Memory, Amnesia and Politics

Judge Garzón to Speak at University of Minnesota - April 25, 2011

2011-04-15T08:12:00.000-05:00

Spanish Judge, Baltasar Garzón, advocate of universal jurisdiction will speak April 25 at 2:00 p.m.

Rarely has a modern-day judge or human rights defender created as much controversy as Judge Baltasar Garzón. Garzón's supporters view him as an unrelenting human rights advocate, taking on high-profile cases including former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden. Garzón's critics write him off as an over-stepping judge who has abused his judicial power, including exceeding his authority by investigating Spanish Civil War atrocities.

Judge Garzón grabbed the world's attention in 1998 when he asked UK authorities to extradite former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, to the Spanish court under an indictment of torture. Garzón's request was under the legal theory of universal jurisdiction, which allows any court to try individuals who are alleged to have committed the most serious international crimes, such as crimes against humanity or war crimes.

Since the Pinochet case, Garzón has continued to push for broad jurisdictional authority, opening investigations in the militant Basque separatist group, ETA, as well as Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. After his most recent investigation into the Franco era crimes of the Spanish Civil War, the tables were turned, and Garzón himself was indicted for overreaching his jurisdiction in investigating war crimes arising out of the Spanish Civil War.

Judge Garzón is challenging the lawfulness of his indictment in Spain which the International Center for the Legal Protection of Human Rights (INTERIGHTS) has described as a "threat to the independence of judges and to their role in ensuring accountability for alleged widespread and systematic crimes." Garzón alleges the criminal case against him violates several of Spain's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights including the obligation to protect individuals from an unfair criminal process.

Judge Garzón will speak at the University of Minnesota on April 25 at 2:00PM in Room 25 Mondale Hall, University of Minnesota Law School, 19th Ave South, Minneapolis MN 55455. His talk will focus on "Truth, Justice and Reparation". A reception will follow immediately Garzón's lecture.

Garzón's visit is being co-sponsored by the Human Rights Program, the Department of Political Science, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, The Institute for Global Studies, The Hubert Humphrey Center, The Law School, The Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, Global Spotlight, European Studies Consortium
Event is free and open to the public.

Now Accepting Proposals for Panel on Baltasar Garzón - St. Louis, November 2011

2011-04-14T20:55:00.002-05:00

Many bloggers and other readers end up on this site looking for information on Baltasar Garzón. I am now accepting proposals on Judge Garzón for a Special Session panel at the Midwest MLA (Modern Language Association), to be held in St. Louis in November 2011. For more information on the conference, please click here.

Baltasar Garzón: International Justice on Trial
This panel explores the figure of Judge Baltasar Garzón as a metaphor for post-dictatorial justice in Spain and Latin America. Seen alternately as an advocate for human rights or as a celebrity “activist judge,” many argue Garzón has displaced the cause of the very victims he purports to defend. From his orchestration of the Pinochet arrest to his failed attempt to investigate Francoist-era crimes, Garzón remains at the center of an ideological battle over the narrative reconstruction of the dictatorial past. This panel examines Garzón’s portrayal by self or others in journalism, film or new media, especially with regard to the construction of a transnational memory culture and the practice of citizenship in democratic societies. Papers welcome in English or Spanish.

Please submit 250-word abstracts as email attachments to Kathy Korcheck by June 3, 2011.

Conference: "Backward Glances: History, Imagination and Memory" - Ireland, August 2011

2011-03-27T12:35:00.000-05:00

Seen in UPenn CFP:

Backward Glances: 31st August - 1st September
University College, Cork
contact email: backwardglances@ucc.ie

Call For Papers:

Backward Glances: History, Imagination, and Memory
University College Cork, Ireland.
31st August – 1st September 2011

Society is marked by a fascination with its past, yet this need or desire to look backward and understand, is complicated by the illusive nature of the past. Accessible only through the sites of text, memory and imagination, the past is, in essence, unstable and transitory. Both individual and communal in nature, it is continually exposed to processes of re-interpretation, revision, and re-writing. Anchored in the present, the backward glance is influenced by the concerns and needs of that present, and subject to the dominant ideological perspectives of a fleeting contemporary moment.

Backward Glances, a two-day interdisciplinary conference at University College Cork, seeks to generate dialogue and debate about the nature and function of the retrospective gaze. Exploring the diverse modes by which culture strives to assimilate its history, the conference considers the manner in which constructions of the past are conditioned by the lens of the present. The desire to reflect on and reshape former times is not limited to literature. The organisers invite 20-minute papers from a wide variety of fields. Topics may include but are not confined to:

• National history and national memory
• Spaces of Memory
• Historical fiction
• Individual and collective pasts
• Contested histories
• History and trauma
• History and gender
• Memoirs/Biography

Abstracts of approximately 200-250 words to be submitted to backwardglances@ucc.ie by 12th May 2011.

Please direct any queries to this address or see our website www.ucc.ie/backwardglances for more information.

Ariel Dorfman on Obama's Upcoming Visit to Chile

2011-03-19T12:13:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama and Sebastián Piñera

Ariel Dorfman has published an editorial today in Spain's El País on President Obama's upcoming visit to Chile titled "Obama y el dolor de Chile" ("Obama and the Pain of Chile"). In the editorial he suggests that Obama visit with former exiles and children of the disappeared; go to the newly inaugurated Museo de la Memoria and get to know Villa Grimaldi, the former detention and torture center that is now the Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace. This is the first paragraph, with my translation in italics.

Cuando Barack Obama desembarque en Chile el próximo lunes en una visita de 24 horas, algo crucial va a faltar en su agenda. Habrá mariscos suculentos y discursos que elogien la prosperidad de Chile, acuerdos bilaterales y encuentros con los poderosos y los pomposos, pero no hay planes, sin duda, de que el presidente de Estados Unidos tome contacto con lo que fue la experiencia fundamental de la reciente historia chilena, el trauma que el pueblo de mi país padeció durante los casi 17 años del régimen del general Augusto Pinochet.

When Barack Obama lands in Chile next Monday on a 24-hour visit, something critical will be lacking in his agenda. There will be delicious seafood and speeches praising Chile's prosperity, bilateral agreements and meetings with the pompous and powerful, but there are absolutely no plans for the U.S. president to come in contact with what was the key experience in recent Chilean history, the trauma that the people of my country suffered for the almost 17 years of General Augusto Pinochet's regime.

Dorfman goes on to explain why he believes Obama must address Chile's dictatorial past while in Chile (again, my translation follows in italics):

Una razón por la cual tiene sentido que Obama haga todo lo posible por vislumbrar, aunque fuera a través de un vidrio oscuro, nuestra vasta y devastadora pena, es que los norteamericanos fueron, en gran parte, responsables de aquella tragedia. Washington ayudó, alentó y financió la caída del Gobierno democráticamente elegido de Allende y la trayectoria dictatorial de Pinochet.

One reason why Obama must do everything he can to make clearer, albeit through a dark lens, our vast and devastating pain, is that Americans were, in large part, responsible for that tragedy [that of the overthrow of Allende and the installation of the Pinochet regime]. Washington helped, encouraged and financed the fall of Allende's democratically-elected government and the dictatorial trajectory of Pinochet.

Dorfman's editorial does not go so far as to propose President Obama apologize for U.S. involvement and support of the Pinochet regime. In fact, he expressly states that that gesture, in his view, is unnecessary. What Dorfman would like instead is all the more simple and brief, but full of symbolism nonetheless: he wants Obama to visit the tomb of Salvador Allende and observe a few moments of silence, a gesture Dorfman believes will send the message to Chile, all of Latin America and the entire planet ("y de hecho a todo el planeta") that the U.S. is ushering in a new era of relations with its Latin American neighbors.

I applaud Dorfman's intentions in his editorial column. Certainly, more people -- especially in the U.S. -- need to inform themselves about American support of right-wing dictators in Latin America. For doubters, plenty of de-classified state documents exist -- some of which are linked on this blog -- to help illustrate the U.S. role in funding and aiding otherwise the military dictatorships of the entire Southern Cone. I don't think, however, that Dorfman is being realistic about the kind of president that Obama has thusfar shown himself to be.

In his editorial, Dorfman resurrects the name of Bobby Kennedy, citing him as an example for Obama to follow. In the 60s, Kennedy visited with Chilean president Eduardo Frei (leader of the Christian Democratic Party and president just prior to Allende) and met with Chilean miners and angry Communist students protesting the former's visit. In Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur Schesslinger recounts part of that visit, and quotes Kennedy's remarks after meeting with the Chilean miners: "'If I worked in this mine,' Kennedy told a Chilean reporter, 'I'd be a Communist too'" (p. 696).

Has Dorfman been paying attention to American politics since Obama's election? First of all, Obama has largely disappointed the (true) left in this country, due to what they perceive to be his largely centrist position on nearly every important issue out there. Second, one of the rallying cries of the (extreme) right has been to call Obama a "Socialist" or a "Communist," often mixing the terms beyond recognition into a hodgepodge of McCarthy-era rhetoric (sometimes, unbelievably, these terms have been mixed with Obama as "Fascist" or even "Nazi"). So, let's imagine what Obama's visit to Chile would be like were he to follow Dorfman's suggestions.

Most likely, were we to see Obama at Allende's tomb, the right would immediately gravitate once more to the idea of foreign Obama, socialist Obama, radical America-hater Obama. Everyone knows Allende is a hero of the left. So, Obama linking himself to Allende, even in this brief appearance, would just feed into the right's fear-mongering machine. While the left might find the gesture laudable, they would also have reason to complain, for Obama has not demonstrated this kind of public presidential presence stateside. For example, the left might ask why Obama isn't standing with the Wisconsin workers protesting the end to their collective bargaining rights.

Nonetheless, as Dorfman reminds us, President Obama will be dining in the same Presidential palace where Salvador Allende died "en defensa del derecho de su pueblo a elegir su propio destino" ("in defense of his people's right to elect their own destiny"). It is difficult to imagine how his entire visit could go by with no mention of the tragic Chilean past. Unfortunately, however, the President's political identity has been shaped less by his risk-taking and more by his acquiescence to the ever-shifting Overton window. Like Clinton, Obama's desire to be "post-political" and "post-partisan," always seeking compromise, has only served to his disadvantage.

In Chile, Obama will be meeting with President Sebastián Piñera. Though perhaps not as visible a meeting as that between Obama and Hu Jin Tao, this encounter will be still put under a microscope, as will Obama's other Latin American stops. While Ariel Dorfman's position in his editorial is certainly understandable and reasonable, given Chile's recent past, it is highly unlikely that Barack Obama will acknowledge anything regarding Allende or the Pinochet dictatorship. In fact, the nuclear issue has already taken precedence, as The Santiago Times reported Wednesday that Pres. Piñera has announced a nuclear agreement with the U.S. (see also today's NYT, "Undeterred by Fallout Fears....").

"Nostalgia for the Light" (dir. Patricio Guzmán) opens Friday in New York

2011-03-16T20:01:00.000-05:00

In my first few months of college, I met a Chilean graduate student that was studying geology. I wanted to talk about Neruda, and he was more than happy to oblige. Naturally, my friend was fascinated with rocks, so much so that when traveling, he often had to declare extra weight for the containers of earth he transported back and forth. The shelves in his office were lined with geodes, fossils and amber, but anything related to science intrigued him deeply. I often had the sense Ohio was incredibly disappointing to him -- geographically dull, relatively young in the grand scheme of things, and too populated with mall and parking lot lights to get a good view of the night sky. Nonetheless, I accompanied him on several excursions -- once, to keep watch for the comet Hale-Bopp, and later, during a field work expedition in Punta Arenas, near the Strait of Magellan. Though he was made of many things, earth and The Earth were integral parts of his identity. Sometimes, I have the feeling it is so for most Chileans. Maybe it has to do with the incredibly varied nature of the Chilean landscape, the frequency of earthquakes or the long, narrow boundary lines of the country itself. Earlier on this blog, I attempted to address similar questions after the miners were rescued.

Patricio Guzmán is one of Chile's most well-known documentarians, and his work is essential for anyone interested in memory and human rights. His most famous quote, also on the front page of his website, is "Un país sin cine documental es como un país sin album de fotografías" ("A country without documentary film is like a country without a photo album"). The trailer for his new film, "Nostalgia for the Light," opens by addressing the Atacama desert. A NYT review calls the documentary, which opens Friday in Greenwich Village, a "meditation on astronomy, archeology, geology and human rights."

For more information, see the film's official website here. I will report back on the blog after I've seen it, but in the meantime, if anyone would like to share initial reactions, please do so using the comment feature of this post.

Read more here:
Review in Reverse Shot
Review in Slant Magazine
Interview in Filmmaker Magazine

View brief clips here:
Clip 1
Clip 2
Clip 3

A Model for the Class I Hope to Teach

2011-03-06T18:04:00.001-06:00

Professor Francie Cate-Arries is the author of the influential Spanish Culture Under Barbed Wire. Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps.1939-45 (2004). She also led what must have been an amazing class -- to teach and to take -- on memory in Madrid:

I am beginning to lay the groundwork for a similar project that has come out of the four-way intersection of post-dissertation research, a class I taught on contemporary literature and film of the Spanish Civil War, a Memory Studies honors seminar and the personal ties I have formed thanks to my Spanish blog. The class I envision will be taught partially in the United States and partially in situ. It will be interdisciplinary in nature and feature an extended, yearly field trip to one or several "sites of memory," which will vary. Hopefully, it will be team-taught. Perhaps, my teaching partner will alternate. I expect to bring together the study of literature and culture, psychology and history/politics.

As I outline the course, research locations and consider practical issues, I come back repeatedly to my concerns about memory tourism and how to prevent this sort of encounter or experience. Certainly, studying this issue will be essential prior to any potential interactions with survivors and/or their descendants, as well as the physical locations we might inhabit temporarily. I think that careful, frequent reflection will be key, as well as a clearly-outlined rationale and purpose prior to any excursion here or abroad.

Currently, I am reading Memory and the Future, because, as the editors state in the introduction, "For those who study memory, there is a nagging concern that memory studies is inherently backward-looking, and that memory itself -- and the ways in which it is deployed, invoked and utilized -- can potentially hinder efforts to move forward" (1). As I have used literature and film to discuss memory and amnesia, I have come to realize that scholars have neglected memory's future. What is the future of memory?

I will report more on developments in the above endeavor in the coming months.

February 23, 1981: "El 23-F"

2011-02-23T09:41:00.000-06:00

Today is the 30th anniversary of the attempt to overthrow the democratic government in Spain, known as "el 23-F" for the date on which is occurred, February 23. I have never known whether to call this day a "coup" or an "attempted coup," but I have seen both used with alarming interchangeability. On the one hand, it would seem right to call it an attempted coup. After all, no new government was installed and the attempt was, in the end, a failed one. Yet for a day, at least within the confines of the Congreso de los Diputados in Madrid, Spain was held hostage to the demands of the right-wing military golpistas that occupied Congress in their green uniforms and tri-cornered hats. Considering the fact that the attempted coup occurred just 6 years after Franco's death and 3 years after the new Spanish Constitution was passed, el 23-F must have been a terrifying reminder that the past was by no means past (see an overview of the events in this Guardian article from February 23, 1981).

On this day, Spain was about to elect a new prime minister, Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo (see obituary here); Congress was in session when suddenly, a swarm of civil guards, led by the lieutenant colonel Antonio Tejero, entered the building and began shouting for everyone to get down. Shots were fired -- Congress deputies dove beneath their desks, but a few remained seated (one of whom, Adolfo Suárez, helped provide the spark for Anatomía de un instante/Anatomy of a Moment, Javier Cercas's excellent dissection of that day).

At 1:15 a.m., King Juan Carlos I appeared on TV to defend the Constitution (this aspect of February 23 -- that is, the King's heroism -- has been a matter of fierce debate between those who support the monarchy and those who feel the King, who was put in place by Franco, needs to step aside). Order was eventually restored, and Tejero only served a year under house arrest. The date was a defining moment of the Spanish transition to democracy. The long-standing narrative of the harmonious, bloodless transition to democracy in Spain has been dismantled in recent years, but considered alongside some of the recent events in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya, it is hard not to marvel at the fact that Spain's young democracy was able to survive this day (of course, democracy had already been "in place" for several years in Spain).

Below, a few videos to help illustrate February 23, 1981. All are in Spanish only. I have yet to find a video in English on this day.

Probably the most well-known video sequence of that day:

An interesting re-creation of what was going on outside:

Trailer from a new film on February 23 (official website here):

For more, see special in Público

"Desaparecidos" (Disappeared) displays the work of Gervasio Sánchez

2011-02-12T18:22:00.001-06:00

The CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona) is currently showing the work of Gervasio Sánchez, a Spanish photojournalist that has spent a large part of his career documenting the "disappeared":

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, La Casa Encendida de Obra Social Caja Madrid and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León simultaneously present the exhibition “The Disappeared”, curated by photojournalist Sandra Balsells. This photographic show by photojournalist Gervasio Sánchez addresses the theme of forced disappearance in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Spain between 1998 and 2010.

“The Disappeared” represents a forceful document against forgetting and aims to salvage the suppressed memory of people disappeared during various wars and processes of repression. The presentation of the exhibition forms part of a major cultural action which, for the first time on the Spanish expository scene, involves the simultaneous exhibition in three cities (León, Barcelona and Madrid) of a macro photographic project centring on a single theme, by the same author.

Each centre will show a broad but completely different selection of photographs, making it a truly new expository proposal (MUSAC: 79 photographs and installation of portraits, "Cruelty and Pain", the joint work of Gervasio Sánchez and Ricardo Calero; La Casa Encendida: 73 photographs and 4 murals with 40 portraits; CCCB: 103 photographs and 4 murals with 40 portraits). The three exhibitions share the same narrative structure and thematic blocks, and all three end with a significant epilogue devoted to Spain, dealing with the present-day process of search for and exhumation of people who disappeared during the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship.

In addition to photographic material, the exhibition includes two audiovisual recordings explaining the testimonies of the families of disappeared people and reproducing the ambient sound of detention centres and burial places.

In the framework of the exhibition, the three centres will also be organizing conferences to reflect on and debate the phenomenon of forced disappearance.

More information here (English) and at the photographer's personal blog (Spanish). Sánchez's blog, Los desastres de la guerra, which takes its name after the famous Goya grabado, contains detailed descriptions of some of the photographs displayed in the exhibit.

In this video, Sánchez describes his work on the "disappeared," the importance of documenting absence and the effects of forced disappearance on the victim's family members.He also discusses the world of (photo)journalism today.

January 28, 1986

2011-01-28T12:16:00.001-06:00

Photos here

I have a mixed relationship with the sciences. Until high school, I loved participating in science fairs, contemplating black holes and listening to "2001: a Space Odyssey" and a National Geographic record called "Space Sounds." My scrapbook was full of newspaper clippings on new planetary moons, shuttle launches and supernovas. My sister and I would lie upside down on my canopy bed and pretend we were getting ready for lift-off. While most of my friends were busy seeing themselves as teachers or nurses, I proudly stated that I wanted to be a paleontologist, and then, an astronaut. In junior high, I participated in a science fair with a project on natural dyes. Another year, I made crystals. By the time I was ready for high school, I had won a few science prizes at my school and was really jazzed about the idea of studying biology. Unfortunately, chemistry and physics altered my earlier relationship with science, and although I still maintain a love for all things "outer space," I have long considered myself to be essentially a "language person," which is really kind of silly.

On January 28, 1986, I was not yet a teenager. That day, classes were cancelled due to snow -- as they often are this time of year in northeast Ohio -- and my mom had taken my friends and me to the ice skating rink where I had taken lessons for the past few years. At some point, I recall an adult coming to get us early, and being disappointed because we weren't ready to go. When I got home, my mom was crying and glued to the TV, which my father was also watching (a rarity, as he was not a big fan of TV). The space shuttle Challenger had exploded just 73 seconds after liftoff (video here). Perhaps because both my parents were teachers, they took this news especially hard; on the Challenger, teacher Christa McAuliffe would be making her first flight into space. In addition, one of the astronauts, Judy Resnick, was from Akron, just over an hour away from us. My reaction, outwardly, was measured. But inside, I just could not believe it. I felt crushed, as if I had been a partner in the same project as the astronauts -- space! Glorious space! How could this happen?

Later on in the day, we had to go to the store for something. It was a store with audio equipment of some kind and there were TVs playing. One of my vivid recollections is seeing and hearing the TVs playing the story. That night, and in the coming weeks, I did nothing but write in my journal about the Challenger disaster, recording details about the flight and the astronauts and my reaction to the new information being revealed. Even though I was still a child, I had the sense that something major had occurred that would change what happened in years to come. I wanted to be able to say, "I wrote about this when it happened and here are my reflections."

The Challenger disaster changed the face of the entire space program in the United States. It meant the end of this sort of golden era of space exploration (or at least, what we had seen as such) -- and this feels quite evident in my childhood scrapbook, when there are no longer any newspaper articles on new moons, photos of planetary rings or shuttle launches. As a professor, explaining this change (in terms of memory) can be a challenge.

In several of my classes, when we've spoken about photography and collective memory, I show a series of well-known photographs with no captions and ask students to identify the event depicted in the photo and also, to provide an approximate year or time period for the image. To me, the trails of white smoke against a dark blue sky (seen in the photo at the start of this post) are immediately identifiable as the Challenger explosion. Yet quite often, students are unsure what this is -- some recall the 2003 Columbia disaster instead.

It is unbelievable to me that today marks 25 years since the Challenger disaster. Though so much time has passed, it is easy to recall the pit in my throat that day when I learned about the explosion and what it meant for the seven astronauts and their families. In some ways, Challenger was my first real experience with death. It is one of those moments where I will "never forget where I was" when I heard the news.

Since 1986, space exploration, though it may have evolved considerably in some ways (the Hubble telescrope, the International Space Station, no moon exploration, suggestions of going to Mars, etc.), is still very much influenced by national and transnational politics. In the U.S. January 28, 1986 was a defining moment of 80s history (in addition to the images of the catastrophe, think of Ronald Reagan's "heroes" speech that night -- "a day for mourning and remembering"). The space program was suspended for several years. We no longer pursued shuttle launches and explorations with the same frequency or sense of "news-worthiness." In some ways, this is evident even in the manner in which the Columbia disaster was covered in February 2003. Today, it is difficult to say what is in store for NASA or future shuttle missions, particularly after proposed cuts by the Obama administration.

