journalism and the Literary Landscape in Morocco -- Moroccan Historiography Bracing for a New Challenge -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Chapter 6 Sites of Memory in Lebanon: The Hariri Mosque in Martyrs Square -- Introduction

Chou Sar? (What happened?) is a documentary film by De Gaulle Eid, made in 2010 in Lebanon. The film consists of a number of interviews Eid undertook with his close and extended family about a massacre that took place one evening in December, 1980. Among the dead were Eid's parents. Thirty years later, as he visits his relatives and records their stories, the question what happened? comes to be directed more towards the personal, social, and political circumstances in which the survivors have coped. In the following discussion I focus on how Eid's film addresses this event by concentrating on its aftermath. I am interested in how Chou Sar? engages the capacity of public and political cultures in Lebanon to approach memory of violence and enduring trauma as pressing concerns in and for the present. In doing so, I suggest that the film works to screen and situate violence and trauma as both actual and potential modes of address and response.

"The interdisciplinary field of memory studies has tended in recent years to diverge into two directions: on the one hand, the study of memorials, monuments, rituals and commemorations, adapting theories of space, construed through notions of 'collective memory' and 'affective memory'; and on the other hand, a psychoanalytic model of translation between 'traumatic memory' and 'narrative memory', dominated by an approach to the value of narrative as cure. While these approaches often cross over into each other, generating compelling insights, they tend to be informed by what we could call a presentist approach to memory. This tends to position the present, however embattled, as a potentially stabilising recovery of the past. Having learned and adapted much from both approaches, I nevertheless regard my work with memory as a slight departure. Preoccupied with works of cultural production, mainly film and literature, arising out of the sixteen-year civil war in Lebanon, I am concerned more with a fragmenting force of memory situated as an irresolvable, irreconcilable, productive tension between what comes to be re-covered as present and past, i.e., neither from the vantage point of 'the' present nor from that of »the« past. My current research develops and applies this notion of memory." (author´s abstract)