Ethnicity studies 2015/2
Dovilė Budrytė, Erica Resende Foreword. Beyond the nation? In search of global connections between traumatic memories
Jasmina Husanović. Economies of affect and traumatic knowledge: lessons on violence, witnessing and resistance in Bosnia and Herzegovina
The aim of this paper is to outline the current dynamics of the economies of affect and traumatic knowledge concerning the politics of memory and witnessing to trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It also refers to some specific instances of cultural and knowledge production and grassroots activism in war and post-war contexts outlining the deadlocks faced, as well as some promising trajectories of antinationalist, left, and feminist activism seeking political and social justice. For those who experienced various forms of wartime and postwar violence in the countries that composed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and who oppose and traverse the dominant logic of victimisation and commodification, this is a multidirectional, affective and collective effort of reconstituting memory for the purposes of hopeful politics.
Jessica Auchter. Theorizing haunting and the international after genocide: the cases of Rwanda and Darfur
This contribution seeks to explore the concept of haunting by examining two cases in which memorialization has proceeded very differently: Rwanda and Darfur. It makes the argument that by allowing ourselves to be haunted, new avenues of politics open up that gesture towards a shared human vulnerability rather than a politics based on competing victimhood. It specifically seeks to elucidate how an ethics of haunting offers an alternative lens with which to view memorialization after mass atrocity. Rwanda and Darfur provide two very different contexts for this process: in Rwanda, built memorials form key sites for memorialization and the display of human remains as evidence of atrocity. In Darfur, there is ongoing conflict, no physical memorial sites, and the bodies of victims mingle with desert sands, yet oral testimonies persist as key ways in which deaths are memorialized. Both of these examples posit questions about lingering identities and the relationship between identity and physical memorial sites. Exploring tensions between how deaths and narratives about deaths are managed (or attempts to manage these), as well as the competing narratives that persist at memorial sites allows me to explore more fundamental questions of identity as it relates to who and what memorialization is. Furthermore, it allows me to explore how memorialization proceeds and what it might mean to be haunted by the lives and deaths that have been silenced or coopted into particular memorial projects.
Erica Resende. Aporia, trauma, and emotions in the crisis of meaning of 9/11
Employing concepts and theories that relate meanings, representations, memory, and trauma, I attempt to show how the 9/11 events have been able to destabilize representations and meanings, break the line of history, subvert senses, bend space-time perceptions, and shake the grids of intelligibility that had allowed Americans to make sense of reality and of themselves. Our aim is to understand how mute and hyperreal representations of the events of 2001 provoked a situation where language failed, producing aporia. Due to the difficulty of its signification, 9/11 sits at the heart of a trauma in American collective imaginaries, which may be understood as a collapse of hegemonic political discourses regarding American sense of security.
Scott Boykin. The Armenian Metz Yeghern, one hundred years later: an “unresolved” case of genocide and the development of international norms
Intersubjective recognition of human rights abuses affirms them and exerts pressure to acknowledge them in international norms and institutions. It is in this way that the transnational memory of genocides, made part of the common lifeworld of humanity, can assert itself against the contrary interests of states and shape institutions and conduct in international affairs. Thus, human rights abuses do indeed foster the development of the international human rights regime. The Armenian Genocide, an unresolved and massive human rights abuse, contributed powerfully to the development of the current law on genocide and demonstrates how transnational memory, encapsulated in legal concepts, can transmit intersubjectively recognized norms of state conduct through time and institutions. In spite of the fact that there was no meaningful remedial action for the Armenian Genocide, and despite the fact that it is not universally recognized and is to some extent the subject of dispute, the Armenian Genocide played a significant role in the development of the international law on genocide and, because it is still the subject of dispute, remains a focal point for discussion of the concept of genocide a century later. The Armenian Genocide offers evidence that memory of unresolved human rights abuses can drive the development of international norms, and the ways in which this historical case is remembered have played a constructive role in the development of the global human rights regime.
Diogo Monteiro Dario. Transitional justice and the Colombian conflict: from universal jurisdiction to conflict resolution
The aim of this article is to analyze the leading narratives about transitional justice (TJ) and the ways in which parts of these narratives were interpreted in Colombia. This analysis includes the Justice and Peace Law adopted in 2005 and the consequent formation a normative framework centered on the notion of the victim. The theoretical part incorporates insights about the changes in the ways that TJ was conceptualized by various international actors and dwells on the impact of these changes, making them relevant to the case of Colombia. This case study demonstrates how the local actors have employed different narratives of TJ centered on a key symbolical dispute over the notion of victim.
Isabel David. The retornados: trauma and displacement in post-revolution Portugal
The aim of this article is to shed light on the traumatic experiences of the retornados and their strategies to cope with loss and displacement, by focusing on the cases of retornados from Angola and Mozambique, the territories that hosted the largest percentage (94%) of Portuguese settlers. Retornados is the word used to refer to the white Portuguese living in the African colonies who were repatriated to Portugal in the months leading to their independences, between the Spring and Autumn of 1975. Their exact numbers are unknown, varying between 500,000 and one million. 40% of them had been born in the colonies. The findings of this paper are based on semi-structured interviews conducted with six retornados, all with different professional and personal trajectories. The paper argues that the Portuguese case presents unique features that place it in a special category in the context of traumatic memory and displacement literature. First, by blurring the distinction between victim and oppressor – when colonists become the victims of a political power that used them as agents of an imperialistic power project. Second, by showing how the post-revolution Portuguese elites chose not to use the retornados to further the country’s foreign policy goals, but rather forgot them, to further those goals, namely European Economic Community membership. Third, by demonstrating that the plight of the retornados has not been used for the sake of domestic political purposes in forty-one years of democracy.
Violeta Davoliūtė. Multidirectional memory and the deportation of Lithuanian Jews
Although Jewish Lithuanians were deported in June 1941 in numbers that were fully proportional to their share of the population at the time, their experience has been largely excluded from the collective memory of this historical trauma. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with Lithuanian Jewish deportees, memoirs and archival documents this article seeks to restore their experience to its rightful place, and using the framework of “multi-directional memory”, explores the reasons why their unique perspective was “forgotten” for so many years, only to be recovered in recent public discourse.