Wilderness vs. Wal-Mart

2011-01-23T14:47:00.001-06:00

First, let's be blunt. I hate Wal-Mart. And let's be honest. I do shop there, less out of a desire to do so, and more because it is one of the only places to get what I need in the small town in which I live (the Wal-Mart here is of the old-fashioned early Sam Walton variety: it stocks the basics. The very basics). I hate Wal-Mart for the reasons that people everywhere hate it. It's the epitome of the postmodern corporation: it gives us cheap (finanically and materially), shoddy merchandise made in China by exploited workers, while promoting a carefully-constructed mythology of American values: helping out the working class, being "good for the community" and allowing mom to stay within her budget. In reality, the economic behavior of Wal-Mart in the United States and elsewhere should make them the enemy of the working class, particularly if we look at their atrocious record of workplace gender and racial discrimination (women and other minority groups missing out on promotions), and denial of health care to its workers by re-defining what "full-time" meant. For more, see Robert Greenwald's 2005 documentary Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price.

Since the end of the Bush era, Wal-Mart has invested in a healthy dose of re-branding. Let's take a look at the "military industrial complex" Wal-Mart (original photo here):

The red, white and blue (and cement gray), clearly meant to emphasize the patriotic nature of shopping (as promoted by George W. Bush in 2007), fit nicely with the pretty star-cum-hyphen between Wal and Mart:

Of late, we have seen a move to this cleaner, more environmentally-conscious looking logo:

No matter how it defines itself to the public, Wal-Mart still has the reputation for deciding to set up shop where it is least welcome. Claiming that it will provide impoverished communities with a healthy supply of jobs, it seems to nearly always get its way when all is said and done. Its idea of "living better" is being able to do "one-stop shopping," where you can get groceries, prescriptions, clothes, a burger at McDonalds, an oil change for your car, a lawnmower and perhaps a bookcase or two all under one roof. On the way out, stop at the Wal-Mart gas station for some extra cheap gas too! Wal-Mart made other kinds of shopping -- the pharmacy, the clothing boutique, the family-owned hardware store -- extinct, turning town squares into a bunch of empty storefronts and making small business owners and employees largely unnecessary.

For some time now, Wal-Mart has been involved in a dispute in the state of Virginia over whether the former should be permitted to build near an historic battle site of the American Civil War. Wal-Mart argues, once again, that the construction will bring many new jobs to the area. It also states that it would be building in an area already dotted with retail locations. Those involved in the local tourism industry claim that what visitors desire is familiarity, convenience and access, which Wal-Mart can provide (see video). Historical preservationists are concerned by the shopping center's proposed proximity to the site of the Battle of the Wilderness, a turning point of the war. For a change, Republicans and Democrats have, together with historians and celebrities, teamed up to keep Wal-Mart out. This week, the case goes to court. It is hard to overlook the irony of the battle's name in its confrontation with the corporate giant. It is getting harder and harder to imagine any wilderness in this country.

When I was growing up, in 1980s Ohio, my parents took my sister and I on many exciting "one tank trip" vacations. We got to know our state parks, in other words. But three of the most thrilling summer trips were going from Ohio-Florida (in a brown Valiant with vinyl seats and no air conditioning!), Ohio-Great Smoky Mountains and Ohio-Maine. There were no Wal-Marts to stop at along the way. And yes, a certain amount of "wilderness" was involved -- we were never sure where we would end up and what we might find there. We had to pack for the unexpected. We drove all day, until my parents were too tired to go any further -- and then we found a hotel. We always had enough gas, because we were never sure where the next gas station would be -- it's not like now, where there is one at every highway exit. The littering of the American landscape with Wal-Marts and other similar structures makes our universe always 24-7, always within reach. We don't have to rely on ourselves, because Wal-Mart will always be there to help us out of a jam, as this 2008 map from Wal-Mart Watch suggests:

The impact of Wal-Mart construction is not only environmental and cultural, but, as the case in Virginia demonstrates, historical. Does it really matter, as some claim, that the proposed store location would fall outside the actual core of the Civil War battlefield, where some 30,000 were killed, injured or disappeared? Does building a perimeter of commerce -- with Wal-Mart at the helm -- around the battle area defame or re-shape this "site of memory"?

There are those who argue -- including the Pulitzer prize-winning historian James McPherson -- that the building site that would be occupied by Wal-Mart was in and of itself part of the battle area:

McPherson is expected to testify that the store's site and nearby acres were blood-soaked ground and a Union "nerve center" in the battle. Grant's headquarters and his senior leaders were encamped near the site of the proposed store and Union casualties were treated there or in an area destined to be the store's parking lot, McPherson wrote in a summary of his testimony.

"Among other things, thousands of wounded and dying soldiers occupied the then open fields that included the Walmart site, which is where many of the Union Army hospital tents were located during the battle," McPherson wrote.

The pro-Wal-Mart side claims, on the other hand, that "'There is no indication that any significant historical event occurred on this land.'"

It will be interesting to see how this story develops, especially given the upcoming commemoration of the Civil War. The interest in "historical preservation" in the United States is very uneven. On the one hand, this country seems to favor a "throw away" architectural practice -- build one, build more, and if it doesn't work, tear it down and build it again. Or, if it's old, it's no good. The U.S. is a largely forward-looking society -- rather than honoring "tradition," it likes to see "progress," which often means the building and opening of new, often unnecessary, stores. But at the same time, it is also a country -- like others, I suppose -- that engages in a very selective monumentalization -- Mt. Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the new World Trade Center.

The American Civil War is a defining piece of U.S. history. Why does Wal-Mart need to build right there, near the battle site of the Battle of the Wilderness? Surely, it is not the only location available. It seems more likely that the company hopes to capitalize on the challenges of the current economy -- perhaps, by linking itself to perceived demands of local tourism as well.

Obama's Arizona Speech

2011-01-12T22:34:00.000-06:00

"If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let's make sure it's worthy of those we have lost."

(At some point soon, I will write a post on the Arizona shootings, and this speech).

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Commemorating the American Civil War

2011-01-05T13:57:00.000-06:00

Since around 2004, my main area of research has been on contemporary literature and film of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism. Therefore, whenever I hear "civil war," my first reaction is to think of Spain. The American Civil War (1861-65) is, quite frankly, something that has never really piqued my interest. I guess when I think of this period of American history, the image that comes to mind is my high school A.P (advanced placement) history class, where the teacher spent a large part of the period reading the newspaper while we "did homework." I did not learn anything in that class, and I did not get college credit for it either (instead, in college, at the wonderful suggestion of an adviser, I ended up taking "Black Experience I and II," which were two of the best history classes never taught in high school -- at least, not mine). In addition to my dreary high school history experience, the American Civil War also brings to mind Civil War re-enactments or the burning passion some still feel for the Confederate flag. It's difficult for me to relate to the desire to live or pay homage to our history in either of these ways.

Over the past few weeks, I have begun to notice more and more mentions of the American Civil War. One of my favorite poetry sites, Poetry Daily, featured James Doyle's "Civil War Photograph." I heard that the USPS will be releasing commemorative Civil War stamps in 2011. And today's NYT features a new occasional series, "Disunion," which "follows the Civil War as it unfolded." Of course, the renewed interest in the war is due to the fact that 2011 is the 150th anniversary of its beginning. We are sure to see an increase in the number of films, publications and commentary -- and probably, commemorative activities -- on the war.

The 150th commemoration of the start of the American Civil War comes at a time of extreme political vitriol in the United States. It is not at all surprising to encounter some rather casual and more explicit Civil War allusions in the verbal sparring between Democrats, Republicans and Tea Partiers and in the neo-confederate tributes to the so-called "War for Southern Independence" such as the ones below:

April 2010: governor Bob McDonnell (R-VA) declares "Confederate History Month," failing to mention slavery as a cause for the Civil War
June 2010: in reference to the Arizona immigration bill, Glenn Beck claims "I think we're headed for a civil war"
October 19, 2010: Time magazine publishes the commentary "Will the Federal Reserve's Ben Bernanke Cause a Civil War?"
December 2010: South Carolina's "Secession Gala," which remembered the state as the first to secede from the U.S., was met by protests (of course, "states' rights" is a huge Tea Party focal point, so it's a convenient way to tie the Civil War memory to current day agendas)

I must admit, I feel a new interest in learning about the American Civil War, thanks to studying the Spanish Civil War -- and particularly, how it continues to be remembered. But as with the SCW, I am especially intrigued by how the memory of war continues to mark the contemporary political landscape. Obviously, there is quite a difference between "remembering" a war that began 150 years ago and one that occurred in the 20th century (2011 is 75 years since the start of the war in Spain). The case of Spain is complicated, besides, by 36 years of dictatorship, the "pact of silence" and the fact that mass graves continue to be uncovered today (though of course, a majority of these graves are not from the war itself, but the brutal postwar repression). In the U.S., no one can say they recall the war, while in Spain, the war's survivors have passed or will do so soon. Nonetheless, the shelf life of a civil war is long. 150 years may seem like an eternity, but many are more than happy to make the past quite present, if only to help feed current political interests. In that, Spain and the U.S. have something in common.

This Blog in 2011

2011-01-05T11:38:00.000-06:00

This blog has been on hiatus for nearly 2 months now. During this time, I have occasionally contemplated ending its brief run, because it is simply quite a challenge to write and maintain two blogs, one in Spanish and one in English. In addition, when I began this blog one year ago, I really wanted it to be more than the "copy and paste" variety; however, that is what it inevitably became -- a place to catalog and archive events and publications, rather than a serious exploration of the politics of memory and amnesia. Of course, not every post can be a miniature essay or offer an extensive review, but I do believe that every blog must provide at least some original content -- otherwise, it is not a blog worth reading (at least, to me).

For the time being, I have decided to continue this blog, but to worry less about updating it and posting every little memory-related news item. I am going to set the goal of 2 posts or so a month, and if it goes beyond that, great. I am also interested in maintaining this blog in the event I teach a memory studies seminar again (hopefully, next year). I am pleased that, even in the absence of posts over the past few weeks, readers have continued to find this blog and make use of it. Thanks for stopping by, and if you are so inclined, please leave a comment.

U.K. Conference: "The 9/11 Decade"

2010-11-18T10:46:00.000-06:00

The "9/11" Decade: Rethinking Reality: first call for papers, deadline 15 December 2010

Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), University of Brighton
contact email: nc95@brighton.ac.uk

Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)
University of Brighton, UK

6th Annual International Interdisciplinary Conference
The “9/11” Decade: Rethinking Reality
Wednesday 31 August – Friday 2 September 2011

Joint conference organisers:
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics, University of Brighton;
Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry, University of Ghent;
Centre for Research Ethics & Ethical Deliberation, Edge Hill University;
Centre for Research in Ethics and Globalisation, University of Groningen

Invited keynote speaker: Geoffrey Robertson QC

Call for Papers

It is no exaggeration to claim that the politics of the last decade have their origin in one event: the hijacking and flying of passenger aircraft into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Since then wars, putatively justified as responses to this attack, have raged in Iraq and in Afghanistan. These wars have resulted in the growth of violent opposition to a perceived US imperial polity; have been used to justify the rewriting of long established legal frameworks protecting the people’s rights have led to neurosis about the protection of borders which the age of global capital was supposed to bring to an end; and have seen the crippling of active leftist opposition to the opportunistic furtherance of the neo-liberal revolution.

This interdisciplinary conference seeks critically to rethink this last decade and to put into question the nostrums it would have us take for granted. We call for papers that:
• challenge dominant paradigms for understanding terror, war, rights, citizenship, legitimacy, politics and the person;
• address the shifts in our cultural landscapes that the securitisation of everyday life has created;
• rethink the architecture of Empire, the literature of “9/11” and the geography of the unending “war on terror.”

Proposals are invited on any relevant topic and should be addressed to an interdisciplinary audience. Likely themes may include be the following, although the conference is by no means limited to these:
The architecture of terror: cities “at war”; designing the security society
“Just” war and asymmetrical warfare: aerial bombing; “suicide” bombing; drones
The politics of 2001-2011: the “war on terror”; rethinking empire, globalisation and sovereignty after “9/11”; the re-articulation of Capital; the “shock doctrine”
Rethinking ourselves: torture; identity; Islamophobia; immigration, asylum and refugees
Culture after “9/11”: art, literature, film and popular culture.
The politics of death after “9/11”: “remembrance” and memorialisation; counting the dead
Philosophy and its limits: the language of terror and the terror of language; sincerity and conviction
Theorising resistance: rethinking the law; rethinking the political

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be emailed to Nicola Clewer by 15 December 2010: nc95@brighton.ac.uk

Decisions will be communicated no later than 15 January 2011.

For further information please visit website here

Argentina: "Nieto Recuperado" - Democracy Now Features Interview with "Recovered Grandchild"

2010-11-18T10:40:00.000-06:00

We speak with Manuel Gonçalves, a "nieto recuperado," or a "recovered grandchild," in Argentina. He is one of the thousands of children born to parents who were disappeared during the dictatorship. These children were born in captivity, then kidnapped by the military and given away to government supporters or military families. Some of them have found their way back to their families. Manuel Gonçalves, son of Gaston Gonçalves, who was killed during the dictatorship. He was kidnapped as a newborn baby. His father’s alleged killer is now on trial.

(From November 12, 2010)

Go to original

Conference: "The Role of Memory in the American Construct"

2010-11-18T10:27:00.000-06:00

IAAS Postgraduate Symposium - “Re-memory” and “Disremembering”: The Role of Memory in the American Construct

Irish Association for American Studies
contact email: iaas.symposium@gmail.com

IAAS Postgraduate Symposium
Saturday 29th January 2011
Location: Clinton Institute for American Studies, UCD, Dublin, Ireland.

Call for Papers

“Re-memory” and “Disremembering”: The Role of Memory in the American Construct

Memory, (both collective and individual), and memolialisation have an international legacy of shaping identity constructs, impacting upon reactionary politics and re-conceptualising history in accordance with changing social mores. In the United States, choosing what to preserve in collective and individual memory (and perhaps more significantly, what not to preserve and/or commemorate), map a national history of conflict and heroism, despair and hope, decline and renaissance. America’s cultural memory has also been partly shaped by the idea of community. This is reflected in its diverse topography; the collective memory of the small town communities and subjective memory of the frantic, multicultural cities have each, in different ways, impacted on how America has come to define and understand itself. Remembering and choosing not to remember in the United States have, then, been instrumental in surviving trauma and in celebrating achievement, though the suggestion that the past can “infect” the present fosters a tendency to bury the darker aspects of America’s remembrances.

Postgraduate students of all disciplines within the field of American Studies (including literature, film, history, geography, philosophy, visual arts, performance arts, new media, politics, sociology, cultural studies, ecology, law, economics, and international relations) are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers in the area of American studies, with possible topics including but not restricted to:

- (Re)-Constructing National Identity
- Conflict resolution
- Problems within (and without) of Cultural Diversity
- Representations of Gender
- Representations of Race
- Historical interpretation and Periodisation
- (Re)-Configuring America’s Collective (Re)Memory
- American Exceptionalism
- The Hyphenated Identity

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be emailed to the IAAS Postgraduate Caucus Co-Chairs:
Louise Walsh (Clinton Institute for American Studies, UCD) and Kate Kirwan (University College Cork) at iaas.symposium@gmail.com
Please note that you must be a member of the IAAS to participate; see membership form attached.

DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS: FRIDAY 31st DECEMBER 2010

Call for 9-11 Book Reviews

2010-11-18T10:25:00.000-06:00

9-11 Book Reviews

Randy Robertson / Modern Language Studies
contact email:
robertson@susqu.edu

Modern Language Studies, the journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association, is seeking reviews of works related to 9-11. The reviews will appear in a special issue commemorating the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. Relevant works include those on terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign policy in the wake of 9-11, etc. The reviewed work can be fiction or nonfiction.

Please submit your review electronically (as a Word attachment) to Randy Robertson, Reviews Editor of MLS, at robertson@susqu.edu.

Marianne Hirsch to speak at Washington University in St. Louis

2010-10-23T12:44:00.000-05:00

The renowned memory scholar Marianne Hirsch will be speaking at Washington University in St. Louis on November 8 at 4 pm. The talk is free and open to the public. Marianne Hirsch's name is most often linked to her formulation of "postmemory" in the book Family Frames and in subsequent articles written individually and with her partner Leo Spitzer.

I read the news of Hirsch's visit to St. Louis with a mixture of excitement and disappointment, because just 3 years ago, I was a student at Wash U and the focus of my dissertation was postmemory in contemporary Spain. While I will be attending a conference in St. Louis next week, I will unfortunately not be able to attend this talk. During my 6 years at Washington University, I was able to hear many exciting, renowned speakers from a variety of disciplines. Anyone in the St. Louis area that researches memory should make time to attend this important lecture!!

Examining the role of memory in reconstructing family history
Marianne Hirsch to deliver Holocaust Memorial Lecture for Assembly Series Nov. 8
October 21, 2010
By Barbara Rea

For many children of Holocaust survivors — collectively known as the “second generation” — there is a longing to understand pre-war life, culture and community experienced by their parents before the trauma of expulsion, incarceration and brutalization.

Marianne Hirsch, PhD, a member of this generation and a distinguished scholar on memory and cultural history, argues that post-Holocaust generations, with their profound need to vicariously participate in this bygone world, experience “postmemory” — a term Hirsch has coined to convey the ways generations born after the Holocaust access the experiences of the witnesses through mediation and imaginative reconstruction.

Hirsch will be on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis to explore these themes for the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, an Assembly Series program at 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Graham Chapel. The lecture, titled “Rites of Return: The Afterlife of the Holocaust in Jewish Memory,” is free and open to the public.

“Postmemory refers to the ways in which generations born after a traumatic event access the experiences of the witnesses,” says Erin McGlothlin, PhD, associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Holocaust Lecture Committee, “not through actual remembrance and recall, but through imaginative projection and re-creation.”

Images play an especially important role in this re-creation, she says.

McGlothlin also notes that, although postmemory as a concept was created to understand the Holocaust, it can be used to mine cultural memory for any traumatic event.

“In recent years, scholars have extended the concept of postmemory far beyond the particular context of the Holocaust to refer to the generational memory of disparate historical and cultural events,” McGlothlin says.

Thanks to the Internet and to several trips back to Czernowitz, Hirsch has reconstructed the once thriving center of Jewish life in Ukraine, where her parents lived.

With her husband, Leo Spitzer, she has produced a book called Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz, which explores the city that before the war was an important center of Central European Jewish intellectual life. Reviewer Monica Szurmuk, of theworld.org, writes that “Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book Ghosts of Home is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search.”

Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She also teaches at Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and co-directs its Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.

In addition to the Czernowitz publication, Hirsch has written many books, including Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory; The Familial Gaze; and Time and the Literary. She has edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including the indispensable MLA guide, Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust.

She is the recipient of a host of fellowships and has served as editor of the journal PMLA. She is on the advisory boards of two journals, Memory Studies and Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Hirsch earned bachelors, master’s and doctoral degrees from Brown University.

For more information on this and upcoming Assembly Series programs, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-4620.

On Chile

2010-10-16T11:14:00.002-05:00

the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda

In 2000, I decided to go to Chile during my spring break. I made the decision as I always made travel decisions back then -- hmnnn, I think I'll go abroad for awhile. It wasn't a completely random choice. Chile had been on my mind for almost 10 years by then. In high school, my mother had given me my first Neruda book, a bilingual edition with translations by W.S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Nathaniel Tarn and Anthony Kerrigan (for the record, of the four translators, I tend to prefer Merwin and Reid. But why read Neruda in translation if you don't have to?). I absolutely devoured this book, especially the love poems. But later I discovered simple things Neruda (the odes), Spanish Civil War Neruda (Spain in the Heart), the Neruda I read with friends. I found out about Isla Negra, and I wanted to see it. I decided to go to Chile to visit Neruda's three homes in Santiago, Valparaíso (where my college friend Luis lives) and Isla Negra. Because my friend is a geologist, and was going to be doing field work in the Punta Arenas area, I also made plans to go there.

Before I went to Chile, I had only visited Mexico and Spain. Being in Chile was a little like going to California when you have only been to the east coast (or vice-versa). Stepping off the plane, there is a distinct sense that you are. . . elsewhere. Part of it has to do with the change in seasons, but it's also just the "vibe" of the country. I only saw a fraction of the country, but it made a big impression on me to go from Santiago to Viña del Mar to Valparaíso to Isla Negra to Punta Arenas. The difference in temperatures, pace, amount of people and general landscape was pretty significant.

My visit was incredible. I left the end of winter and entered the end of summer. People swarmed the beach at Viña del Mar. My friend and I started in Valparaíso, with its inclines and sea-worn buildings. Now that I've been in San Francisco, I can say Valparaíso reminds me a bit of being there. Or the other way around. I love being near "the sea" and having that smell in the air. I would love to wake with a view of water -- who wouldn't? In Neruda's house, one of his rooms -- I can't recall which at the moment -- looked right out onto the water. No one was allowed to photograph anything inside the house, but one could be photographed with the view of the sea in the background. I tried to imagine Neruda writing with that backdrop, drinking wine with friends, reading. I tried to imagine the house totally ransacked, his rows of books in ruins on the floor, after the '73 coup, just days before his death.

Recently, like many other people, I've had Chile on my mind for reasons other than Neruda. The earthquake, the bicentennial, the ongoing news about the miners, and the fact that I haven't stopped listening to this CD for the last month, have all put Chile (phonetically, she lay, as my friend would say) back in my everyday thoughts.

