Intelligently written with a wry and gentle humour, the Black Madonna of Derby provides a vivid and topical insight into three generations of a Polish immigrant family as they struggle to find a balance between two cultures.
Intelligently written with a wry and gentle humour, the Black Madonna of Derby provides a vivid and topical insight into three generations of a Polish immigrant family as they struggle to find a balance between two cultures.
In Search of Singularity introduces a new “compairative” methodology that seeks to understand how the interplay of paired texts creates meaning in new, transcultural contexts. Bringing the worlds of contemporary Polish and Chinese poetry since 1989 into conversation with one another, Joanna Krenz applies the concept of singularity to draw out resonances and intersections between these two discourses and shows how they have responded to intertwined historical and political trajectories and a new reality beyond the human. Drawing on developments such as AI poetry and ecopoetry, Krenz makes the case for a fresh approach to comparative poetry studies that takes into account new forms of poetic expression and probes into alternative grammars of understanding.
History is a powerful tool in the hands of politicians, and can be a destructive weapon, as power over the past is the power to decide who is a hero and who is a traitor. Tradition, the remembrance of ancestors, experiences of previous generations are keys that unlock the doors to citizens’ minds, and allow certain ideas, visions and political programs to flourish. However, can history be a proper political weapon during democratization processes when the past is decisively divided from the present? Are the new order and society founded on the basis of some interpretation of the past, or, rather, are they founded only with reference to the imagined future of the nation? This book explores such questions through a detailed description of the use of remembrance policies during political transformations. It discusses how interpretations of the past served the realization of transitional objectives in countries as varied as Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, South Africa and Spain. The book is a unique journey through different parts of the world, different cultures and different political systems, investigating how history was remembered and forgotten by certain democratic leaders. Individual chapters discuss how governments’ remembrance policies were used to create a new citizen, to change a political culture, and to justify a vision of society promoted by new elites. They explain why some sore topics were avoided by politicians, and why sometimes there was no transitional justice or punishment of leaders of the authoritarian state. The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore policies of remembrance, democratization, and the role of memory in contemporary societies.
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