In July 1995, the Army of the Serbian Republic killed some 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica--the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II. Surviving the Bosnian Genocide is based on the testimonies of 60 female survivors of the massacre who were interviewed by Dutch historian Selma Leydesdorff. The women, many of whom still live in refugee camps, talk about their lives before the Bosnian war, the events of the massacre, and the ways they have tried to cope with their fate. Though fragmented by trauma, the women tell of life and survival under extreme conditions, while recalling a time before the war when Muslims, Croats, and Serbs lived together peaceably. By giving them a voice, this book looks beyond the rapes, murders, and atrocities of that dark time to show the agency of these women during and after the war and their fight to uncover the truth of what happened at Srebrenica and why.
Gender and Memory brings together contributions from around the world and from a range of disciplines--history and sociology, socio-linguistics and family therapy, literature--to create a volume that confronts all those concerned with autobiographical testimony and narrative, both spoken and written. The fundamental theme is the shaping of memory by gender. This paperback edition includes a new introduction by Selma Leydesdorff, coeditor of the Memory and Narrative series of which this volume is a part. Are the different ways in which men and women are recalled in public and private memory and the differences in men's and women's own memories of similar experiences, simply reflections of unequal lives in gendered societies, or are they more deeply rooted? The sharply differentiated life experiences of men and women in most human societies, the widespread tendencies for men to dominate in the public sphere and for women's lives to focus on family and household, suggest that these experiences may be reflected in different qualities of memory. The contributors maintain that memories are gendered, and that the gendering of memory makes a strong impact on the shaping of social spaces and expressive forms as the horizons of memory move from one generation to the next. They argue that in order to understand how memory becomes gendered, we need to travel through the realms of gendered experience and gendered language. Selma Leydesdorff is professor of oral history at the University of Amsterdam. Her publications include We Lived with Dignity and Trauma and (with Kim Lacy Rogers) Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors. Luisa Passerini is professor of cultural history at the University of Torino. Her publications include Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics Between the Wars, Il mito d'Europa: Radici antiche per nuovi simboli, and Memoria e utopia: Il primato dell'intersoggettivit. Paul Thompson is research professor in sociology at the University of Essex and a fellow at the Institute of Community Studies, London. He is founder-editor of Oral History, and founder of the National Life Story Collection, British Library National Sound Archive. His previous publications include The Voice of the Past and The Edwardians.
On October 14, 1943, Aleksandr "Sasha" Pechersky led a mass escape of inmates from Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Despite leading the only successful prisoner revolt at a World War II death camp, Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved in his home country of Russia. This story of a forgotten hero reveals the tremendous difference in memorial cultures between societies in the West and societies in the former Communist world. Pechersky, along with other Russian and Jewish inmates who had been prisoners of the Nazis, was considered suspect by the Russian government simply because he had been imprisoned. In this volume, Selma Leydesdorff describes the official silence in the Eastern Bloc about Pechersky’s role in the Sobibor escape and how an effort was made to recognize his actions. The narrative is based on eyewitness accounts from people in Pechersky’s life and a discussion of the mechanism of memory, mixing written sources with varied recollections and assessing the collisions of collective memory held by the East and the West. Specifically, this book critiques the ideological refusal of many societies to acknowledge the suffering of Jews at Sobibor. Offering fascinating insights into a crucial period of history, emphasizing that Jews were not passive in the face of German violence, and exploring the history of the Jews who fell victim to Stalinism after surviving Nazism, this is valuable reading for students and scholars of the Holocaust and the position of Jews under Communism.
Traumatic experiences and their consequences are often the core of life stories told by survivors of violence. In Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors leading academics explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which survivors remember, and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.International case studies include the migration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, the life stories of Guatemalan war widows, violence in South Africa, persecution of political prisoners in South Africa and the former Czechoslovakia, lynching in the Mississippi Delta, resistance in Zimbabwe's liberation war, sexual abuse, and the ongoing Irish troubles. The volume reveals the complexity of remembering and forgetting traumatic experiences, and shows that survivors are likely to express themselves in stories containing elements that are imaginary, fragmented, and loaded with symbolism. Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors is a groundbreaking work of relevance across the social sciences. This new perspective on trauma will be of particular importance to researchers in psychology, history, women's studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.
In this volume, contributors present narratives and explore the way they influence the perception of the past. While acknowledging the debate about the validity of qualitative research based on narratives, this volume aims to illuminate how truth and evidence form part of a much wider debate on the representation of history. The volume includes the work of historians but the interdisciplinary nature of the contributions shows that the validity debate also applies to the broader fields of cultural studies, sociology, and other social sciences. The distinction between memory and testimony is a crucial theme. Memory, though selective, is the basis of testimony. Testimony provides an audience with information that becomes evidence of what was seen or experienced. Such evidence can form the basis of legal truth. Nanci Adler and Selma Leydesdorff divide the volume into three core sections: Official Testimony and Other "Facts and Evidence"; The Creation of New History and the Integration of Collective Memory in the Story of One's Self; and Claims Based on Narratives vs. Official History. After a comprehensive introduction by the editors, the volume offers twelve essays by leading scholars. This work is a new offering in Transaction's acclaimed Memory and Narrative series.
Despite leading the only successful prisoner revolt at a World War II death camp, Aleksandr "Sasha" Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved in his home country of Russia. This story of a forgotten hero reveals the tremendous difference in memorial cultures between societies in the West and societies in the former Communist world
In July 1995, the Army of the Serbian Republic killed some 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica--the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II. Surviving the Bosnian Genocide is based on the testimonies of 60 female survivors of the massacre who were interviewed by Dutch historian Selma Leydesdorff. The women, many of whom still live in refugee camps, talk about their lives before the Bosnian war, the events of the massacre, and the ways they have tried to cope with their fate. Though fragmented by trauma, the women tell of life and survival under extreme conditions, while recalling a time before the war when Muslims, Croats, and Serbs lived together peaceably. By giving them a voice, this book looks beyond the rapes, murders, and atrocities of that dark time to show the agency of these women during and after the war and their fight to uncover the truth of what happened at Srebrenica and why.
Traumatic experiences and their consequences are often the core of life stories told by survivors of violence. In Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors leading academics explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which survivors remember, and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.International case studies include the migration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, the life stories of Guatemalan war widows, violence in South Africa, persecution of political prisoners in South Africa and the former Czechoslovakia, lynching in the Mississippi Delta, resistance in Zimbabwe's liberation war, sexual abuse, and the ongoing Irish troubles. The volume reveals the complexity of remembering and forgetting traumatic experiences, and shows that survivors are likely to express themselves in stories containing elements that are imaginary, fragmented, and loaded with symbolism. Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors is a groundbreaking work of relevance across the social sciences. This new perspective on trauma will be of particular importance to researchers in psychology, history, women's studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.
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