Driving home from work last week, I was listening to a report on the rescue of the miners. Isabel Allende was talking. Shortly after Chile's independence day (September 18), she had visited the mine site and now she was reflecting on this emotional moment for the country as a whole. She never mentioned a word about Chile's military dictatorship, never said a thing about the disappeared, but in my own mind, I could not help associating these "disappeared" miners, now being "appeared" and released from the earth, with those who were disappeared and never returned. Strangely, the rescue gave Chile back its own sons in a way that has never been possible for those who vanished under Pinochet. The fact that Isabel Allende - whose father was Socialist Salvador Allende's first cousin -- was standing beside President Sebastián Piñera, a right-wing millionaire, was also quite a symbolic moment, I thought. Perhaps it doesn't mean anything, but the image of the two together seemed to bring the past to a scene that had been concentrating very much on the present, on the extremely delicate, day-to-day, minute-by-minute operations of bringing the miners to the earth's surface.

Isabel Allende beside President Sebastián Piñera (photo from here)

Lo and behold, just one day after I heard the interview with Isabel Allende, I read this article in the NYT, which reflects on the site of the mine rescue as a site of memory inextricably linked to the crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship: "In the predawn hours of Oct. 17, 1973 — 37 years before the mine rescue, almost to the day — military personnel murdered 16 men near here, including some who worked for Chile’s state mining company." These men, the article goes on to say, were 16 of 70 that the "Caravan of Death" murdered that month in Chile. One of the victim's sisters said that "The experience with the 33 miners made us relive every moment. . . Finding them alive and then rescuing them was like finding my brother again.”

The mine rescue, and the connection of the site with a previous traumatic history, illustrate the fact that sites of memory do not just remain stable representatives of the same story, but evolve over time, depending on historical and political circumstances. Although it is quite different, I am reminded of the Valle de los Caídos site in Spain, currently back in the news again as the Spanish government debates whether or not to make it into a "center for memory."

The most striking symbol of Valle de los Caídos is the gigantic cross that marks its location. The site is visited largely by tourists, but also used to be where the ultra right gathered every November 20 (the anniversary of Franco's death), until the 2007 Law of Historical Memory made that illegal. Many people don't realize that Valle was built by slave labor under Franco in the 50s. Many also don't know that, buried on the altar (!) of the church inside are Franco himself and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish fascist party, Falange. In addition to Franco, many of the Civil War dead are also buried in the walls of what some have called Spain's largest "mass grave." What to do with this enormous structure, which still houses a Benedictine monastery, remains unclear. However, one thing is certain -- the site's identity has undergone a series of revisions over the past several years. In my view, these revisions are necessary, and transforming the site into a Center for Memory would give Spain what is still lacks almost 35 years since Franco's death.

"Revising" a site of memory like the area of the mine rescue or the Valle de los Caídos site should not mean eclipsing its past history. Ideally -- and it sounds cliché -- we could use the past struggles there to inform the present use of the site. In 1973, miners were murdered where in 2010, they were rescued. What does this mean? Is it just a coincidence? Or can the rescue ultimately allow healing of other kinds?

I'll be writing a bit more about Chile here soon. I have a post planned about the rapper Ana Tijoux. For now, I'll just say that if you haven't been to this magnificent country, I highly recommend it. One day, I hope to return for a longer visit. In some ways, I know only an "imagined Chile" informed by Neruda and the folksinger Víctor Jara. What is the everyday Chile? It still seems a bit mysterious to me. So much is informed by what lies below ground -- fault lines, the disappeared, miners descending to the earth's pit. What is it to live with the knowledge of unstable tierra, the possibility of tremors and aftershocks? Surely, this awareness comes with its own kind of memory.

Seminar: Cosmpolitan Memory and Trauma

2010-10-15T10:36:00.000-05:00

CFP: Cosmopolitan Memory and Travelling Trauma (ACLA March 31-April 3, 2011)

Terri Tomsky, University of Alberta; Jennifer Bowering Delisle, McMaster University
contact email:
tomsky@ualberta.ca

When a collective memory of trauma transcends its directly affected community to be taken up by others, it can be said to be “cosmopolitan” (Levy and Sznaider) or “multidirectional” (Rothberg). The concept of a travelling or a genuinely “cosmopolitan” memory is compelling. Indeed, how a memory of trauma travels across cultures, and develops in time as a shared or borrowed memory is a topic that necessitates further discussion. Like Edward Said’s notion of “travelling theory,” the transition of a memory from a specific context into a new setting or across a transnational space has significant theoretical and pragmatic consequences. Questions must be asked about how traumatic experiences, especially of political violence, are mediated across space and time; how might a transported memory of trauma sharpen consciousness and shape cross-cultural communities? Equally, how might it enable selective commemoration, and risk reification or domestication?

This seminar invites scholars across the fields of trauma, postcolonial, and memory studies to critically examine the movement of traumatic memories across cultures. We are interested in proposals that address the productive transcultural circulation of trauma – what Michael Rothberg has called “multidirectional memory” – as a politically significant source for oppressed communities. Additionally, we seek proposals that engage the travel of traumatic memory in relation to audience, affect, capital, and cultural and economic imperialisms.

The deadline for 250 word paper proposals is NOVEMBER 1, 2010. Proposals should be submitted through the ACLA website: http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php?override=xyzzy

Memory Conference: "The Art of Public Memory"

2010-10-15T09:31:00.000-05:00

CALL FOR PAPERS, WORKSHOPS, PERFORMANCES, LECTURE PERFORMANCES

THE ART OF PUBLIC MEMORY

An international, interdisciplinary conference exploring intersections of the arts, memory, and history

April 7th to 10th, 2011, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

The conference is, in part, inspired by the performance of Bill T. Jones's Serenade/ The Proposition, at UNCG on Friday, April 8. A contemporary dance about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and a rumination on the nature of history, Jones’s dance suggests examination of other works involving Lincoln such as the current off Broadway play Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party Review and Suzan-Lori Park's 1994 The America Play, and portraits of Lincoln by composers such as Charles Ives and Roy Harris. It also calls for a broader examination of the arts, memory and history. Potential questions include: How and in what ways do memories acquire a public character and through what means are they preserved, archived, and negotiated in everyday life? In what ways do expressions of public memory create, sustain, and de-stabilize the work(ings) of power? How are ideas of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation re-inscribed or contested through performances, especially performances of history? In what ways do the body, bodily action, and bodily experience enter into public memory?

We invite proposals of academic papers, panels, workshops, lecture performances, and performances from scholars and artists in the arts, education, the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The conference is sponsored by, and celebrates, the new School of Music, Theatre and Dance at UNCG, and is co-sponsored by UNCG's Program in Women's and Gender Studies.

Proposals must be received by December 1, 2010
Notification of acceptance by January 31, 2011

Send your submission through email to: womens_studies@uncg.edu.

Please include your last name and ART OF PUBLIC MEMORY in the Subject Heading of the e-mail. The text should be attached and pasted in the body of the e-mail to assure access. Please send documents in .doc or .docx formats.

Receipt of all submissions will be confirmed electronically.

REQUIREMENTS

Individual papers should not exceed 20 minutes for presentation. Submit a 500 word abstract.

Panels consisting of three individual presenters may be proposed. Submit a 250 word discussion of the ideas and issues important to the panel in addition to individual paper proposals of 500 words each for the presenters. Please send all documents together.

Performances (solo performance, staged readings, dance, music, installations): We hope to include a limited number of performances, especially performances that can be accomplished in alternate spaces, studios, classrooms, or in shared evenings of music, theatre, and dance. Submit a 500 word abstract describing the event and its organization.

Lecture-Demonstrations, Lecture-Performances, or Workshops may run from 30-45 minutes. Submit a 500 word abstract describing the topic and organization of the session.

For all proposals, include:

• name
• affiliation (if applicable),
• contact information,
• 150 word biography of presenter,
• presentation title,
• presentation format (individual paper, panel, workshop, performance, etc),
• space needs,
• technology needs.

Queries about proposals may be addressed by e-mail to Ann Dils at ahdils@uncg.edu.

New book on Trauma - Haunting Legacies

2010-10-07T10:16:00.000-05:00

From: Columbia University Press

About the book:

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships.

Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's Still Alive and Marguerite Duras's La Douleur; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's W, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Philippe Grimbert's Secret; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Sabine Reichel's What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, and Ursula Duba's Tales from a Child of the Enemy. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Writing Against Memory and Forgetting

3. Haunting Legacies: Trauma in Children of Perpetrators

4. Identity Trouble: Guilt, Shame, and Idealization

5. Replacement Children: The Transgenerational Transmission of Traumatic Loss

6. Deadly Intimacy: The Politics and Psychic Life of Torture

Bibliography

About the author: Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her books in English include Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis; Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood; and The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language.

Radio program on "False Memories"

2010-09-27T23:49:00.000-05:00

When I used to live in St. Louis, one of my favorite listening experiences was The Diane Rehm Show. I no longer get to listen nearly enough to the program, especially since it comes on in Iowa at 9 pm, rather than 9 am. Diane Rehm is an amazing interviewer, and I have to put in my plug for her show before getting on to the following.

Tomorrow, the program is featuring a dialogue about repressed, recovered or "false memories." When I was growing up in the 80s, "false memories" were all the rage. It seemed as though people were being accused every other day of things -- always, extremely abusive things -- they had done 20 years ago. This is an extremely complex matter, and one I am unqualified to address.

My Lie is a book by journalist Meredith Maran, who falsely accused her father of molesting her. How do "false memories" develop? What does the so-called "recovered memories" movement say about particular periods of our history? And, what interests me in particular, how and why does this movement impact women? Perhaps, a slightly off-topic matter for this blog, but one that merits our attention nonetheless.

Argentina will investigate the crimes of Francoism

2010-09-04T19:28:00.000-05:00

I was a bit startled to see this title in the Spanish press this morning, but I am happy to see that the matter Spain has tried to keep internal for so long now has international players involved.This is a big deal!!

From: BBC News

4 September 2010 Last updated at 15:06 ET

Argentine court reopens Franco probe

An Argentine court has reopened an investigation into crimes against humanity in Spain during the rule of Gen. Francisco Franco.

The appeals court overturned a previous ruling that blocked a suit brought by Argentine relatives of two Spaniards killed under Franco.

It said they had a right to know if the case was being investigated.

Crimes committed under Franco and during the 1936-39 civil war are covered by an amnesty law in Spain.

The Argentine appeals court said a diplomatic request should be sent to Spain to ask what action it was taking to investigate crimes against humanity between 1936 and 1977.

'Systematic terror'

It said Spain should be asked if it was investigating the existence of "a systematic and deliberate plan to terrorise Spaniards who supported representative government by their physical elimination."

Human rights groups have welcomed the decision.

The lawsuit was opened in Argentina in April after the high-profile Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon was forced to drop an investigation into killings during the civil war and under Franco's rule.

Judge Garzon was suspended after Spain's supreme court found that he had exceeded his authority by ignoring the 1977 amnesty law.

The Argentine lawsuit is based on the principal of universal justice.

Judge Garzon has previously invoked the same principle to investigate crimes against humanity committed during 1976-83 military rule in Argentina, as well as to seek the extradition of the late Chilean military ruler, Augusto Pinochet.

Spain's 1977 amnesty law, which pardoned political crimes by both sides in the civil war, was seen as vital to ensure a successful transition to democracy after Franco died in 1975.

Tens of thousands of people were killed and buried in unmarked graves during the Spanish civil war and under Gen Franco's subsequent rule, but no-one has ever been prosecuted for the killings.

Upcoming publications on the 10-year anniversary of 9-11

2010-09-04T11:28:00.001-05:00

From UPenn CFP:

"9/11/2011" Abstract deadline: November 30, 2010 Paper Submission deadline: May 2011

Other Modernities, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
contact email:
amonline@unimi.it

9/11/2011
Guest Editors Emanuele Monegato and Cinzia Scarpino

If the risk of turning the forthcoming ten-year 9/11 anniversary into a commemorative rhetorical triumph is very high, for us, Altre Modernità (http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/index), a journal of Literary and Cultural studies, that date may otherwise invite reflections that encompass the one event – or, better, “the mother of all events” – which has marked a watershed in late-modern history. Hence the idea of a special issue, “9/11/2011”, which welcomes proposals for papers that explore how the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers have re-drawn both the political boundaries and the world’s imagination of our time on the basis of the “war on terror” ideology endorsed by George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. Beside considering the effects posited by such rhetorical strategy – what U.S. scholar Donald Pease has called “the New American Exceptionalism” – another issue we are interested in investigating is the “collateral language” which has been imposed upon American and world citizens as a weapon of “mass distraction”, a doublespeak aimed at containing political dissent and cement national as well as international consent. Fuelled by a renewed East/West clash of civilizations, Washington “war on terror” ideological tenets have been responsible for restrictive immigration policies not only against Arabs but also against other peoples, for example Mexicans.

We also welcome theoretical-philosophical analyses of the epistemological changes associated with a post-9/11 paradigm as well as aesthetics insights into the literary and artistic output which has been shaped after the very “futurable” event long anticipated by mass culture (cinema, TV, comics, etc.).

A further area of consideration will include, accordingly, a study of 9/11 as a turning point in the writing of American and world literature and literary criticism.

Possible topics of relevance include:

• 9/11/2001 – 9/11/2011
• 9/11 East-West
• 9/11 and the contemporary philosophical paradigm
• Aesthetics of 9/11
• “Language is power”: collateral language
• “War on terror” rhetoric
• New 9/11 in contemporary arts
• Theories and acts of violence in post-9/11 cultural representations
• 9/11 and (new) mass culture(s): cinema, documentaries, TV series, comics, music

Proposal Submission deadline: November 30, 2010 at amonline@unimi.it
Paper Submission deadline: May 2011 at amonline@unimi.it
All essays will undergo a double-blind peer review.
Online: September 11, 2011
Languages of contributions: Italian, English, Spanish, French.

We also welcome book reviews (fiction, criticism, poetry, etc.) and reviews for art events (exhibitions, installations, etc.) addressing the above-mentioned themes. Please write to amonline@unimi.it

2. “Field Notes on the 9/11 Moment: Transformations in Community and Country”

Leslie Shortlidge/Kirwan institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
contact email:
shortlidge.2@osu.edu

Call for papers
Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts
Volume 4 Number 3
Spring 2011 (June 2011)
Submission Deadline: October 15, 2010

“Field Notes on the 9/11 Moment: Transformations in Community and Country”
The ten-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on American soil encourages us to consider how the events of that day have framed how we address race, religion and national origin in the policy and public realms. The 9/11 moment has shaped American domestic and foreign policy, and has transformed individuals and communities both in the United States and abroad. Here in the United States, Arab Americans, South Asians, Muslims, and Sikhs have endured backlash, targeted law enforcement, and various forms of racial, religious and national origin profiling at the hands of the general public, the media, and the U.S. government in the name of national security. Nor were the repercussions of 9-11 felt only within the United States; Muslim communities around the world have experienced unprecedented backlash since 9/11.

Guest Editor Deepa Iyer, Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), and the editorial staff of Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts invite submissions for the third issue of its fourth volume, entitled “Field Notes on the 9/11 Moment: Transformations in Community and Country .”
We especially welcome analysis, critiques, reflections, and documentation by activists, community-based organizations, and others who responded to the crisis that enveloped the South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, and Arab American communities in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

Topics of inquiry can include but are not limited to:
• How has 9/11 changed the way that we think about race, religion, national origin, and immigration status in the United States and abroad?
• What tools and strategies have been used by community activists to sustain and build community during and after the 9/11 moment?
• What impacts does being targeted as “suspect” by the United States government have on an individual? A family? A community?
• What are some of the success stories around coalition-building and race relations that have occurred since 9/11?
• What lasting impacts, if any, have the events of 9-11 and their aftermath had on relationships between racial and ethnic minority communities in the United States or abroad?
• What lasting impacts, if any, have 9-11 and the subsequent decade-long, global War on Terror had on the political consciousness of Arab American, South Asian, Muslim and/or Sikh communities inside or outside the United States?
See our suggested Style Guidelines (www.raceethnicity.org/styleguide.html) and please feel free to contact our managing editor, Leslie Shortlidge (shortlidge.2@osu.edu), with any questions or concerns about submitting your work.

Submission of artwork for the cover that relates to the theme of the issue is welcome. See website at http://www.raceethnicity.org/coverart.html for submission guidelines.

An August 28 of 47 Years Ago

2010-08-28T17:46:00.003-05:00

All day I have been contemplating a post on this despicable appropriation of what might be called a U.S. Civil Rights "site of memory." However, I think that posting on it, especially now, will only end up attracting unwelcome visitors and their comments. Also, posting on "it," even in this minuscule, unknown corner of internet space, is offering a gift to those people whose "ideas" I wish to deflect. Instead, for now, I will post this reminder of August 28, 1963. We need to contemplate why persons such as those mentioned in the NYT article have decided to descend on the Lincoln Memorial on precisely this day. Post-racial society? I think not.

Read full text of speech here

"Destroy this Memory" - Hurricane Katrina and Grafitti

2010-08-19T19:26:00.000-05:00

"Destroy this Memory," photo by Richard Misrach

Someone sent me a link to this story on NPR. I was captivated by the photo on the left, which also is the title of a book of photographs (see below) on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There are so many layers to this one image -- the loss of memories inside this intimate space (what was lived there, the house intact); the manner in which the memory of Hurricane Katrina has in itself been covered over; and of course, the fact that the picture resists the grafitti's command.

Richard Misrach's Destroy This Memory is an affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina. Rather than simply surveying the damage, Misrach—who has photographed the region regularly since the 1970s, most notably for his ongoing Cancer Alley project—found himself drawn to the hurricane-inspired graffiti: messages scrawled in spray paint, crayons, chalk, or whatever materials happened to be on hand. At turns threatening, desperate, clinical, and even darkly humorous, the phrases he captured—the only text that appears in the book—offer unique and revealing human perspectives on the devastation and shock left in the wake of this disaster.

Destroy This Memory presents previously unpublished and starkly compelling material, all of which Misrach shot with his 4 MP pocket camera. Created between October and December 2005, this haunting series of images serves as a potent, unalloyed document of the raw experiences of those left to fend for themselves in the aftermath of Katrina.

Artist's royalties for this project are being donated to the Make It Right Foundation, which is currently rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, 1949) is credited with helping pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation in the 1970s. He has exhibited extensively, and his work is held in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship. Misrach is represented by Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Pace-MacGill Gallery, New York; and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Click here to see more photos from the book

New Publication: "Memorial Mania"

2010-08-19T18:03:00.001-05:00

Erika Doss
Memorial Mania. Public Feeling in America
488 pages © 2010

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express—and claim—those issues in visibly public contexts.

Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.

Seen on: University of Chicago Press

Call for Papers: Memory and Collective Identity in Comparative Literature

2010-08-12T09:13:00.000-05:00

From UPenn CFP

Memory and Collective Identity in Comparative Literature and Others
full name / name of organization:
452ºF Journal of Comparative Literature
contact email:
redaccion@452f.com

On July 31st 2010, we start the CFP for the fourth issue of 452ºF Journal
of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature.This CFP is open and
addressed to anyone that wishes to and that holds at least a BA degree.

The bidding terms, which are exposed below and that regulate the reception
and publication of the different articles are subject to the content of
the Peer review System, the Style-sheet and the Legal Notice. These can be
consulted in the Procedures area of the web page.

- The deadline is on September 30th 2010, all articles received after this
date will be rejected.
- The number of articles corresponding to this fourth issue will be
between 12 and 16. 40% of these will be reserved to researchers without
PhDs, and the Editorial board can only represent 20% of the total.
- The articles will be placed, according to their field of interest, in
the corresponding section of the journal (monographic or miscellaneous).

- The monographic part will be restricted to 6 to 8 articles and, in this
fourth issue, will approach the relations between Memory and Collective
Identity in Comparative Literature, with the following possible research
approaches:

a. –Relations between cultural production, memory discourses and the
construction of collective identities.
b. –Studies on testimonial literature. Relations between individual and
collective memory.
c. –The fluctuant nature of identity: transformation of the perspective of
memory according to the social-historical context.
d. –Relations between narrative strategies and the ideological load of
memory.
e. –Analysis of the politic capitalization of cultural productions around
memory.

The journal commits itself to organize a thematic bibliography of the
available studies on the topic, following the perspective proposed in the
Monographic section of the web page.

- All other articles will constitute the miscellaneous section and, placed
within the margins of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, the
choice of the theme and approach is free.
- The articles must be sent to redaccion@452f.com . The “subject” of the
email should state what section the article belongs to (“monographic” or
“miscellaneous”), the name of the author and the title of the article.

Memory and Collective Identity in Comparative Literature

Memory has lately become a central concern in contemporary culture and
politics of all societies in a global scale. This “memory boom”,
originated in socio-historical, political, cultural, technological and
market-oriented reasons, is articulated around a certain “memory
industry”, which in turn generates identity discourses. Cultural products
play a fundamental role in the formation and consolidation of these
discourses.

On the one hand, the rehabilitation of the memory of wars, dictatorships,
killings and genocides tries to rescue from oblivion a traumatic past.
There is also a willingness of discursive democratization (represented by
the promotion of testimonial literature), looking to break through that
version of history written by the winning side. Also, the need to look
towards the past as a means of understanding the present is often
emphasized, to increase the new generations’ awareness of the need to
avoid the repetition of the same atrocities. Therefore, new
historiographic methodologies have vindicated the incorporation of new and
different perspectives that had traditionally been excluded from the
construction of discourses.

Nevertheless, the notion of discursive elaboration of memories, together
with the fact that discourses about the past are always filtered by the
interests and beliefs of the present, make it necessary for this new
historiography to be constantly under scrutiny by a critical analysis.
This would reveal possible “abuses of memory” (term coined by Todorov in
the text with the same title) denounced by many authors, politicians,
journalists and human rights activists. It is particularly interesting as
well as complex to work on the relationship that can be established
between the constant re-writing of the past and the construction of
collective identities. As Halbwachs explains, collective memory puts
together the past and the present, as well as the individual and the
social group. It is in this sense that we are also interested in the
different discursive strategies that several authors have developed to
reconstruct their memories from a subjective vision of the present. This
also allows us to establish a link between certain forms of narration and
the different underlying ideological intentions. One of the
characteristics that make memory studies difficult is the specificity of
each political vindication, and also their fluctuating character in
relation to present-day socio-political factors. However, at the same
time, in a global world of linked identities and politics, “different
discourses on historical memory are intertwined and overlap each other all
throughout the world, trespassing frontiers and bouncing against each
other, sometimes hiding and forgetting their own historical memory,
sometimes reinforcing it", as claimed by Huyssen in an interview for
Metropolis magazine.

Taking as starting point, then, the fact that the restoration of the past
is subject to the ideologies of the present; and also that memory studies
are not only a tool for analysis, but also for the transformation of
contemporary contexts, we want to vindicate a critical role that can
distinguish between the "obligation of memory” (which introduces an
ethical evaluation of its own look towards the past, as pointed out by
Lozano Aguilar inDecir, contar, pensar la guerra), and the possible
political abuses that derivate from these vindications. We also believe
that a fundamental role of criticism is to suggest, as long as it is
possible, new strategies to go beyond militaristic discourses. We propose
therefore the following lines of research for this monographic issue:

a. –Relations between cultural production, memory discourses and the
construction of collective identities.
b. –Studies on testimonial literature. Relations between individual and
collective memory.
c. –The fluctuant nature of identity: transformation of the perspective of
memory according to the social-historical context.
d. –Relations between narrative strategies and the ideology of memories.
e. –Analysis of the political capitalization of cultural productions on
memory.
f. –Strategies to overcome memory discourses.
g. –Memory discourses as trans-border political discourses. Analysis,
through cultural products, of the influence of different discourses on
different geographical areas.

Call for Papers: Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

2010-08-12T09:10:00.000-05:00

From UPenn CFP:

Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization (abstract deadline 9/1/2010)

Rick Crownshaw (Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London)
contact email:
r.crownshaw@gold.ac.uk

The Memory and Narrative series, currently published by Transaction (based at Rutgers University), emerged from the highly acclaimed International Yearbook for Oral History and Life Stories. To date, the series comprises 14 volumes, constituting an interdisciplinary forum that stimulates debate on a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues relating to memory and narrative.  

The series editors invite proposals for a forthcoming volume entitled Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

In academic study the Holocaust has been wrested from arguments as to its incomparability. For example, recent groundbreaking work in historiography has sought to remove the ‘conceptual blockages’ (Moses, Stone) in comparing modern atrocities, moving beyond conceptualizations of the Holocaust’s uniqueness that might inscribe a hierarchy of suffering across modernity. Such a comparative approach elicits the structural continuities and discontinuities between atrocious events – between, for example, genocide and colonial atrocity. In memory studies, related, current work has focused on the ‘cosmopolitan’ nature of Holocaust memory, arguing the ways that national, collective memory registers the transnational flux of remembrance, and how the global shapes the local and vice versa (Levy and Sznaider). However, in such models does the nation, no matter how ‘glocalised’, remain too coherent a structure for modeling the centrifugal dynamics of memory? Is the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of Holocaust memory still too centripetal a dynamic? And in such models, does the Holocaust eclipse other events with which it is compared or contiguous? So, a spatial approach to modernity’s extremes and the correspondent ideas of race, nation and empire that allowed them to happen, together with the increasing difficulty of discretely locating history and memory, suggests a necessary reorientation of Holocaust Studies. More recently, Holocaust memory has been theorised as ‘multidirectional’ and its proximity with the memories of other traumas, no matter how competitive and screening, rethought as the means by which Holocaust memory, protean by nature, can, in an age of decolonization, be adapted, appropriated and entered into dialogue with memories of modernity’s other atrocities (Rothberg). This proposed volume asks, among other things, how might we extend the archive of ‘multidirectional’ memory that Rothberg has so fruitfully begun to explore. What are the implications of ‘multidirectionality’ for the writing of Holocaust history as well as for the study of Holocaust memory? How might memory practitioners and activists use the ‘multidirectional’ archive, and the concept itself, in politically and juridically transformative ways to effect transnational justice? Put another way, how can we move from an ethics of history and memory to material, political and juridical effects? And what of the very definition of memory itself in an age of globalization? As media technologies facilitate the ways that Holocaust memories become unmoored from groups and individuals that lay claim to them, to be shared and inflected by others on a global stage, do definitions of memory (secondary, shared, post, prosthetic) become even more attenuated? Do the itineraries of representations of the Holocaust call for a rethinking of the relationship between history and memory, their definitions and disciplinary boundaries?

The editors invite submissions from across the disciplines, at both a meta-level, exploring the state of Holocaust Studies, and as well as at the level of individual case studies of the transculturation, transnationalisation and globalization of Holocaust memory.

Submissions might address but are not limited to the following themes:

• The changing nature of the archive in a digital age as resource for Holocaust history and memory;
• Global memory and history as a basis for transnational justice and reparations claims, and what serves as legitimate and authoritative evidence, what satisfies claims for recognition and restitution;
• The limits of concepts of transcultural, transnational and global memory and history;
• Globalization and methodological change in historiography, oral historiography, and literary and testimony studies; new comparative methodologies;
• Global inflections in Holocaust museum, memorial and monument practice; commemorative forms used to remember the Holocaust and how they might shape memories of other atrocities around the world;
• Postmodern philosophies of Holocaust representation;
• Theories of ‘secondary witnessing’ (Apel), ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch), ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg), and ‘fantasies’ of witnessing (Weissman) in an age of global memory;
• Citizenship, migration and the uses of Holocaust history and memory.
• ‘Screen’ and political memory;
• Comparative approaches to the Holocaust, slavery and colonialism

Please send a 500-word abstract, along with a short C.V., to the editors of this proposed volume, Rick Crownshaw (r.crownshaw@gold.ac.uk) and Albert Lichtblau (Albert.Lichtblau@sbg.ac.at), by September 1, 2010. Contributors chosen on the basis of their abstracts will be asked to submit essays (approximately 6,000 words), for further consideration, by March 1, 2010.

Memory and Narrative Series Editors:
Prof. S. Leydesdorff (S.Leijdesdorff@uva.nl)
Prof. A. Lichtblau (Albert.Lichtblau@sbg.ac.at)
Dr. R. Crownshaw (R.Crownshaw@gold.ac.uk)
Dr. N. Adler (N.Adler@Niod.knaw.nl)
Dr. Adam Brown (adb2004@med.cornell.edu)
Yifat Gutman (gutmy472@newschool.edu)

My Visit to Ground Zero

2010-08-09T13:42:00.001-05:00

In May 2000, I made my first trip to New York City. I was attending a wedding between a Japanese woman and an American man, and the couple had arranged a tour of the city for some of their guests. It was an ideal first time experience, and I was lucky to be a part of it, essentially for free. We did many of the typical tourist excursions -- the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Little Italy and Chinatown, a boat tour along the skyline. And, we also stopped outside the Twin Towers, just long enough to get out of our shuttle and shoot several photographs. I really had no understanding of what occurred inside those buildings or in the surrounding area. But I did recall the 1993 bombing and knew that the towers had been, at one time, the tallest buildings in the world. Mainly, my recollection of the towers is limited to the one or two images left behind by my point-and-shoot camera: massive, institutional gray structures that blocked the sun and sky, making it seem like night on the street below. Because it was impossible to capture the buildings in their entirety, most of us tried to catch the top of the towers in our lens (see my photo below, from May 9, 2000). Maybe I am wrong, but I also recall sitting or kneeling on the sidewalk out in front in order to get the best view. And then it was time to board the shuttle again with the remainder of the gawkers, most of whom had never been in the city before.

personal photo, taken May 9, 2000

Since 2000, I've returned to NYC three times; however, because I usually spend time in other areas of the city, I had never gone to Ground Zero until a week or so ago. There were several factors that motivated me to visit the area this time around. First, after the memory course I taught last semester, I thought it was essential that I be able to talk about my direct impressions of the site, particularly since several of my students had already visited Ground Zero and the visitors' center. There is no substitute for being there. Waiting until now has also allowed me to have a more informed encounter with the site; I benefited from studying memory and traumatic events for many years prior to my visit, because I was able to observe and evaluate the scene differently than had I gone with say, only the TV images of planes crashing into the buildings. Finally, the fact that the site is under construction also compelled me to see it now, before the new tower goes up. The traumatic landscape is unstable and in the process of being transformed (though perhaps "transformed" is too strong a word because it signals something final, and I mean to indicate more of an evolution).

I made the trip to Ground Zero with a person who grew up just outside the city. At one time, he had worked briefly in Manhattan. He had last visited the site in December 2001, when the area was heavily protected by chain link fences still peppered with photographs of loved ones, letters, poems and other personal items. He experienced 9-11 while living in the Midwest -- actually, in what some call the "buckle of the Bible Belt," a phrase that to me, has always encompassed multiple points on the U.S. map -- and he had felt, early on, that New York's 9-11 had been "co-opted" by the rest of the country. Yes, of couse 9-11 was a national, collective event. But to him, it was as if suddenly, New York mattered in the Midwest. More than just the stereotypical image of rude people, insane taxi drivers and crime, New York suddenly became "ours," with the flood of "United We Stand" and "God Bless America" bumper stickers soon to come, followed by the yellow ribbon car magnets ("Support the Troops"). In other words, where he lived, the experience of 9-11 seemed to become political quicker than elsewhere. Revolting expressions of nationalism had not only (re-)surfaced, but taken over the entire landscape. Everyone's patriotism was questionable. If you didn't have an American flag in your yard, you were probably "the enemy." This was the logical mindset spawned by the "you are either with us or against us" mentality of the post 9-11 world. In his own words, he writes:

it was odd for New York, or at least certain very specific aspects of New York being embraced suddenly as "our America." New York has always been regarded, especially in the rural midwest, as essentially "foreign" --- in ethnicity, values, politics, etc. It felt manipulative and disingenuous the way very specific New Yorkers (Cops, Firemen, First Responders, Rudy Giuliani) were suddenly---it seemed---granted temporary status as exemplary Americans. It was always and without fail these New Yorkers who were celebrated, not the ordinary citizens---not the Hasidic Jews and the Somali cab drivers and the Puerto Rican restaurant workers, etc.

Then came the 2004 GOP Convention in New York, which took this manipulation to new heights. 911 memories and Ground Zero was a kind of conquered "Red State territory" in the heart of the enemy.

It is difficult to be at Ground Zero and concentrate on the terror of 9-11 without also reflecting on the way 9-11 was used -- and continues to be used -- politically (a perfect recent example is the debate over whether a mosque should be permitted near the site). While the Ground Zero landscape is about the catastrophic loss of human lives, it is subsequently about other wars (Iraq, Afghanistan); about imperialism and capitalism; about religious freedom and (in)tolerance; about memorialization and urban landscapes. My visit to the site was relatively brief -- maybe 15 minutes -- because, truthfully, there is not that much to see, but a lot upon which we can reflect later on.

We took the subway to Ground Zero, and even though my companion thought the stop for the WTC had been eliminated, we later discovered it still exists, but on a different train than the one we were on. Even if we hadn't known which direction to head when getting off the subway, it would have become quickly apparent by the long line of tourists on the sidewalk and an enormous construction site at the end of the street. We bypassed the tourist line, which was gazing at a bronze-colored wall sculpture commemorating "first responders," and stood at the edge of the sidewalk across the street from the construction area.

The first thing I noticed was the amount of people with cameras out. I told my companion, "I feel guilty taking photographs," but at the same time, it seemed a necessary, important thing to do, as long as it was done in a respectful, unobtrusive way. This is the first photo I took:

I am not positive, but I believe that what we are looking at in the center of the photo is the beginning of the new building, "One World Trade Center," which is scheduled to open in 2013. While looking at this site, I was struck by the emptiness of the landscape, and the fact that the sky is visible. When I stood in front of the Twin Towers in 2000, what I recall is the shadow they produced, and the sliver of sky between them. What's interesting is that the view of this traumatic site of memory is also now obstructed by fences and gates and screens of all kinds. I don't know how much of this has to do with security, and how much is just a regular part of safety on any construction job site, but it certainly adds a sense of secrecy to the whole operation, despite the large banners designed to help viewers understand what the site will look like upon completion (see photos 3 and 4).

Photo 1

Photo 2


Photo 3


Photo 4

Although it was important to contemplate the construction site, to take in the cramped quarters of the nearby streets and to imagine what the devastation must have been like, I found it more interesting to turn my gaze to the sidewalk area. I think I may have been anticipating a larger, public memorial on the street. But all that was there was this makeshift memorial:

This memorial, to NYC firefighters lost on 9-11 (see large poster), is also a place for people to leave fire and police uniform insignia from all over the world. The fluorescent uniform item in the lower right-hand corner is that of a police officer from Móstoles, just outside Madrid. If one looks carefully, above this memorial is a handwritten sign taped to a building window:

"Vendors are not allowed to sell near or around firehouse (photos/pamphlets/booklets/etc. Please do not purchase in these areas and report them to police. Thanks."

Just around the corner from the sign above, one finds the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, open 10-6 on most days, with a $10 admission fee. We did not go in. For some reason, to do so felt wrong. I had learned enough on the street outside. Nonetheless, I did pick up a pamphlet, and am intrigued by this description of the center:

Tribute Center Tour Guides are intimately connected to the events of September 11, 2001 as survivors, family members who lost loved ones, rescue workers, civilian volunteers, police, firefighters and Lower Manhattan residents and workers. Guides share their personal experience of loss, healing and survival with a factual description of the events, providing the visitor with an unparalleled opportunity to connect with history firsthand.

I am glad I made this visit to Ground Zero, though I must admit I am in opposition to the construction of a new building at this site. I can understand and respect the argument that sees construction as proof of strength and perseverance in the face of tragedy, as well as what comes "natural" to New York. However, the entire reconstruction process has already been marred by design polemics, and to me, there is something very American about the need to rebuild bigger and better and not just let it be. I do like the plans for the actual memorial, but I am resistant to that new memorial being located alongside more commerce and power. Perhaps, when I view the site in coming years, my impressions will change. Also, I should recognize that my Midwestern upbringing also probably colors my perspective on this site and what ought to be done with it.

Documentary Film: "La isla," directed by Uli Stelzner

2010-08-07T22:54:00.000-05:00

La isla is a documentary film on the Guatemalan Civil War, directed by Uli Stelzner. I first read about this film yesterday, in a very personal review on the blog CineSobreTodo.

The film's description on SilverDocs reads:

In this artfully rendered film, Guatemala’s violent history of repression at the hands of extremist political regimes is laid bare following the discovery of a vast archive of secret police documents. Found near the site of La Isla—a notorious extrajudicial prison—the cache details with chilling specificity the surveillance, torture and killing of thousands of civilians targeted by the country’s succession of fanatical right-wing governments. As a team of dedicated forensic specialists undertakes the arduous task of sorting through the files, the voices of the disappeared rise again to challenge the culture of impunity that has plagued this troubled nation.

New Book of Short Stories - "Memory Wall"

2010-08-06T08:04:00.000-05:00

I am on the lookout for this new book of short stories, which I read about twice in the NYT this past week. Here is a brief synopsis from Amazon.com's reviewer:

Books made of linked stories, like recent award-winning favorites Olive Kitteridge and Let the Great World Spin, are usually connected by shared places and people. The tender and lyrical stories in Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall are linked no less strongly, but, as if Oliver Sacks had turned to fiction, by a neurological theme. Set as far apart as South Africa and the Korean DMZ, Doerr's stories circle around the central pull of memory, both the struggle against memory's loss and the weight of memories that remain. In the long and brilliantly intricate title story, as memories fade from an aging white woman in suburban Cape Town, they are stored for her (and for anyone else with compatible ports installed in their head) in replayable cartridges. In the final story, "Afterworld," girls from a Jewish orphanage who were murdered by Nazis survive decades later as ghosts in the visionary epileptic seizures of the one girl who survived them. If memories in these tales are like the Yangtze River town in "Village 113," threatened with the forced forgetfulness of a man-made flood, they are also like the legendary sturgeon in "The River Nemunas," which surfaces with an ancient, armor-covered dignity years after it was thought to have vanished. --Tom Nissley

Read review here

Read article here in Books of the Times

Read book excerpt here

Uruguayan Documentary: "Las manos en la tierra"

2010-08-06T07:40:00.000-05:00

One of the blogs I read regularly is Memoriando, a documentary film blog based in Colombia. The blogger, who goes only by "Vica," has an unbelievable ability to track down documentaries -- mostly contemporary, but not always -- from all over the world. I am addicted to reading Memoriando, because I always discover films I've never heard of. Today's post is on an Uruguayan documentary, "Las manos en la tierra" ("Hands in the Earth"), directed by Virginia Martínez.

Martínez's documentary focuses on the disappeared of Uruguay's military dictatorship (1973-85), and, in the words of the synopsis on the official website, sees itself as "an arqueological thriller" that "marks a before and after in the history of the country." I cannot think of any other documentary on the case of the Uruguay, which tends to get overlooked when we speak of the Southern Cone dictatorships of the 70s and 80s.

Reading about this film reminds me of a conversation I once had with an Uruguayan friend who told me, almost as if she were embarrassed, "I mean, what happened in Uruguay is nothing like Chile or Argentina, but it was still bad."

I look forward to reading more about this film.

Bolívar Exhumation Continues to Cause Stir

2010-08-04T12:47:00.001-05:00

In a post last month I wrote briefly about Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's decision to exhume Simón Bolívar's remains. This bizarre action continues to draw the attention of international press. Late last night, the New York Times featured the story on the front page of the online edition, and cited several possible reasons for the exhumation:

The exhumation could serve multiple purposes. If Mr. Chávez can say Bolívar was murdered in Colombia, he could try to use that against Colombia’s current government, with which Venezuela’s relations are cold, while reinforcing his longstanding claims that Colombians and others are plotting to assassinate him.

It would also allow Mr. Chávez to rewrite a major aspect of Venezuela’s history. The president already closely identifies himself and his political movement with Bolívar, renaming the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, his espionage agency the Bolivarian Intelligence Service and so on. Portraits of Bolívar hang alongside Mr. Chávez’s in federal government offices.

This country’s intelligentsia fixates on Bolívar’s legacy and the use of Bolívar not just by Mr. Chávez but by rulers stretching back to the 19th century. (go to original article here)

Like the above quote, the following cartoon, published on July 24, 2010 in the Spanish paper El País, also references Chávez's increasing obsession with Colombia:

The cartoon description reads: "After breaking ties with Colombia, Hugo Chávez seeks advice from his mentor Fidel Castro:"

Hugo Chávez (left): "Hey Fidel, how have you managed to stay in power so long?"
Fidel Castro (right): "I didn't unbury Martí."

Cartoon Artist: Erlich

Of course, the cartoon Castro is referring to José Martí, one of Cuba's national heroes. It appears the cartoonist believes Chávez's move may backfire -- if it hasn't already.

This ongoing controversy reminds me of the book Death of the Father: an anthropology of the end of political authority, edited by John Borneman. The book looks at Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and East European Communism, and offers a compelling discussion on the death of political leaders and how that death is represented (think of the embalming of Lenin, for example, or the execution of Mussolini and his lover).

I am sure we will continue to hear a lot about Colombian-Venezuelan relations, as well as Hugo Chávez, especially with the release of "South of the Border," the new Oliver Stone documentary on leftist Latin American leaders.

Ceausescu and Wife Exhumed at Family's Request

2010-07-21T11:22:00.000-05:00

Seen on: NPR

Ex-Romanian Dictator Ceausescu, Wife Are Exhumed

by The Associated Press

Taking the country by surprise, forensic scientists on Wednesday exhumed what are believed to be the bodies of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena at the request of their children.

Ceausescu ruled Romania for 25 years with an iron fist before being ousted and executed during the 1989 anti-communist revolt in which more than 1,000 people were killed.

Some Romanians doubt that the Ceausescus were really buried in the Ghencea military cemetery in west Bucharest. There is also some nostalgia for the communist period and regrets that the couple was executed on Christmas Day, 1989.

The news of the exhumation, the latest development in a five-year court case, broke as most Romanians were asleep. Officials rapidly closed the cemetery as dozens of journalists began arriving at the gates. A few elderly people wandered around the sprawling cemetery but were kept away from the exhumations by guards.

Ceausescu was toppled Dec. 22, 1989, as Romanians fed up with years of draconian rationing and communist rule revolted. He tried to flee Bucharest by helicopter but his pilot switched sides. After a summary trial, Ceausescu and his wife were executed by a firing squad three days later.

A team of pathologists and cemetery officials hoisted the wooden caskets of Ceausescu and his wife out of their graves Wednesday. They took samples from the corpses and put them into plastic bags — a process lasting more than two hours — before reburying the coffins.

"We are closer to knowing the truth," the couple's son Valentin Ceausescu told The Associated Press by phone.

Officials say it will take up to six months to determine the identity of the remains.

Ceausescu's alleged remains were better preserved than those of his wife, said Mircea Oprean, the couple's son-in-law who was present at the exhumation.

Oprean's wife, Zoia Ceausescu, had sued the defense ministry in 2005, saying she had doubts that her parents were buried in the cemetery. She died of cancer in 2006 and her brother Valentin took up the case.

Cemetery worker Cornel Muntean told the AP that Ceasescu was dressed in a thick gray overcoat. An AP reporter saw a dirty cloth being removed from Ceausescu's remains and what looked like a thick gray fur hat at the end of the coffin.

Romanians rose up in 1989 as other Communist regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe, angered and exhausted by years of rationing as the dictator tried to pay off the country's foreign debt. Meat, cooking oil and butter were severely limited and blackouts were common.

Ceausescu stifled dissent with his Securitate secret police, which were believed to have 700,000 informers in the nation of 22 million.

NYT article: "The Web Means the End of Forgetting"

2010-07-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

From: The New York Times

The Web Means the End of Forgetting

By JEFFREY ROSEN

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.

With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.

In Brandeis’s day — and until recently, in ours — you had to be a celebrity to be gossiped about in public: today all of us are learning to expect the scrutiny that used to be reserved for the famous and the infamous. A 26-year-old Manhattan woman told The New York Times that she was afraid of being tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she wears only two outfits when out on the town — a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt or a basic black dress. “You have movie-star issues,” she said, “and you’re just a person.”

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

THE CRISIS — AND THE SOLUTION?
All this has created something of a collective identity crisis. For most of human history, the idea of reinventing yourself or freely shaping your identity — of presenting different selves in different contexts (at home, at work, at play) — was hard to fathom, because people’s identities were fixed by their roles in a rigid social hierarchy. With little geographic or social mobility, you were defined not as an individual but by your village, your class, your job or your guild. But that started to change in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a growing individualism that came to redefine human identity. As people perceived themselves increasingly as individuals, their status became a function not of inherited categories but of their own efforts and achievements. This new conception of malleable and fluid identity found its fullest and purest expression in the American ideal of the self-made man, a term popularized by Henry Clay in 1832. From the late 18th to the early 20th century, millions of Europeans moved from the Old World to the New World and then continued to move westward across America, a development that led to what the historian Frederick Jackson Turner called “the significance of the frontier,” in which the possibility of constant migration from civilization to the wilderness made Americans distrustful of hierarchy and committed to inventing and reinventing themselves.

In the 20th century, however, the ideal of the self-made man came under siege. The end of the Western frontier led to worries that Americans could no longer seek a fresh start and leave their past behind, a kind of reinvention associated with the phrase “G.T.T.,” or “Gone to Texas.” But the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities.

But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

Concern about these developments has intensified this year, as Facebook took steps to make the digital profiles of its users generally more public than private. Last December, the company announced that parts of user profiles that had previously been private — including every user’s friends, relationship status and family relations — would become public and accessible to other users. Then in April, Facebook introduced an interactive system called Open Graph that can share your profile information and friends with the Facebook partner sites you visit.

What followed was an avalanche of criticism from users, privacy regulators and advocates around the world. Four Democratic senators — Charles Schumer of New York, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Alaska and Al Franken of Minnesota — wrote to the chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, expressing concern about the “instant personalization” feature and the new privacy settings. The reaction to Facebook’s changes was such that when four N.Y.U. students announced plans in April to build a free social-networking site called Diaspora, which wouldn’t compel users to compromise their privacy, they raised more than $20,000 from more than 700 backers in a matter of weeks. In May, Facebook responded to all the criticism by introducing a new set of privacy controls that the company said would make it easier for users to understand what kind of information they were sharing in various contexts.

Facebook’s partial retreat has not quieted the desire to do something about an urgent problem. All around the world, political leaders, scholars and citizens are searching for responses to the challenge of preserving control of our identities in a digital world that never forgets. Are the most promising solutions going to be technological? Legislative? Judicial? Ethical? A result of shifting social norms and cultural expectations? Or some mix of the above? Alex Türk, the French data-protection commissioner, has called for a “constitutional right to oblivion” that would allow citizens to maintain a greater degree of anonymity online and in public places. In Argentina, the writers Alejandro Tortolini and Enrique Quagliano have started a campaign to “reinvent forgetting on the Internet,” exploring a range of political and technological ways of making data disappear. In February, the European Union helped finance a campaign called “Think B4 U post!” that urges young people to consider the “potential consequences” of publishing photos of themselves or their friends without “thinking carefully” and asking permission. And in the United States, a group of technologists, legal scholars and cyberthinkers are exploring ways of recreating the possibility of digital forgetting. These approaches share the common goal of reconstructing a form of control over our identities: the ability to reinvent ourselves, to escape our pasts and to improve the selves that we present to the world.

REPUTATION BANKRUPTCY AND TWITTERGATION
A few years ago, at the giddy dawn of the Web 2.0 era — so called to mark the rise of user-generated online content — many technological theorists assumed that self-governing communities could ensure, through the self-correcting wisdom of the crowd, that all participants enjoyed the online identities they deserved. Wikipedia is one embodiment of the faith that the wisdom of the crowd can correct most mistakes — that a Wikipedia entry for a small-town mayor, for example, will reflect the reputation he deserves. And if the crowd fails — perhaps by turning into a digital mob — Wikipedia offers other forms of redress. Those who think their Wikipedia entries lack context, because they overemphasize a single personal or professional mistake, can petition a group of select editors that decides whether a particular event in someone’s past has been given “undue weight.” For example, if the small-town mayor had an exemplary career but then was arrested for drunken driving, which came to dominate his Wikipedia entry, he can petition to have the event put in context or made less prominent.

In practice, however, self-governing communities like Wikipedia — or algorithmically self-correcting systems like Google — often leave people feeling misrepresented and burned. Those who think that their online reputations have been unfairly tarnished by an isolated incident or two now have a practical option: consulting a firm like ReputationDefender, which promises to clean up your online image. ReputationDefender was founded by Michael Fertik, a Harvard Law School graduate who was troubled by the idea of young people being forever tainted online by their youthful indiscretions. “I was seeing articles about the ‘Lord of the Flies’ behavior that all of us engage in at that age,” he told me, “and it felt un-American that when the conduct was online, it could have permanent effects on the speaker and the victim. The right to new beginnings and the right to self-definition have always been among the most beautiful American ideals.”

ReputationDefender, which has customers in more than 100 countries, is the most successful of the handful of reputation-related start-ups that have been growing rapidly after the privacy concerns raised by Facebook and Google. (ReputationDefender recently raised $15 million in new venture capital.) For a fee, the company will monitor your online reputation, contacting Web sites individually and asking them to take down offending items. In addition, with the help of the kind of search-optimization technology that businesses use to raise their Google profiles, ReputationDefender can bombard the Web with positive or neutral information about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search. (Services begin from $10 a month to $1,000 a year; for challenging cases, the price can rise into the tens of thousands.) By automatically raising the Google ranks of the positive links, ReputationDefender pushes the negative links to the back pages of a Google search, where they’re harder to find. “We’re hearing stories of employers increasingly asking candidates to open up Facebook pages in front of them during job interviews,” Fertik told me. “Our customers include parents whose kids have talked about them on the Internet — ‘Mom didn’t get the raise’; ‘Dad got fired’; ‘Mom and Dad are fighting a lot, and I’m worried they’ll get a divorce.’ ”

Companies like ReputationDefender offer a promising short-term solution for those who can afford it; but tweaking your Google profile may not be enough for reputation management in the near future, as Web 2.0 swiftly gives way to Web. 3.0 — a world in which user-generated content is combined with a new layer of data aggregation and analysis and live video. For example, the Facebook application Photo Finder, by Face.com, uses facial-recognition and social-connections software to allow you to locate any photo of yourself or a friend on Facebook, regardless of whether the photo was “tagged” — that is, the individual in the photo was identified by name. At the moment, Photo Finder allows you to identify only people on your contact list, but as facial-recognition technology becomes more widespread and sophisticated, it will almost certainly challenge our expectation of anonymity in public. People will be able to snap a cellphone picture (or video) of a stranger, plug the images into Google and pull up all tagged and untagged photos of that person that exist on the Web.

In the nearer future, Internet searches for images are likely to be combined with social-network aggregator search engines, like today’s Spokeo and Pipl, which combine data from online sources — including political contributions, blog posts, YouTube videos, Web comments, real estate listings and photo albums. Increasingly these aggregator sites will rank people’s public and private reputations, like the new Web site Unvarnished, a reputation marketplace where people can write anonymous reviews about anyone. In the Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks.

Anticipating these challenges, some legal scholars have begun imagining new laws that could allow people to correct, or escape from, the reputation scores that may govern our personal and professional interactions in the future. Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, supports an idea he calls “reputation bankruptcy,” which would give people a chance to wipe their reputation slates clean and start over. To illustrate the problem, Zittrain showed me an iPhone app called Date Check, by Intelius, that offers a “sleaze detector” to let you investigate people you’re thinking about dating — it reports their criminal histories, address histories and summaries of their social-networking profiles. Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute social measurements — like how often he or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using cellphones and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers — like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example — which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability.

To allow people to escape from negative scores generated by these services, Zittrain says that people should be allowed to declare “reputation bankruptcy” every 10 years or so, wiping out certain categories of ratings or sensitive information. His model is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires consumer-reporting agencies to provide you with one free credit report a year — so you can dispute negative or inaccurate information — and prohibits the agencies from retaining negative information about bankruptcies, late payments or tax liens for more than 10 years. “Like personal financial bankruptcy, or the way in which a state often seals a juvenile criminal record and gives a child a ‘fresh start’ as an adult,” Zittrain writes in his book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It,” “we ought to consider how to implement the idea of a second or third chance into our digital spaces.”

Another proposal, offered by Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado, would make it illegal for employers to fire or refuse to hire anyone on the basis of legal off-duty conduct revealed in Facebook postings or Google profiles. “Is it really fair for employers to know what you’ve put in your Facebook status updates?” Ohm asks. “We could say that Facebook status updates have taken the place of water-cooler chat, which employers were never supposed to overhear, and we could pass a prohibition on the sorts of information employers can and can’t consider when they hire someone.”

Ohm became interested in this problem in the course of researching the ease with which we can learn the identities of people from supposedly anonymous personal data like movie preferences and health information. When Netflix, for example, released 100 million purportedly anonymous records revealing how almost 500,000 users had rated movies from 1999 to 2005, researchers were able to identify people in the database by name with a high degree of accuracy if they knew even only a little bit about their movie-watching preferences, obtained from public data posted on other ratings sites.

Ohm says he worries that employers would be able to use social-network-aggregator services to identify people’s book and movie preferences and even Internet-search terms, and then fire or refuse to hire them on that basis. A handful of states — including New York, California, Colorado and North Dakota — broadly prohibit employers from discriminating against employees for legal off-duty conduct like smoking. Ohm suggests that these laws could be extended to prevent certain categories of employers from refusing to hire people based on Facebook pictures, status updates and other legal but embarrassing personal information. (In practice, these laws might be hard to enforce, since employers might not disclose the real reason for their hiring decisions, so employers, like credit-reporting agents, might also be required by law to disclose to job candidates the negative information in their digital files.)

Another legal option for responding to online setbacks to your reputation is to sue under current law. There’s already a sharp rise in lawsuits known as Twittergation — that is, suits to force Web sites to remove slanderous or false posts. Last year, Courtney Love was sued for libel by the fashion designer Boudoir Queen for supposedly slanderous comments posted on Twitter, on Love’s MySpace page and on the designer’s online marketplace-feedback page. But even if you win a U.S. libel lawsuit, the Web site doesn’t have to take the offending material down any more than a newspaper that has lost a libel suit has to remove the offending content from its archive.

Some scholars, therefore, have proposed creating new legal rights to force Web sites to remove false or slanderous statements. Cass Sunstein, the Obama administration’s regulatory czar, suggests in his new book, “On Rumors,” that there might be “a general right to demand retraction after a clear demonstration that a statement is both false and damaging.” (If a newspaper or blogger refuses to post a retraction, they might be liable for damages.) Sunstein adds that Web sites might be required to take down false postings after receiving notice that they are false — an approach modeled on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires Web sites to remove content that supposedly infringes intellectual property rights after receiving a complaint.

As Stacy Snyder’s “Drunken Pirate” photo suggests, however, many people aren’t worried about false information posted by others — they’re worried about true information they’ve posted about themselves when it is taken out of context or given undue weight. And defamation law doesn’t apply to true information or statements of opinion. Some legal scholars want to expand the ability to sue over true but embarrassing violations of privacy — although it appears to be a quixotic goal.

Daniel Solove, a George Washington University law professor and author of the book “The Future of Reputation,” says that laws forbidding people to breach confidences could be expanded to allow you to sue your Facebook friends if they share your embarrassing photos or posts in violation of your privacy settings. Expanding legal rights in this way, however, would run up against the First Amendment rights of others. Invoking the right to free speech, the U.S. Supreme Court has already held that the media can’t be prohibited from publishing the name of a rape victim that they obtained from public records. Generally, American judges hold that if you disclose something to a few people, you can’t stop them from sharing the information with the rest of the world.

That’s one reason that the most promising solutions to the problem of embarrassing but true information online may be not legal but technological ones. Instead of suing after the damage is done (or hiring a firm to clean up our messes), we need to explore ways of pre-emptively making the offending words or pictures disappear.

EXPIRATION DATES
Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in “Delete,” uses the Borges story as an emblem for the personal and social costs of being so shackled by our digital past that we are unable to evolve and learn from our mistakes. After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.

This is not an entirely fanciful vision. Google not long ago decided to render all search queries anonymous after nine months (by deleting part of each Internet protocol address), and the upstart search engine Cuil has announced that it won’t keep any personally identifiable information at all, a privacy feature that distinguishes it from Google. And there are already small-scale privacy apps that offer disappearing data. An app called TigerText allows text-message senders to set a time limit from one minute to 30 days after which the text disappears from the company’s servers on which it is stored and therefore from the senders’ and recipients’ phones. (The founder of TigerText, Jeffrey Evans, has said he chose the name before the scandal involving Tiger Woods’s supposed texts to a mistress.)

Expiration dates could be implemented more broadly in various ways. Researchers at the University of Washington, for example, are developing a technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self-destruct” after a specified period of time. Instead of relying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud” — in other words, on their distributed servers — Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters” the encryption key. To read the data, your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they “erode” or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can no longer be read. Tadayoshi Kohno, a designer of Vanish, told me that the system could provide expiration dates not only for e-mail but also for any data stored in the cloud, including photos or text or anything posted on Facebook, Google or blogs. The technology doesn’t promise perfect control — you can’t stop someone from copying your photos or Facebook chats during the period in which they are not encrypted. But as Vanish improves, it could bring us much closer to a world where our data didn’t linger forever.

Kohno told me that Facebook, if it wanted to, could implement expiration dates on its own platform, making our data disappear after, say, three days or three months unless a user specified that he wanted it to linger forever. It might be a more welcome option for Facebook to encourage the development of Vanish-style apps that would allow individual users who are concerned about privacy to make their own data disappear without imposing the default on all Facebook users.

So far, however, Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., has been moving in the opposite direction — toward transparency rather than privacy. In defending Facebook’s recent decision to make the default for profile information about friends and relationship status public rather than private, Zuckerberg said in January to the founder of the publication TechCrunch that Facebook had an obligation to reflect “current social norms” that favored exposure over privacy. “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds but more openly and with more people, and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time,” he said.

PRIVACY’S NEW NORMAL
But not all Facebook users agree with Zuckerberg. Plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that young people, having been burned by Facebook (and frustrated by its privacy policy, which at more than 5,000 words is longer than the U.S. Constitution), are savvier than older users about cleaning up their tagged photos and being careful about what they post. And two recent studies challenge the conventional wisdom that young people have no qualms about having their entire lives shared and preserved online forever. A University of California, Berkeley, study released in April found that large majorities of people between 18 and 22 said there should be laws that require Web sites to delete all stored information about individuals (88 percent) and that give people the right to know all the information Web sites know about them (62 percent) — percentages that mirrored the privacy views of older adults. A recent Pew study found that 18-to-29-year-olds are actually more concerned about their online profiles than older people are, vigilantly deleting unwanted posts, removing their names from tagged photos and censoring themselves as they share personal information, because they are coming to understand the dangers of oversharing.

Still, Zuckerberg is on to something when he recognizes that the future of our online identities and reputations will ultimately be shaped not just by laws and technologies but also by changing social norms. And norms are already developing to recreate off-the-record spaces in public, with no photos, Twitter posts or blogging allowed. Milk and Honey, an exclusive bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, requires potential members to sign an agreement promising not to blog about the bar’s goings on or to post photos on social-networking sites, and other bars and nightclubs are adopting similar policies. I’ve been at dinners recently where someone has requested, in all seriousness, “Please don’t tweet this” — a custom that is likely to spread.

But what happens when people transgress those norms, using Twitter or tagging photos in ways that cause us serious embarrassment? Can we imagine a world in which new norms develop that make it easier for people to forgive and forget one another’s digital sins?

That kind of social norm may be harder to develop. Alessandro Acquisti, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, studies the behavioral economics of privacy — that is, the conscious and unconscious mental trade-offs we make in deciding whether to reveal or conceal information, balancing the benefits of sharing with the dangers of disclosure. He is conducting experiments about the “decay time” and the relative weight of good and bad information — in other words, whether people discount positive information about you more quickly and heavily than they discount negative information about you. His research group’s preliminary results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did 10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, that information has staying power. Research in behavioral psychology confirms that people pay more attention to bad rather than good information, and Acquisti says he fears that “20 years from now, if all of us have a skeleton on Facebook, people may not discount it because it was an error in our youth.”

On the assumption that strangers may not make it easy for us to escape our pasts, Acquisti is also studying technologies and strategies of “privacy nudges” that might prompt people to think twice before sharing sensitive photos or information in the first place. Gmail, for example, has introduced a feature that forces you to think twice before sending drunken e-mail messages. When you enable the feature, called Mail Goggles, it prompts you to solve simple math problems before sending e-mail messages at times you’re likely to regret. (By default, Mail Goggles is active only late on weekend nights.) Acquisti is investigating similar strategies of “soft paternalism” that might nudge people to hesitate before posting, say, drunken photos from Cancún. “We could easily think about a system, when you are uploading certain photos, that immediately detects how sensitive the photo will be.”

A silly but surprisingly effective alternative might be to have an anthropomorphic icon — a stern version of Microsoft’s Clippy — that could give you a reproachful look before you hit the send button. According to M. Ryan Calo, who runs the consumer-privacy project at Stanford Law School, experimenters studying strategies of “visceral notice” have found that when people navigate a Web site in the presence of a human-looking online character who seems to be actively following the cursor, they disclose less personal information than people who browse with no character or one who appears not to be paying attention. As people continue to experience the drawbacks of living in a world that never forgets, they may well learn to hesitate before posting information, with or without humanoid Clippys.

FORGIVENESS
In addition to exposing less for the Web to forget, it might be helpful for us to explore new ways of living in a world that is slow to forgive. It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people — oral or written, true or false, friendly or mean — was considered a terrible sin because small communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip: although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes. “If a man was a repentant [sinner],” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.’ ”

Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor. In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, said that “the next generation is infinitely more social online” — and less private — “as evidenced by their Facebook pictures,” which “will be around when they’re running for president years from now.” Schmidt added: “As long as the answer is that I chose to make a mess of myself with this picture, then it’s fine. The issue is when somebody else does it.” If people chose to expose themselves for 15 minutes of fame, Schmidt says, “that’s their choice, and they have to live with it.”

Schmidt added that the “notion of control is fundamental to the evolution of these privacy-based solutions,” pointing to Google Latitude, which allows people to broadcast their locations in real time.

This idea of privacy as a form of control is echoed by many privacy scholars, but it seems too harsh to say that if people like Stacy Snyder don’t use their privacy settings responsibly, they have to live forever with the consequences. Privacy protects us from being unfairly judged out of context on the basis of snippets of private information that have been exposed against our will; but we can be just as unfairly judged out of context on the basis of snippets of public information that we have unwisely chosen to reveal to the wrong audience.

Moreover, the narrow focus on privacy as a form of control misses what really worries people on the Internet today. What people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their online reputations. But the idea that any of us can control our reputations is, of course, an unrealistic fantasy. The truth is we can’t possibly control what others say or know or think about us in a world of Facebook and Google, nor can we realistically demand that others give us the deference and respect to which we think we’re entitled. On the Internet, it turns out, we’re not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don’t have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in context, there’s nothing we can do about it.

But if we can’t control what others think or say or view about us, we can control our own reaction to photos, videos, blogs and Twitter posts that we feel unfairly represent us. A recent study suggests that people on Facebook and other social-networking sites express their real personalities, despite the widely held assumption that people try online to express an enhanced or idealized impression of themselves. Samuel Gosling, the University of Texas, Austin, psychology professor who conducted the study, told the Facebook blog, “We found that judgments of people based on nothing but their Facebook profiles correlate pretty strongly with our measure of what that person is really like, and that measure consists of both how the profile owner sees him or herself and how that profile owner’s friends see the profile owner.”

By comparing the online profiles of college-aged people in the United States and Germany with their actual personalities and their idealized personalities, or how they wanted to see themselves, Gosling found that the online profiles conveyed “rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren’t trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.” (Personality impressions based on the online profiles were most accurate for extroverted people and least accurate for neurotic people, who cling tenaciously to an idealized self-image.)

Gosling is optimistic about the implications of his study for the possibility of digital forgiveness. He acknowledged that social technologies are forcing us to merge identities that used to be separate — we can no longer have segmented selves like “a home or family self, a friend self, a leisure self, a work self.” But although he told Facebook, “I have to find a way to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self,” he also suggested that as all of us have to merge our public and private identities, photos showing us having a few drinks on Facebook will no longer seem so scandalous. “You see your accountant going out on weekends and attending clown conventions, that no longer makes you think that he’s not a good accountant. We’re coming to terms and reconciling with that merging of identities.”

Perhaps society will become more forgiving of drunken Facebook pictures in the way Gosling says he expects it might. And some may welcome the end of the segmented self, on the grounds that it will discourage bad behavior and hypocrisy: it’s harder to have clandestine affairs when you’re broadcasting your every move on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. But a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts; and at the moment, the enforced merging of identities that used to be separate is leaving many casualties in its wake. Stacy Snyder couldn’t reconcile her “aspiring-teacher self” with her “having-a-few-drinks self”: even the impression, correct or not, that she had a drink in a pirate hat at an off-campus party was enough to derail her teaching career.

That doesn’t mean, however, that it had to derail her life. After taking down her MySpace profile, Snyder is understandably trying to maintain her privacy: her lawyer told me in a recent interview that she is now working in human resources; she did not respond to a request for comment. But her success as a human being who can change and evolve, learning from her mistakes and growing in wisdom, has nothing to do with the digital file she can never entirely escape. Our character, ultimately, can’t be judged by strangers on the basis of our Facebook or Google profiles; it can be judged by only those who know us and have time to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, face to face and in context, with insight and understanding. In the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He is writing a book about Louis Brandeis.

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.

Hugo Chávez Has Bolívar's Remains Exhumed

2010-07-19T12:13:00.001-05:00

Caption:
"Venezuela. President Hugo Chávez gets quite a surprise when exhuming the remains of Simón Bolívar."

Artist: Erlich
Appeared in El País (July 18, 2010)

Hugo Chávez has always exalted certain figures -- Che, Castro, Simón Bolívar -- in political speeches. In fact, he is the self-proclaimed leader of the "Bolivarian Revolution." But the news that he has exhumed the remains of Simón Bolívar is a bit over the top. Public exhumations and burials of former national heroes during one's time in office always seem to augur an increase in state control; often, they are an attempt not to remember, but conveniently forget, certain aspects of the past for one's own political gain. The question "who owns the bones?" comes to mind. In this case, the particular "father-son" drama being played out is quite intriguing. If Chávez can claim that Bolívar was murdered, it will no doubt help him justify his "revolution" even further and provide him with more photo opps. for the sort of public, melodramatic weeping he enjoys, even on Twitter!

In the cartoon above, it would appear that we are looking at the skeletonized hand of Bolívar, giving Chávez the middle digit. This is because although Chávez has exalted Bolívar's image throughout his time as "President," many say that Bolívar would not have shared the former's policies.

From: BBC News

17 July 2010
Venezuela's Chavez exhumes hero Simon Bolivar's bones

The remains of South American independence hero Simon Bolivar have been exhumed in Venezuela to determine the cause of his death nearly 200 years ago.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ordered Bolivar's tomb be opened because he suspects he was murdered.

Most accounts maintain Bolivar died from tuberculosis in Colombia in 1830.

Mr Chavez announced the exhumation of his hero on Twitter, saying he "wept with emotion".

"What impressive moments we have lived tonight. We have seen the bones of the Great Bolivar!" he tweeted from the national pantheon in Caracas.

"That glorious skeleton must be Bolivar, because his flame can be felt. Bolivar lives!" he added.

'Important discoveries'

More than 50 experts including criminal investigators and forensic pathologists have been examining the remains to see if Bolivar was the victim of a conspiracy rather than disease, according to Venezuela's attorney-general, Luisa Ortega Diaz.

"We have important discoveries that will be announced to the nation at the appropriate moment," she said.

The exhumation comes as Colombia has accused Venezuela of tolerating the presence on its territory of the main Colombian leftist groups, the Farc and the ELN.

Relations between Mr Chavez, an outspoken socialist, and the conservative government of Colombia have deteriorated in the last two years.

Mr Chavez has rejected Colombia's accusations.

Known as "the Liberator", Simon Bolivar led the 19th Century revolutionary war against Spain, winning independence for Venezuela and several other South American nations.

The Venezuelan president claims him as the inspiration for his "Bolivarian" revolution, though some historians say Bolivar would not agree with Mr Chavez's socialist policies.

18th-Century Ship Uncovered at Ground Zero

2010-07-15T18:20:00.000-05:00

This story certainly speaks to the "archaeology of memory" (Benjamin). An 18th-century ship has been uncovered at the Ground Zero site. Strangely, I read about this in the Spanish paper El País, but have yet to see any coverage in the NYT. The article below comes from The Guardian:

Ground Zero diggers uncover hull of 18th century ship

Archaeologists examine timbers found at site of World Trade Centre bombings

Workers excavating the World Trade Centre site have unearthed the 10-metre hull of a ship believed to have been buried in the 18th century.

The vessel was probably used along with other debris to fill in land to extend lower Manhattan into the Hudson river, archaeologists have said.

It was hoped the artefact could be retrieved by the end of today, said archaeologist Molly McDonald. A boat specialist was going to the Ground Zero site to examine the find.

McDonald said she wanted to at least salvage some timbers; it was unclear if any large portions could be lifted intact.

"We're mostly clearing it by hand because it's fragile," she said. Construction equipment may be used later in the process.

McDonald and Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist, were at the site of the 11 September 2001 attacks when the hull was discovered on Tuesday morning.

"We noticed curved timbers that a back hoe brought up," McDonald said. "We quickly found the rib of a vessel and continued to clear it away and expose the hull.

"We're going to send timber samples to a laboratory to do dendrochronology to help us get a sense of when the boat was constructed." Dendrochronology is the science that uses tree rings to determine dates and chronological order.

A 45kg (100lb) anchor was found a few yards from the hull on Wednesday but the experts are not sure if it belongs to the ship. The anchor was about a metre across, McDonald said.

The archaeologists are racing to record and analyse the vessel before exposure to air makes the delicate wood deteriorate.

"I kept thinking of how closely it came to being destroyed," Pappalardo said.

7/7 Memorial

2010-07-07T12:17:00.000-05:00

It is interesting that yesterday, Queen Elizabeth II was at Ground Zero, just one day prior to the anniversary of the terrorist bombings in London (July 7, 2005). Here are a few images of the memorial for victims of the 7/7 attacks, which opened in 2009.

photo here

As a point of comparison, this is Madrid's March 11 memorial, located outside Atocha train station.

Interior:

Exterior:

It will be interesting to see what develops as a memorial at Ground Zero. For various reasons, my personal opinion is that a new skyscraper - which will be the same height as one of the previous towers of the World Trade Center - should not go up. However, I do like the idea of the memorial (called "Reflecting Absence") thus far -- two empty spaces where the original towers once stood. According to Wikipedia, "pools of water fill the footprints, underneath which sits a memorial space whose walls bear the names of the victims."

Photo here

"We Are Not Here to Reminisce" - Queen Visits Ground Zero Site

2010-07-06T23:21:00.000-05:00

Via: NYT

Queen Addresses UN, Places Wreath at Ground Zero
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 7, 2010

Filed at 12:07 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Queen Elizabeth II challenged the United Nations to fight global dangers by ''waging'' peace, then entered ground zero on Tuesday for the first time to honor the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Back in New York after more than three decades, the 84-year-old British monarch turned her eyes toward the future of the World Trade Center: new skyscrapers rising over what was once smoldering debris that had buried loved ones forever.

''We are not here to reminisce,'' she told the world body earlier Tuesday. ''In tomorrow's world, we must all work together as hard as ever if we are truly to be United Nations.''

Not even a record high temperature of 102 degrees, accompanied by a heat advisory, kept the monarch from New York's hallowed ground.

She arrived at the 16-acre site in lower Manhattan late Tuesday afternoon with her husband, Prince Philip. They walked slowly across a wooden walkway that reaches deep over the construction site. Huge cranes hovering overhead were stopped and workers took a break during the queen's visit.

In silence, Elizabeth laid a wreath of flowers on an iron pedestal near the footprint of the trade center's south tower. Bowing her head, she gently brushed her gloved hand against the locally grown red peonies, roses, lilies, black-eyed Susans and other summer blossoms.

Then the queen met dozens of family members and first responders who had lost loved ones as the twin towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.

''The queen just was asking me about that day, and how awful it must've been,'' said Debbie Palmer, whose husband, battalion Fire Chief Orio Palmer, was killed. ''She said, `I don't think I've ever seen anything in my life as bad as that. And I said, `Let's hope we never do again.'''

Palmer said of the monarch: ''She's beautiful. She looks like she could be anybody's grandmother.''

The queen wore a two-piece white, blue and beige print dress with long sleeves and a matching brimmed champagne-colored silk hat with flowers.

While there were ''waterfalls coming down my body, there was not a drop of sweat on her face; I don't think royalty sweats,'' joked Nile Berry, 17, son of securities analyst David S. Berry, who died in the south tower, leaving behind three children.

''I think she understood'' the significance of meeting victims' relatives, Nile told The Associated Press, adding that it would take him a while to ''digest'' that he had met the queen.

Elizabeth left the site in a motorcade to tour the British Garden of Remembrance, built to honor the 67 Britons killed in the attack. She met their families there, joining them for a ceremony.

Tim Rosen, who called himself a ''fan of the queen,'' was angling for a glimpse of her at the corner of ground zero. ''She's been through a lot,'' said the 30-year-old attorney. ''She has a certain sense of duty that I like. A very elegant woman.''

''There she is!'' Patricia Farmer, a real estate project manager, shouted when she spotted her near the garden. ''The one in the blue!''

Farmer, who said she was born in Northern Ireland, called Elizabeth ''my queen.''

But not everyone was so enthused. Roman Shusterman held a sign near ground zero that read, ''Queen of British Petroleum,'' the British company whose rig explosion in Louisiana created the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

''The queen hasn't said anything about it because she thinks she's too good for us,'' said Shusterman, 28.

Earlier Tuesday, Elizabeth's familiar formality graced the lectern at the United Nations, where she urged the world body to spearhead an international response to global dangers, while promoting prosperity and dignity for the world's inhabitants.

''It has perhaps always been the case that the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership of all,'' she said, while praising the U.N. for promoting peace and justice.

Speaking as queen of 16 U.N. member states and head of a commonwealth of 54 countries with a population of nearly 2 billion people, Elizabeth recalled the dramatic changes in the world since she last visited the United Nations in 1957, especially in science, technology and social attitudes.

''In my lifetime, the United Nations has moved from being a high-minded aspiration to being a real force for common good,'' Elizabeth told diplomats from the 192 U.N. member states. ''That of itself has been a signal achievement.''

But she also praised the U.N.'s aims and values -- promoting peace, security and justice; fighting hunger, poverty and disease; and protecting the rights and liberties of every citizen -- which have endured.

''For over six decades the United Nations has helped to shape the international response to global dangers,'' the queen said. ''The challenge now is to continue to show this clear ... leadership while not losing sight of your ongoing work to secure the security, prosperity and dignity of our fellow human beings.''

Elizabeth and Prince Philip flew to New York from Canada for the five-hour visit and departed for London from John F. Kennedy International Airport at around 7 p.m. Tuesday.

------

Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer and John Heilprin at the United Nations and Marc Beja in New York City contributed to this report.

Documentary: "Mi vida con Carlos" ("My Life with Carlos")

2010-07-01T10:22:00.000-05:00

First viewed on the Spanish blog, El blog del cine español.

'My Life with Carlos' is the journey of a son (director German Berger-Hertz) trying to learn the truth about his father, who was killed in 1973 in Pinochet's Chile. Deeply-personal, poetic, and suspenseful, the film chronicles the heroic actions that led to Carlos Berger's death and the devastating effect it had on his family. In this powerful cinematic document, Berger-Hertz confronts not only the horrors of his country's past but also his own.

Winner, Best Documentary at the San Diego Latino Film Festival
Voted Top Ten Audience favorite at Hot Docs
Winner, Best Film and Audience Award at the Biarritz FF, Winner, Best Film, Young Jury Award, Audience Award at the Rencontres du Cinema Marseille
Winner, Best Film at the Lleida Film Festival
Winner, Critics' Award at the Malaga Film Festival
Official Selection, Rotterdam International Film Festival
Official Selection, Goteborg Film Festival
Official Selection, Latinbeat - Film Society of Lincoln Center

My Life With Carlos TRAILER from German Berger on Vimeo.

On Nocturnal Statue Removals

2010-06-25T11:58:00.002-05:00

A statue of Joseph Stalin has been removed from its perch overnight (the short report follows). For those interested in the subject, I recommend this more extensive article published by the BBC, which outlines similar dictator-removal acts. I am all for the removal of dictatorial statues and symbols, but I think these nighttime removals are a bit sneaky, and don't really help install confidence in local politics. Covering up a video camera, doing the removal under a tarp or stopping by at 3 a.m. with a few pulleys and chains in itself suggests an authoritarian or paternalistic stance toward memory. It almost seems as if the state is telling the people, "we don't trust you, so we have to take matters into our own hands." These removals also beg the question, "what happens to these objects once they are removed?" Where are they stored? Who will see them, if anyone? What will replace these statues? How will these replacement objects be received?

I am reminded of a recent article from the Spanish press on the work of Fernando Sánchez Castillo (Madrid, 1970), who created several pieces on the Francoist legacy now showing as part of the PhotoEspaña exhibit. The pieces include 3 photographs, a video and a spinning head of Francisco Franco. In the article, Sánchez Castillo spoke of the difficulties he encountered when hoping to gain access to remnants of the Franco era. In 2002, the artist began a project - really, a sort of campaign -- that involved having several blind friends visit and touch statues of the dictator that had been removed upon the passage of the Law of Historical Memory (2007). However, only one government authority - the Barcelona city hall -- granted him permission to peruse the dictatorship storage unit. As the artist put it, the challenges he faced show that "we still have a serious problem with our history: we don't know what to do with it."

Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Tactic, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Juana de Aizpuru Gallery. © Fernando Sánchez Castillo

From: The New York Times

June 25, 2010
Statue of Stalin Removed from His Birthplace
By ELLEN BARRY

MOSCOW — Citizens in the Georgian city of Gori, the birthplace of Stalin, woke on Friday to discover that a towering statue of the dictator erected 48 years ago had been removed from the central square during the night, in another potent symbol of Georgia’s rejection of its Soviet legacy.

Georgian authorities took the statue down under conditions of complete secrecy, temporarily blocking the lens of a closed-caption camera that offers a live video feed from the square, according to the online news service civil.ge.

The city was badly battered by Russian bombing raids during the 2008 war, and officials said they would replace the statue with a monument to victims of Russian aggression. Still, the move is likely to anger some in Gori, which vigorously capitalized on its status as Stalin’s birthplace throughout the Soviet era and still offers a range of exhibits and impersonators to nostalgic tourists.

"Un largo invierno" ("A Long Winter") - documentary on Spain's March 11 and Pilar Manjón

2010-06-14T19:25:00.005-05:00

On March 11, 2004 -- known as "el 11-M" in Spain -- 191 people were killed and thousands wounded when ten bombs exploded on four different commuter trains in a terrorist attack in Madrid. Until 2004, terrorist attacks in Spain had been largely tied to ETA, the Basque separatist organization. Initially, Spanish politicians -- including the president at the time, José María Aznar, and the candidate for president, Mariano Rajoy, both of the Partido Popular, or "People's Party" (PP) -- and media blamed ETA for the attacks. However, ETA had long had a practice of announcing their attacks prior to their occurrence, as well as assuming responsibility for them. Also, despite the fact that ETA had murdered over 800 since 1968, their largest attack was the Barcelona Hipercor bombing of 1987, which killed 21.

Occurring just three days before Spain's presidential elections, the attacks inspired widespread protests when it became apparent that the governing party (aligned with Bush and Blair) had attempted to sway public opinion by contacting the media and asking them to support the ETA theory, as Democracy Now reported in November 2004:

Within a few hours, Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar had called all the major media executives in the country and told them that ETA, the Basque separatist group, was to blame. Such was the conviction expressed by the president that Spain’s largest newspaper, the left-leaning EL PAIS, published a special edition on the day of the attacks with the title "ETA massacre in Madrid."

Without a doubt, the ETA theory was politically-motivated. As is well-known, the Aznar government supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The widely-publicized photo of Tony Blair, George Bush, and Aznar smiling like the three amigos in the Azores had drawn the ire of Spaniards that had protested the war from the outset. Essentially, Aznar ignored public outrage about the Iraq invasion, and allied himself with England and the U.S. It is impossible to overlook the fact that two of the countries suffered major terrorist attacks on September and March 11 (England, on Juy 7, 2005). Thus, promoting the ETA theory served to benefit Aznar, while opening the door to radical Islamic terrorists did not. The people of Spain came together -- some holding signs reading "paz," some demanding the PP stop lying -- in a powerful, visible display of solidarity on the streets of Madrid.

The day after the bombings, a massive demonstration that had been promoted by the government to protest the attacks turned into a spontaneous antiwar event that condemned both the bombings in Madrid and in Iraq. Finally, on the eve of the elections, thousands of people congregated in front of the headquarters of the governing political party, the PP. They demanded to be told the truth. (Democracy Now, November 23, 2004)

In 2007, an official report ruled out any ETA involvement in the 2004 bombings, but was also unable to establish any direct links to Al-Qaeda. To date, at least 2 men have been sentenced - a Moroccan national and a Spaniard. Both men received sentences over 30,000 (thirty thousand) years and were charged with supplying the materials needed to make the bombs -- cell phones and dynamite. The years are mainly symbolic, as no one can remain in prison longer than 40 years in Spain. The Socialist party (PSOE), led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has been in power since 2004, but the Zapatero government has had its share of problems, particularly regarding the economy.

Similar to what happened in the U.S. after September 11, Spain has begun to witness an attempt to deal with March 11 via literature, film and music. Probably the best known example to date is the song "Jueves" by the now defunct pop group La Oreja de Van Gogh (LOVG). I also recently finished a short novel by Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, El corrector, which has March 11 as its backdrop. And just days ago, I read about a new documentary film, Un largo invierno, which adopts a new approach to the March 11 story. The film's trailer is embedded in this post below. English subtitles are forthcoming on the official site.

In Un largo invierno ("A Long Winter," 2009), director Sebastián Arabia opts for a much different focus than those we are used to seeing in "terror documentaries." Here, there are no images of smoldering, twisted train cars or people weeping. We do not see played for the millionth time, from the vantage point of an escalator, the moment one of the bombs explodes. In his hour-long film, Arabia zeroes in on one protagonist, Pilar Manjón, whose 20-year old son, Daniel Paz Manjón, died in the March 11 attacks. Significantly, Pilar Manjón is also the president of the Asociación 11M Afectados del Terrorismo ("March 11 Association of those Affected by Terrorism," originally meant to serve victims of March 11 and their families), founded in 2004. She might be said to be the public face of March 11 -- during the March 11 hearings, she called out politicians and accused terrorists alike, and demanded that a new commission be created, independent of political affiliation. Perhaps, it was this appearance that led to her largely negative portrayal by the mainstream press, but Manjón's affiliation with the worker's trade union Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) -- originally founded by the Spanish Communist party -- has probably also contributed unfairly to the tirade of insults she has received.

In addition to the extreme suffering caused by the violent death of her son, Pilar Manjón has had to tolerate public slandering. Cast as the leader of a conspiracy to bring down the right, Manjón has received death threats and even required a body guard to walk down the street. In 2008, she attempted to press charges against two voices of the COPE radio station (sponsored by the Catholic Church and of an extreme right nature) for publicly humilliating herself and, by extension, the victims of terrorism, with comments they made. The complaint was denied. Manjón has also been vocal about the lack of economic and moral support the victims of March 11 have received. Sure to be controversial is the moment in the documentary when Manjón assures the camera she wishes the attacks had been caused by ETA, because then the victims would have been considered "víctimas de primera" (first-class victims) by the Spanish government, rather than second-class citizens. The hierarchy of victims is a topic taken up by Judith Butler in Precarious Life, and I was reminded of this work when I heard this statement. However, to be clear, Manjón is just as angry about the deaths caused by March 11 as she is regarding the deaths in Iraq.

Un largo invierno oscillates between the testimony of Pilar Manjón and clips of Spanish politicians and mainstream media interviews, as well as footage from the protests which followed March 11. This was the first time I have listened to Manjón at length, and I found her to be an eloquent, informed speaker. She has an air of fatigue and grief about her, but her emotions rarely, if ever, overtake her statements. When Manjón is speaking, Arabia tends to use close-up shots, periodically zeroing in on her hands. On several occasions we catch a glimpse of what appears to be a tattoo of her son's name ("Dani") on Manjón's right hand.

I like the way the film begins, with viewers hearing Manjón's report to the March 11 commission being read in her own voice, and simultaneously watching Manjón appear to be listening to her words, as if from a distance. The film picks up the words of this report towards the end of the documentary as well. I also found the end of the film well-done, with the stark images of faces of all ages contrasted against the white background. Such shots are reminiscent of the earlier-mentioned "Jueves" video, and they humanize the events of March 11. However, as I will go into later on, I wonder why the director does not give viewers more access to these people at the end. Who are they? Are they families of the victims? Are some of them those who were wounded on that day? We cannot be sure. It seems we are to read them, as one reviewer put it, as Manjón's acolytes. Yet we just don't know, because they don't speak. Some are serious, some smile and seem to joke with one another. But, unlike Manjón, they remain nameless.

I believe that this was an important film to make, particularly given the politicized nature of March 11, and the villainization of Pilar Manjón. Just like in the U.S. and elsewhere, the notion of "terror" and the concept of the "victim" have been co-opted and manipulated by politicians for political gain. It is difficult to ignore Manjón's point that ETA victims are better treated than other victims of terrorism in Spain, particularly when she cites the economic and medical challenges many face, and asserts that some March 11 victims are actually getting worse rather than better. I also appreciate the director's efforts to allot Manjón her own speaking platform, while he weaves in documentation and audioclips that essentially denounce the center-right (El Mundo) and the extreme right's self-appointed spokespersons (Jiménez Losantos and César Vidal). That said, after viewing this film for the first time yesterday -- and I have not seen it multiple times, which I usually do with documentaries I hope to study -- I am left with some questions. I should add that yesterday, the film was available for viewing in its entirety on the official site, but today, that video has unfortunately been removed (trailer is below and is available only in Spanish at the time).

My doubts regarding this film have to do with the use of Manjón as a centerpiece. The official title of the documentary, Un largo invierno, is preceded by a short descriptor, referencing Manjón's name and position. But because the promotional materials feature Manjón's face in shadow, it seems clear that she is meant to stand in as a representative of that long winter. This is a fact Sebastián Arabia acknowledges -- in the words of the director, "había que corregir algo muy perverso, el aislamiento de Pilar" ("we had to correct something really sick, Pilar's isolation," translation mine). Arabia adds that Manjón has had to carry on her shoulders a very close-knit organization ("lleva sobre los hombros un colectivo muy unido").

Perhaps, one of the film's intentions is thus, to illustrate how the personal trauma of March 11 is also a collective one. Yet while we see the power of community uniting in the days after March 11, in full support of the victims, we are also reminded, sadly, of how a community may also unite against its own victims and their loved ones. I am reminded of the despicable comments made by Ann Coulter in 2006, when she called 9-11 widows "self-obssessed" women "reveling in their status as celebrities" who "enjoyed their husbands' death so much." Pilar Manjón has become the whipping toy for those who still resent that the PP lost the elections on March 14, 2004. I see Arabia's point in getting Manjón's extended testimony beyond the courtroom and the paparrazi, but isn't placing her at the center of his film taking something away from the rest of the stories of 11-M victims? What we have in this film is Pilar Manjón against the world. What about everyone else? Can this one woman really represent everyone? In Arabia's opinion, in telling Pilar's story, he is simultaneously telling a part of Spain's recent history ("No creo que sólo esté contando la historia de Pilar, creo que estoy contando una pequeña parte de la Historia de nuestro país”).

Ultimately, Un largo invierno is a study in memory and forgetting. On the one hand, we have the sense that the PP, the party in power in 2004, tried to impose its own (false) narrative about March 11, which arguably got the party kicked out of office. In addition, the film narrates the trials Manjón has endured, depicting them as concerted efforts to silence her. And, at the time of filming, it is five years later, and what we have is the sense that the March 11 victims and their families are being forgotten, removed from public view. Manjón speculates that this forgetting -- particularly, due to the lack of economic assistance by the Comunidad de Madrid -- is politically-motivated. We come away looking at Manjón as the voice against forgetting and silence about March 11. In fact, the film almost feels like we are to read it as Pilar Manjón's vindication.

Another way we might approach the subject of memory and forgetting has to do with the imagery Arabia chooses to use (or not). The director states that he purposely did not use images of 11-M because he wanted viewers to recall on their own the sentiments of those days in March 2004, but also because the photographs and videos of bodies and shattered, twisted train cars have been misued and abused. In this instance, I agree wholeheartedly with the director's decision. Also, by foregrounding images of the protests and politicians, Arabia tries to showcase the response to March 11, or what was going on while the majority of people were still glued to their TVs focusing on the sheer enormity of the tragedy -- this sort of "global" view would not have been possible just after the attacks, or even in the first few anniversaries.

Though the film was just released in April 2010 and does not yet have subtitles, I also have doubts about how the intricacies of the March 11 story will be explained to audiences abroad. The film manages to condense an incredibly complicated trajectory into 56 minutes, and I think the characters and events portrayed will be more than familiar to Spanish audiences. However, viewers outside Spain are going to require quite a bit of background information to appreciate the film's ambitious attempt to depict the aftermath of the attacks -- and to do so through the voice of Pilar Manjón.

All in all, this is an important documentary for Spain (a country that has really seen an increase in documentary film production over the last 10 years or so), and especially remarkable considering the young age of the director. I admire Pilar Manjón tremendously, and I hope this film will help direct attention to the cause of her organization.

Please see the Facebook page for Un largo invierno here (English trailer is available on the FB site).

Memory and the Future

2010-06-10T20:40:00.000-05:00

Forthcoming in October 2010

Memory and the Future. Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society. Eds. Yifat Gutamn, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro.

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN-10: 0230247407
ISBN-13: 978-0230247406

Description: For those who study memory there is a nagging concern that memory studies are inherently backward-looking, that memory itself and the ways in which it is deployed, invoked and utilized can potentially hinder efforts to move forward. However, there are many memory scholars and practitioners who firmly believe that the study of memory is ultimately about and for the present and future. This view of memory as looking to the past as a way to shape the present and future is the basis for the increasingly relevant and pressing concerns about the relationship of memory to conflict and democratic politics: human rights and transitional justice, post-colonial memory, revenge and violence, testimony, imposture and forgery, social movements and utopian ideas, and the role of historical knowledge and testimony. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars to examine the relationship between past and present, and especially past and future.

Mass Grave Discovered, probably from Stalin era

2010-06-09T21:28:00.000-05:00

From: The New York Times

World Briefing | EUROPE
Russia: Workers Find Mass Grave
By REUTERS
Published: June 9, 2010

Workmen building a road outside of Vladivostok discovered a mass grave with at least 495 skeletons, probably dating to Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, municipal authorities said Wednesday. At least 3 ½ tons of bones were extracted from the site, the city government said. Many of the skulls had gunshot wounds. Millions of Soviet citizens were executed or died in labor camps during Stalin’s rule.

Garzón to continue fight for human rights outside Spain

2010-06-08T18:11:00.000-05:00

From The New York Times

June 8, 2010
Spanish Judge Says His Fight for Human Rights Will Endure
By RAPHAEL MINDER

MADRID — Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish judge who attained fame for pursuing international leaders before Spanish courts, says he is confident his country will continue to pursue accused criminals worldwide whatever the outcome of his own judicial travails.

Mr. Garzón, who went after leaders like Augusto Pinochet of Chile, was himself suspended last month after being charged with abusing his powers to investigate Spanish Civil War atrocities.

“I believe the seeds have been sown, despite the possible contradictions of a country that investigates outside but cannot now investigate inside,” Mr. Garzón said in Madrid last week in his first newspaper interview in a year.

“The principle of universal jurisdiction has in fact germinated and is a conquest that cannot be lost and will not be lost,” he said. “However, as always happens with international justice, it’s about two steps forward, then one step back, then one forward and then two back — so we advance with a lot of difficulties. Why? Because there are a lot of interests at play — judicial as well as political and diplomatic.”

Mr. Garzón, 54, would not discuss his planned defense against the charges against him. Besides those relating to his controversial Spanish Civil War investigation, Mr. Garzón also stands accused in two separate cases, one over personal funding received from a leading Spanish bank and one over allegedly illegal eavesdropping as part of a political corruption investigation.

Mr. Garzón was indicted last April by Judge Luciano Varela for allegedly overstepping his authority and ignoring a 1977 general amnesty that covers crimes perpetrated during the Spanish Civil War. In October 2008, Mr. Garzón had launched a politically sensitive investigation into tens of thousands of deaths and disappearances during the war and the ensuing dictatorship of Franco.

The controversy over his jurisdiction had already forced Mr. Garzón to abandon the investigation within a month, but legal action was still taken against him by far-right activists. Mr. Varella’s decision was then upheld a month later by the body that oversees Spain’s judiciary, which decided to suspend Mr. Garzón pending his trial.

His suspension on May 14 marked an abrupt role reversal for Mr. Garzón, who established his reputation as an international defender of human rights by making extensive use of Spain’s doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which opens the door to prosecution within Spain of crimes committed outside the country. On the domestic front, meanwhile, he also fought against political corruption, as well as violence perpetrated by ETA, the Basque separatist group.

However his investigations have long made him one of Spain’s most polemic figures. Detractors have also questioned his motivations after his brief stint in domestic politics in the 1990s as a senior member of the Socialist party.

Although he was suspended as a judge pending the outcome of the cases against him, Mr. Garzón was given permission to work as a consultant to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Mr. Garzón said that he did not expect to stay in the Netherlands beyond December and that he was not considering another job switch should his legal problems worsen. If found guilty of knowingly contravening a 1977 general amnesty, Mr. Garzón could be suspended for as long as 20 years from the bench, which would effectively end his career as a judge in Spain.

Asked, however, whether he had harbored grander international ambitions, Mr. Garzón said: “I had not thought about this and I would lie if I said yes or if I said no. Until now my work here absorbed me fully.”

Mr. Garzón, who has targeted the United States because of accusations of torture at its Guantánamo prison camp, expressed optimism that President Barack Obama would reverse “sooner rather than later” a decision by the Bush administration not to join the International Criminal Court, which was set up eight years ago.

“The court can now function, but of course with the U.S. it would be a lot better,” said Mr. Garzón, adding that Mr. Bush’s decision had been “one of the worst moments for me.”

In The Hague, Mr. Garzón will use his experience “in cases that are similar to what I have dealt with in the context of fight against terrorism, organized crime and cases of universal jurisdiction.”

Representatives from the ICC’s 111 signatory nations are currently meeting in Kampala, Uganda, to review the court’s role and work. The court has come under criticism particularly for its slowness to bring cases to trial, but also recently over generous spending on its inmates and their visiting relatives. Asked for his own assessment of the court, Mr. Garzón said “this tribunal is still in complete development.”

He added: “To bring a case there is complicated, but I still think faster than in many countries.”

Mr. Garzón rejected suggestions that his crusade against human rights abuses had become too personal to be taken over by one or more of his lower-profile colleagues, should his legal problems put an end to his own career.

“Spain has had a preponderant role in terms of universal criminal justice and of course this leadership is now under question for obvious reasons, but there are ongoing cases and this movement isn’t just a question of Baltazar Garzón or not, but of all those who’ve been involved,” he said.

Still, Dolores Delgado, a leading Spanish prosecuting attorney who has worked closely with Mr. Garzón, said in a separate interview that his departure was a lasting blow.

“He was a pioneer who managed, from a small state, to ignite a concept of international justice that was dead until he started,” she said. “What happens now? He has left and it is very unlikely that another figure like him can emerge.”

Forgetting as a result of new technologies

2010-06-08T12:34:00.001-05:00

I consider myself to be a fairly "connected" person, somehow "withit" technology-wise: I email, I blog, I have used discussion boards and created and used wikis. I am on Flickr, I've used Scribd, and I have made Slideshows. But I am still not on Facebook or Twitter, nor do I want to be, much to the chagrin of some of my friends and colleagues. This statement really stuck out in the article below:

'If you can’t forget because all this stuff is staring at you, what does that do to your ability to lay down new memories and remember things that you should be remembering?' Dr. Aboujaoude said. 'When you have 500 pictures from your vacation in your Flickr account, as opposed to five pictures that are really meaningful, does that change your ability to recall the moments that you really want to recall?'

I am reminded of a book I've been wanting to read, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. I suppose this entry doesn't really have to do with politics, but the changing ways we remember and forget are certainly relevant to the subject of this blog.

From: NYT, June 6, 2010
An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness
By TARA PARKER-POPE

Are your Facebook friends more interesting than those you have in real life?

Has high-speed Internet made you impatient with slow-speed children?

Do you sometimes think about reaching for the fast-forward button, only to realize that life does not come with a remote control?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, exposure to technology may be slowly reshaping your personality. Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.

“More and more, life is resembling the chat room,” says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford. “We’re paying a price in terms of our cognitive life because of this virtual lifestyle.”

We do spend a lot of time with our devices, and some studies have suggested that excessive dependence on cellphones and the Internet is akin to an addiction. Web sites like NetAddiction.com offer self-assessment tests to determine if technology has become a drug. Among the questions used to identify those at risk: Do you neglect housework to spend more time online? Are you frequently checking your e-mail? Do you often lose sleep because you log in late at night? If you answered “often” or “always,” technology may be taking a toll on you.

In a study to be published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia subjected 173 college students to tests measuring risk for problematic Internet and gambling behaviors. About 5 percent of the students showed signs of gambling problems, but 10 percent of the students posted scores high enough to put them in the at-risk category for Internet “addiction.”

Technology use was clearly interfering with the students’ daily lives, but it may be going too far to call it an addiction, says Nicki Dowling, a clinical psychologist who led the study. Ms. Dowling prefers to call it “Internet dependence.”

Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, “Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self,” to be released next year.

Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse.

“If you can’t forget because all this stuff is staring at you, what does that do to your ability to lay down new memories and remember things that you should be remembering?” Dr. Aboujaoude said. “When you have 500 pictures from your vacation in your Flickr account, as opposed to five pictures that are really meaningful, does that change your ability to recall the moments that you really want to recall?”

There is also no easy way to conquer a dependence on technology. Nicholas Carr, author of the new book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” says that social and family responsibilities, work and other pressures influence our use of technology. “The deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology,” Mr. Carr wrote in a recent blog post on the topic.

Some experts suggest simply trying to curtail the amount of time you spend online. Set limits for how often you check e-mail or force yourself to leave your cellphone at home occasionally.

The problem is similar to an eating disorder, says Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York who has led research on the addictive nature of online technology. Technology, like food, is an essential part of daily life, and those suffering from disordered online behavior cannot give it up entirely and instead have to learn moderation and controlled use. She suggests therapy to determine the underlying issues that set off a person’s need to use the Internet “as a way of escape.”

The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland asked 200 students to refrain from using electronic media for a day. The reports from students after the study suggest that giving up technology cold turkey not only makes life logistically difficult, but also changes our ability to connect with others.

“Texting and I.M.’ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” wrote one student. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”

Conference on Fiction and Trauma

2010-06-03T15:42:00.002-05:00

From: UPenn CFP

Collection CFP: Attached to Fiction: Trauma, Loss, Pleasure (4 October, 2010)

full name / name of organization:
Dr Hila Shachar and Dr Sophie Sunderland/English and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia

contact email:
attachedtofiction@gmail.com

Collection Call for Papers:

Attached to Fiction: Trauma, Loss, Pleasure

Editors: Dr Hila Shachar and Dr Sophie Sunderland, English and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia

Contact email: attachedtofiction@gmail.com

"Mr Sakamoto said that reading had saved his life. Not mathematics. Not money. Not travel. Reading. At a time, he said, when he felt blasted by images, words had anchored him, secured him, stopped his free-falling plunge into nowhere."

-Gail Jones, Dreams of Speaking (London: Harvill Secker, 2006), p. 132.

A survivor of the atomic bomb, Gail Jones’s Mr Sakamoto expresses the inherent relationship between literature, loss and trauma. Words that fail to mediate or reconcile loss can also form fictional worlds that offer a particular kind of fidelity to the troubling, incomprehensible event of loss. Attachments to fiction can therefore be intensely felt and strongly defended as part of traumatic experience. We are seeking 300-500 word abstracts for a book collection of essays and short stories on how fictional narratives intersect with personal narratives of loss and trauma. This collection also aims to explore the complex forms of pleasure brought about by the attachment to, or creation of, fiction during traumatic events, loss, or grief. Essays and fiction with an Australian focus are particularly welcome. Specific examples of topics might include, but are not limited to:

Family histories of loss and trauma told in fictional form

Identification with a specific novel or character at a particularly traumatic stage in life

The use of reading and writing as a therapeutic and cathartic experience

The “pleasure” of fiction during periods of loss and trauma

Writing through grief

Reflections upon why certain novels or narratives are particularly important during certain traumatic events

Fictional short stories that engage with the themes of literary production, trauma and loss

Personal narratives of coping with trauma and loss through the process of reading and writing

Theoretical perspectives on literary representations of trauma and loss

Attachment as a psychological and psychoanalytic model with which to consider personal relationships to fictional characters and narratives

Untold and forgotten stories of local Australian and Western Australian traumatic histories

Parallels between literary fiction and life experiences

The traumatic experience of writing itself

In the spirit of the collection, we welcome both fictional and non-fictional short stories and personal essays that engage with the primary themes of the collection. Essays and short stories can be approached from any tone, from the humorous and irreverent, to the serious and contemplative. While scholarly approaches are also welcome, these essays and short stories should be in the style of creative fiction and non-fiction.

Currently, Australian author Gail Jones (University of Western Sydney) is attached to this project as a possible contributor. We welcome abstracts from scholars, creative writers, emerging and established authors, and others. Please send abstracts and a short bio by 4th of October, 2010, to Hila Shachar and Sophie Sunderland at attachedtofiction@gmail.com. Complete essays and short stories of approximately 3000-5000 words will be due on 31st of January, 2011. Inquiries are welcome.

* By web submission at 06/03/2010 - 10:03

Op-Ed Piece on Judge Garzón and International Justice

2010-05-31T22:32:00.003-05:00

Published today in the New York Times:

May 31, 2010
International Justice-For Others
By GUÉNAËL METTRAUX

On May 14, the Spanish General Council of the Judiciary suspended Judge Baltasar Garzón from his functions following his indictment on charges of abuse of authority.

His crime? Garzón allegedly over-stepped his mandate when deciding to initiate an investigation into the disappearance of civilians during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship despite a law of amnesty that covered these crimes.

In the years before that, Garzón had become a living symbol of international justice as he pursued the likes of Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden in the name of universal principles of human dignity, human rights and the international fight against impunity.

The reaction to Garzón’s latest investigative efforts and the Brazilian Supreme Court’s recent upholding of a law of amnesty that applies to the crimes of Brazil’s military dictatorship are powerful reminders that states can still decide what to do with their past, even when that past involves mass atrocities.

That possibility, however, is not open to all states in equal measure. Where their sovereignty has been subjugated (as with Germany after World War II) or where they can be politically pressed into submission (Serbia, most recently), states can be forced to subject their actions to the judgment of other nations in the name of the same values that had validated Garzón’s efforts.

Despite repeated assertions that a body of universal criminal prohibitions applicable to all has grown from these values, they remain to a large extent “le droit des autres,” a set of rules that we seem content to apply to others, but not to ourselves. The “others” are those, states and individuals, who have lost the political muscle to preempt or resist the application of that regime to them.

The International Criminal Court, a tribunal with global ambitions, has thus far only indicted Africans, although more than a hundred countries from five continents have now joined the Court, and crimes coming within its jurisdiction have arguably been committed outside of Africa.

Meanwhile, domestic courts in the Netherlands have successfully shielded Dutch soldiers and the state from judicial scrutiny for their alleged failure to prevent mass atrocities in Srebrenica in July 1995, while Serb and Bosnian nationals are being prosecuted on Dutch territory by an international tribunal for their involvement in those events. The same tribunal declined a few years ago to even investigate crimes attributed to NATO forces in Serbia during the 1999 bombing campaign.

While it could be that no international crimes were committed on those occasions or that there might be other good reasons not to prosecute such cases, a refusal to look into them contribute to creating the unfortunate impression that international accountability matters to some, but not to all.

The indictment of Garzón feeds into this uncomfortable sense of political selectivity in the application of the law. While Garzón was not prevented from investigating Argentine or Chilean nationals by local amnesties, Spanish law seemingly creates an absolute prohibition against an endeavor of the same kind that targets fellow nationals.

Garzón’s error was to assume that the values which had provided a moral and legal justification for his past crusades truly applied universally. Unfortunately, that is not yet the case. International criminal justice still operates selectively within the cracks that international politics have opened up for it.

While it could be argued that some justice is better than none, the present hyper-selectivity of international criminal justice could be most damaging to its credibility in the longer term.

The legitimacy of the rule of law, domestic or international, is based on the assumption that it does apply to all, without prejudice and without discrimination. Stripped of that element, it risks becoming — and will be portrayed as — a tool of political convenience for the powerful.

Before pushing any further the boundaries of international criminal justice, we should ask ourselves whether we are truly committed to subject the conduct of our own leaders and fellow citizens to the standard that we seek to apply to others.

We should also question whether we may legitimately force other nations to face their past in the name of supposedly universal values when we allow powerful countries such as Spain or Brazil to forget and forgive the crimes of their past. If the answer is no, we should perhaps show a great deal more restraint in imposing our demands for justice in states other than our own.

Our commitment to the rule of law should be measured against our readiness to see the standards that we wish to impose on others applied to our fellow citizens. The dismissal of charges against Garzón would be a good place to start the necessary process of making these standards truly universal.

Guénaël Mettraux represents defendants before international criminal tribunals. He is the author of “The Law of Command Responsibility.”

L.A. Times on Judge Garzón

2010-05-23T10:07:00.006-05:00

The L.A. Times has published a new, more extensive article on Judge Garzón today. Thanks again to The Volunteer for sharing the link on their blog.

Crusading Spain judge Garzon himself a defendant - latimes.com

Posted using ShareThis

Irish Times on Garzón

2010-05-19T21:36:00.000-05:00

This blog is quickly becoming a Baltasar Garzón blog. Certainly, when I created it, I did not intend for it to become one. However, at the moment, I am looking for a place to archive articles from the English-speaking press on the Garzón case. Here is the latest one, from The Irish Times.

Key phrase: "it is not only this controversial investigating magistrate who will be on trial in the coming months. It will be Spain’s political system itself, and the problematic legacy left by the Franco regime."

The Irish Times - Thursday, May 20, 2010
Baltasar Garzón

THE ROLLERCOASTER career of Spain’s so-called “star judge”, Baltasar Garzón, has hit a new low with the decision of the General Council of the Judiciary to suspend him from professional duties last week. The case that led to this suspension concerns his investigations into the crimes committed under Gen Franco’s 40-year dictatorship during and following the 1936-39 civil war.

The Supreme Court argues that he did this in the full knowledge that a 1970s amnesty law protects the perpetrators of human rights abuses under that dictatorship. He is charged with perversion of justice at the Supreme Court on this and two other counts. But his supporters argue that he is really being prosecuted for highlighting an uncomfortable reality – modern Spanish democracy is built on a dubious political deal, euphemistically known as “the pact of forgetfulness”, between the heirs of the dictatorship and a majority of democrats. So it is not only this controversial investigating magistrate who will be on trial in the coming months. It will be Spain’s political system itself, and the problematic legacy left by the Franco regime.

The separation of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary is a key democratic principle, but all three cases against Garzón reveal a dangerous degree of politicisation in the Spanish courts. It is tempting to paint Garzón as the innocent victim of such political intrigue. However, this unpredictably partisan figure often appears to be its creature as well as its current target. His fatal error may have been to antagonise all political factions over his 30-year tenure as a senior investigating magistrate.The highs in his professional life have certainly been spectacular. He is best known abroad for his unprecedented attempt to extend the reach of international human rights law.

But his extraordinary achievements have been tarnished by his tendency to exceed his legal powers to get results. This has been equally evident in many high-profile cases: his ruthless pursuit of radical Basque political parties and media; of drug barons; and, most recently and now also the object of a Supreme Court case against him, of corruption in Spain’s biggest opposition party, the right-wing Partido Popular (PP). The flaws in his professional practice might be forgiven if his trial brings about judicial reform and an end to Spain’s amnesia about the dictatorship. But this patently ambitious man has too few friends left in high places for this to be a likely outcome.

L.A. Times on Garzón's Suspension

2010-05-17T08:56:00.004-05:00

Thanks to The Volunteer, a newsletter-blog published on behalf of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, I've found out about a new article on the suspension of Judge Garzón, published yesterday in the opinion section of the L.A. Times. Of course, it's a bit exaggerated to call this case "a new Spanish Civil War," and yet, one understands where the sentiment is coming from. It is easy to feel that many of the same types of divisions that motivated that war are still in play today.

Lately, in the U.S., most of the news coming out of Spain has had to do with the economy. It is good to know some papers are also interested in keeping readers abreast of the other less visible controversy. We cannot praise Judge Garzón when he goes after figures like Pinochet, Osama Bin Laden, or members of the Bush administration, and then criticize him for attempting to pursue justice in his own country, by bringing the crimes of Francoism to light! This case is still in need of greater international visibility.

A new Spanish civil war
A legal attack on Spain's star judge, Baltasar Garzon, is launched after his attempts to probe Spanish Civil War deaths.
May 16, 2010

For years, conservatives in Spain bristled as their most famous magistrate, Baltasar Garzon, pushed the boundaries of international law against former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet and human rights abusers in other countries, but they were powerless to stop him. When Spain's star judge turned his sights on Spanish Civil War atrocities, however, they joined forces with his many personal enemies and went after him, accusing him of opening old wounds and violating the country's 1977 amnesty law. Last week, a Supreme Court judge decided to bring the case to trial, and the General Council of the Judiciary voted in an emergency session to suspend Garzon.

From the beginning, the case against Garzon has seemed to be motivated by political and personal vendettas, and the timing of these decisions is no exception. Early in the week, Garzon had asked Spanish authorities for a seven-month leave to work as a consultant to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, presumably as a face-saving measure to avoid the humiliation of a suspension. But on Wednesday, an investigating magistrate for the Supreme Court (and one of Garzon's detractors) suddenly ordered Garzon to face trial for proceeding without jurisdiction on the Spanish Civil War cases, and the suspension followed on Friday. Such haste in a case that had been moving normally through the system since February has the whiff of malice; the decision was made even though the Spanish attorney general's office still had questions about the case. If convicted, the 54-year-old Garzon would not be jailed, but he could be removed from the bench for up to 20 years. For all practical purposes, it would mean the end of his career in Spain.

Garzon is a hero to many in the international human rights community for his pursuit of criminals and despots, regardless of their political bent, and for his commitment to international laws that say crimes against humanity cannot be amnestied or subjected to statutes of limitations. But heroes are often flawed characters, and Garzon is no exception. His ego and grandstanding, along with his legal stands, have earned him enemies. He is also being investigated in connection with questionable wiretaps he ordered in a probe of a corruption scandal involving the conservative opposition party.

In the Spanish Civil War case, Garzon sought to apply at home the principles he had championed abroad. He tried to open a case on behalf of relatives of the tens of thousands of Spaniards who died or disappeared in the war that ushered in the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco in 1939, despite the amnesty covering the deaths and disappearances during the war and in its aftermath. The vehemence with which Garzon's inquiry was rejected is not surprising given the bloody history of the period, yet the legal action against Garzon is; it's one thing for his superiors to disagree with his judgment in bringing the case or to determine that he is overreaching, but it is quite another to charge him with breaking the law for doing so. Whatever happens in the case against Garzon, it seems that Spain is going to have to probe that past and provide the families with answers. The political divisions that marked that dark chapter of Spanish history still seem to be in play.

Visual Commentary on the Garzón Suspension

2010-05-15T10:34:00.000-05:00

The following cartoons appeared today in the Spanish paper Público.

Title: "The winners"
Artist: Manel Fontdevila
Date: May 15, 2010

Here, a group of men gathers to read the news, "Garzón expelled." The first man comments, "Great news! The winners wrote history." And then he states with apparent glee, "And now, we're also rewriting it!" The men clearly represent the "victors" of the Civil War, or at least, the inheritance they left behind.

Artist: Vergara
Title: "Day of the masks"
Date: May 15, 2010

Yesterday, as Judge Garzón left the Spanish Supreme Court, his supporters lined the street, many of whom carried likenesses of the judge ("We are all Garzón"). On the left, we see Garzón in tears, disguised by the old theatrical comedy mask -- perhaps, to symbolize the farce of the suspension and the sham of the justice system, but also because it was reported that initially, the judge appeared to have received good news, which turned out not to be the case. On the right of the drawing we see a Franco-era officer (actually, it looks to be Franco himself), dressed in judicial robes. The mask he is holding up is that of Luciano Varela, one of the Supreme Court magistrates at the head of the charges of "prevarication" against Garzón (and, not coincidentally, someone who strongly opposed the Law of Historical Memory prior to its 2007 passage).

Editorial in The Nation on Garzón

2010-05-14T23:47:00.002-05:00

Professors Sebastiaan Faber and Geoff Pingree of Oberlin College (Ohio) have published a comment piece in the The Nation, "Garzón on Trial." Available in PDF here.

Videos on Garzón Case

2010-05-14T15:43:00.010-05:00

Supporters of Judge Garzón await him upon his departure from the Supreme Court today. They are shouting, "Garzón, amigo, el pueblo está contigo!" ("Garzón, friend, the people are with you!"). The title of the first video is "Garzón leaves the court of the Audiencia Nacional in tears."

Garzón Suspended!

2010-05-14T08:21:00.007-05:00

I still cannot believe the news to which I have awoken this morning. Judge Baltasar Garzón has been suspended today from the Audiencia Nacional FOR INVESTIGATING THE CRIMES OF FRANCOISM. Spanish reports say Garzón left the court crying. This is not the end, because the judge will still need to stand trial, but his prospects are not looking good at this point. I hold firm to my belief that this is a politically-motivated attempt to remove a judge that has gone above and beyond to support human rights worldwide. In addition, we are witnessing the attempt to silence, once again, the Francoist past and those who dare speak out against it. Whatever happens to Garzón in the end, his case has at least heightened awareness about forced disappearences and executions of the Franco era, and what the judge has called Francoist "crimes against humanity." There will be a protest in front of the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid tonight at 8 (2 pm E.S.T.). More on this story later in the day.

Leer más en español

From: BBC News

Spanish judge Garzon is suspended

High-profile Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon has been suspended from his post by the country's judicial body.

The decision was unanimously adopted by the General Council of the Judiciary.

He is due to face trial on charges that he abused his powers by opening an inquiry in 2008 into crimes committed during Francisco Franco's rule.

Mr Garzon was later forced to drop the investigation into the crimes committed during the 1936-39 Civil War in Spain, which are covered by an amnesty.

Controversial judge

In February, a Supreme Court investigating magistrate ruled that Mr Garzon had ignored the 1977 amnesty by launching the investigation.

Mr Garzon, 54, who is highly popular among the Spanish political left and international human rights campaigners, appealed against the ruling, saying his inquiry was legitimate.

But some on the right accuse Mr Garzon of launching cases that are politically motivated.

Tens of thousands of people disappeared during Spain's Civil War and under Gen Franco's regime that followed.

Mr Garzon is also famous for targeting international figures, including late Chilean military ruler Augusto Pinochet, and al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

Earlier this week, Mr Garzon reportedly asked to take a leave of absence to work for the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Judicial sources at Spain's National Court say Mr Garzon wants to work as an adviser for the ICC for seven months.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8682948.stm

Published: 2010/05/14 12:47:23 GMT

© BBC MMX

Judge Garzón, about to be tried for investigating crimes of Francoism

2010-05-12T09:40:00.003-05:00

From Typically Spanish

Oral hearing opened in the Supreme Court against Judge Baltasar Garzón

By h.b. - May 12, 2010 - 12:02 PM

Garzón faces suspension on charges of perversion of the course of justice

The Supreme Court magistrate, Luciano Varela, on Wednesday opened the oral court case against National Court judge, Baltasar Garzón, who is accused of perversion of the course of justice by starting to investigate the disappearances of people during the Franco years. There is no appeal possible against the decision which is the last step before Spain’s star judge is put on the accused bench, and which will imply his immediate temporary suspension from his National Court post while the case continues.

It comes a day after it was learnt that Garzón has applied for a post at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and whether he is allowed to take up that post now depends on the General Council for Judicial Power, the body which oversees the judiciary in Spain. They are the same body which could announce the temporary suspension of the judge from his post, and some consider there will be more news from them later today.

Garzón commented on Wednesday that he is not leaving either the judiciary, nor his place in the National Court.

Garzón to work at the Hague?

2010-05-12T00:05:00.003-05:00

I am not sure what to make of the news that Judge Garzón has asked to take a leave of absence. At this point, it seems rather like a face-saving measure. Were Garzón to work for the International Criminal Court (see below), it would certainly give him increased visibility on the world stage, making "el caso contra Garzón" in Spain seem even more provincial and ridiculous.

From: BBC

Spain judge Garzon 'seeks leave'

High-profile Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon has asked to take a leave of absence to work for the International Criminal Court (ICC), reports say.

Judicial sources at Spain's National Court say Mr Garzon wants to work as an adviser for the ICC for seven months.

The judge was indicted last month for exceeding his authority by launching an inquiry in 2008 into crimes committed by General Francisco Franco's rule.

The crimes during Spain's 1936-39 Civil War are covered by an amnesty.

Spanish judicial sources say that Mr Garzon, 54, has received a job offer by the ICC chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo.

They say Spain's judicial oversight board has to decide whether to grant Mr Garzon the leave of absence.

Mr Garzon has not publicly commented on the issue.

Popular with the left

In February, a Supreme Court investigating magistrate ruled that Mr Garzon had ignored the 1977 amnesty by launching the investigation into atrocities committed during the four-decade rule of Gen Franco.

Mr Garzon, who is highly popular among the Spanish political left and international human rights campaigners, appealed against the ruling, saying his inquiry - now shelved - was legitimate.

But some on the right accuse Mr Garzon of launching cases that are politically motivated.

Tens of thousands of people disappeared during Spain's Civil War and under the Franco regime that followed.

Mr Garzon is also famous for targeting international figures, including late Chilean military ruler Augusto Pinochet and al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8675548.stm

Published: 2010/05/11 14:53:24 GMT

© BBC MMX

From: The New York Times

World Briefing | Europe
Job Offer for Noted Spanish Judge
By MARLISE SIMONS
Published: May 11, 2010

Spain’s well-known investigating magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, left, who is being prosecuted in a case filed by far-right Spanish groups, has been offered a temporary post as an external adviser to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a court official there said. The judge gained an international reputation as a fearless prosecutor of cases including those on Basque and Islamist terrorism, drug traffickers and the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Garzón was indicted last month on charges of abusing his powers. He has denied the charges.

Para leer más en español, pinchar aquí

Conference: Forms and Functions of Social Memories

2010-05-11T23:58:00.004-05:00

From UPENN CFP:

Call for Papers (see website here):

Forms and Functions of Social Memories -- Perspectives from Social and Cultural Sciences
The conference "Forms and Functions of Social Memories -- Perspectives from Social and Cultural Sciences" takes place at the Institute for Sociology of the University of Erlangen. It starts at December 10th and ends December 12th around noon. It is planned as a mixture between plenary and panel sessions.

Please send a 500 words proposal for a 30 min. paper by September 30th, 2010 to: info@soziale-erinnerung.de.

The conference aims at collecting and re-considering the manifold empirical research on social memories on behalf of their theoretical potential. It is an astonishing fact, that despite of a lot of research in social and cultural sciences on social memories there are rather few comprehensive theoretical considerations. Therefore, we want to set the focus on the integration of different theoretical approaches and empirical research.

In the self-definition of modernity multiple social memories take the place of the "Great Narrative" on different levels that don't have to be compatible. A theory of social memories faces the problem of integrating social dynamics, cultural pluralisation and processes of social differentiation without ignoring contexts of interactions like families or milieus. However, the circulating terms and definitions of forms of social memories should not just be placed side by side. Instead we want to focus, empirically and theoretically, on the processes of formation and constitution that underlie these conceptualizations to work out both lines of conflict and potentials of integration.

The conference would like to discuss theoretical concepts and empirical studies concerning social memories in an interdisciplinary framework. Based on these discussions we would like to ask for theoretical enhancements. From performative acts to narrative situations of interaction or discourse, constructions and representations of the past should be observed in conjunction with problems like oblivion, authenticity, factuality and validity or breaches in the transmission of the past. On the one hand the future directedness of social memories in form of again and again constituted horizons of expectations should be clarified. On the other hand it is deemed to analyse social memories in their function as mechanisms of "Transmission" regarding the specific selectivities that evolve at the intersections (of persons, groups, generations, discourses, etc.) and that constitute the specific relationship between remembrance and oblivion. According to this, the definition of the particular functionality of memories for the processes of social and individual formation of meaning is important, on both counts biographically and systemically.

Of equal importance is the reflection of institutionalised remembrance and of the own position of a speaker: Scientists are directly or indirectly involved in the practice of (institutionalised) remembrance and therefore are facing the challenge of concerning themselves with its contexts, conditions, (political) purpose and the implicit ideologies.

We have invited the following speakers: Paul Connerton (Oxford/UK), Elena Esposito (Modena/Reggio Emilia/ Italy), Mary Fulbrook (London/UK), Jeffrey K. Olick (Virginia/USA), Gabriele Rosenthal (Goettingen/Germany), Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (Warsaw/Poland), Christian Gudehus (Essen/Germany)

Topics include:

* Individual -- Interaction -- Society: boundaries and transitions between the different forms of memories
* Metaphors, terms and forms of social memories and their conditions of formation
* Influence of social differentiation on social remembrance (generations, classes, cultural pluralisation, gender, etc.)
* Transformation of social memories (interdependency of social transformations, processes and social memories)
* Facticity, authenticity and the realm of experience
* Media, discourse and their functions for remembrance
* Re-presentations of the past (body memory, rituals, sites of remembrance, etc.)
* Social and individual practices of remembrance
* Transgenerational transmission and breaches of tradition
* Remembrance and oblivion between institution, power and ideology

The conference languages will be English and German. The presentations are intended to be published in a special volume of a sociological journal after the conference.

Deutsch

Mass Grave Uncovered in Serbia

2010-05-10T10:36:00.004-05:00

From: The New York Times

May 10, 2010
Mass Grave of Kosovo Victims Found in Serbia
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:26 a.m. ET

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) -- Acting on tips from witnesses, Serbian war crimes prosecutors have discovered a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of 250 Albanians who were killed in Kosovo during the 1998-99 war there, then transported to Serbia and secretly buried to hide the atrocities, officials said Monday.

The burial site -- hidden beneath a small building and a newly built parking lot -- is the fourth mass grave of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo that has been found in Serbia since 2001. Two others were discovered in Kosovo. In each case, most of the bodies were those of civilians, including women and children.

The latest discovery is another example of the mass atrocities that were committed during the bloody Serb crackdown on the Kosovo separatists that killed at least 10,000 people and left nearly a million displaced.

Hundreds of bodies of slain ethnic Albanians have been exhumed in Serbia and returned to Kosovo since Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power in a popular revolt in 2000. The previously discovered mass graves in Serbia represented the bulk of genocide charges filed against Milosevic at a U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Netherlands, where he died of a heart attack during his trial in 2006.

Serbia has since tried to deal with its wartime past as it seeks European Union membership, which requires the prosecution of those who committed atrocities during the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. Milosevic's policies still have strong support among ultranationalists in Serbia.

''According to witness testimonies, there are 250 bodies of Kosovo Albanians inside'' the newly discovered grave, Serbia's war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said at a news conference Monday in Belgrade, Serbia's capital.

He said exhumations would begin soon at the site, which was discovered based on witness accounts and in cooperation with a European Union mission in Kosovo.

Serbia's war crimes prosecutor's office said the grave is located in a hilly, rural area of Rudnica, near the town of Raska, 180 kilometers (108 miles) south of Belgrade.

Aerial photos of the site showed a house and a small parking lot near a road nestled between the hills. Vukcevic's deputy, Bruno Vekaric, said the mass grave is believed to be located beneath the building and the parking lot.

Officials did not say when the grave was discovered.

During the Kosovo war, the bodies of Kosovo victims were brought to Serbia by Milosevic's regime in an attempt to cover up the atrocities against civilians.

Some 1,860 ethnic Albanians are still missing from the Kosovo war, many believed to have been buried by Serb forces in similar mass graves in Serbia.

''Serbia has the democratic capacity to face what happened,'' Vukcevic said. ''It is our obligation to the victims who have the right to bury the dead.''

The brutality of Serbia's crackdown in Kosovo prompted NATO to bomb the country in 1999, forcing Milosevic to pull out his troops. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Belgrade refuses to recognize it.

In Kosovo on Monday, officials urged Serbia to face up to its past and overcome its troubled relations with Kosovo Albanians.

Kosovo deputy Prime Minister, Rame Manaj, claimed the discovery was a result of pressure from the EU.

''This comes too late, but this pressure from the international community is welcome as it is the only force that can move things from point zero,'' Manaj said of the discovery of the bodies.

''It is painful news,'' said Xhavit Beqiri, the spokesman for Kosovo's president.

''We suspect there are more Kosovo victims in other such mass graves around Serbia which Belgrade has always known about, but has selectively unearthed them to reduce the scope of the crimes committed in Kosovo,'' Beqiri said.

Vukcevic urged Kosovo's authorities to investigate the fate of about 500 Kosovo Serbs who he said remain unaccounted for since the 1998-99 war after revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians.

------

Associated Press writers Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade and Nebi Qena in Pristina contributed to this report.

Eds: CORRECTS that 4 of the mass graves were found in Serbia, 2 in Kosovo.

From: BBC News

New Serbian mass grave discovered

A new mass grave thought to hold the bodies of about 250 Kosovo Albanians has been found in Serbia, the country's war crimes prosecutor has told the BBC.

It said the information had come from Eulex, the EU police mission in Kosovo, and Serbia was sending investigators.

The victims are believed to have been killed during the 1998-99 conflict, when Serbian forces fought ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo.

The grave is near the town of Raska, close to the border with Kosovo.

There had been rumours two years ago that the grave existed, but searches at that time found nothing.

'Beneath building'

The war crimes prosecutor's office said it would be several days before exhumations could begin at the site in Rudnica, about 180km (110 miles) south of Serbia's capital, Belgrade.

Officials said the remains were buried beneath a building whose foundations had been deliberately constructed to hide the site, reports the BBC's Mark Lowen in Belgrade.

The prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, said the discovery was a sign that Serbia was committed to coming to terms with its history.

"This is more proof that Serbia does not shy away from its dark past and is ready to bring to justice all those who have committed crimes," Mr Vukcevic was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

Our correspondent says identifying the victims through DNA analysis is likely to take several more years - and prolong the painful period of reconciliation.

It is not the first time mass graves from the conflict have been found in Serbia. The bodies of more than 800 Kosovo Albanians were found in several locations in Serbia in 2001, including police compounds.

The bodies were moved out of Kosovo before a Nato bombing campaign forced Serbian security forces out of the region.

Other, smaller mass graves have been found containing Serbian victims of ethnic Albanians.

Researchers in Serbia and Kosovo say more than 11,000 people died in the Kosovo conflict, most of them ethnic Albanian, but at least 2,300 Serbs.

Hundreds missing

A further 1,800 people are classified as missing, according to Eulex figures, but are presumed to be dead.

A former top Serbian police official, Vlastimir Djordjevic, is currently on trial at the UN's Hague-based war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslovia.

He was allegedly involved in the murders of hundreds of ethnic Albanians and the deportation of 800,000 others from Kosovo during the conflict, when he was in charge of police forces in Serbia.

He denies charges of deportation, murder and persecution.

He was a close aide to the late Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who died in tribunal custody in 2006 before a verdict was reached in his trial for war crimes.

Belgrade withdrew forces from the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999 after a Nato bombing campaign, and the area was put under UN control.

Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008 has been recognised by more than 50 countries, including the US and most EU states, but not recognised by more than 100, including Serbia and Russia.

Recent Serbian governments have been pro-Western and last year the country submitted a formal application to join the EU.

But membership negotiations cannot begin in earnest until two war crimes suspects - including the former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic - have been captured.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8671783.stm

Published: 2010/05/10 12:36:48 GMT

© BBC MMX

40th Anniversary of May 4, 1970

2010-05-05T01:45:00.011-05:00

May 4, 2010 is almost over, and yet, I cannot let this day pass without writing at least a few lines (in fact, it will be May 5 by the time this is posted). Today was the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. Although I was not even born yet, I am tied to the events of that day for two reasons - my uncle was a journalism student at Kent State in 1970, and I graduated with two degrees from the university in the 1990s. In 1995, I attended and participated in the 25th year commemoration of the shootings. I often think that my interest in memory goes back to my early experiences at the university, and the yearly debates that surfaced about what to do -- or not -- to commemorate May 4 (photo of students running for cover in a May 4 parking lot)

During my six years in Kent, my feelings about May 4 evolved and matured, as I listened to professors, students, family members, townspeople and poets bear witness (my uncle NEVER talked about May 4 -- it was, in a sense, his secret). As a first-year student, I went to an initial meeting of the "May 4th Task Force," but I was not involved in politics at the time, and I felt that I would need to be were I to become a part of the group. Later, I participated in a silent candelight procession on May 3 around the perimeter of the campus, which ended in the parking lot where the students were shot. This was one of the most moving moments of my time as a Kent State student.

Over the past few days, I have barely been able to keep up with the articles and reports on May 4. Rather than attempting to review the multiple articles out there on Kent State, I will just post links to several, most of which are from the greater northeast Ohio area:

"Kent State and May 4: a new generation refuses to forget" (in Scene - part 1)
"A 40-Year Old Tragedy and the Wounds that Never Heal" (in Scene - part 2)
"On 40th Anniversary of Kent State Shootings, Truth Tribunal Seeks Answers" (in Democracy Now)
"Kent State Shooting Divided Campus and Country" (on NPR)
"Shots Still Reverberate for Survivors of Kent State" (on NPR)
"Vietnam War Still Stirs Passionate Divisions at Kent State May 4 Events" (in Cleveland Plain Dealer)
"Lives Interrupted" (in Akron Beacon Journal)
"Kent State: Coming of Age 40 Years after May 4, 1970 Shootings that Stunned America" (in Cleveland Plain Dealer)

The flood of articles is, of course, due to the anniversary year. However, the increased press is also because the May 4 site has recently been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and a new "walking tour" has been constructed to facilitate doing what the stones of the memorial state -- "inquire, learn, reflect." A "visitors' center" is also planned, which will be housed in Taylor Hall, the journalism building that sat in the middle of the protests and the fatal shots.

I am glad that the University has taken steps to acknowledge visibly the physical markers of May 4, or to give voice to those places where a story has been missing. For example, when I was a student at Kent, everyone knew to "look for the bullet hole," and yet, this hole remained unidentified to the everyday observer. I have not yet returned to Kent to visit the campus and see how the tour is laid out, but it seems to be designed to enhance engagement with and reflection on the past, as well as with the present. Kent State did not happen in a vacuum, and hopefully, the tour will provide an appropriate historical context for the events of May 4, so that the memorial and eventual "visitors' center" can be as interactive as possible. A few pictures:

from the KSU website

May 4 Memorial, dedicated 1990 (photo here)

Without a doubt, it is essential to learn what happened on May 4, 1970 in Kent, Ohio.* Unfortunately, part of the learning has, until now, often involved "picking a side," with the choices being "innocent students" versus "evil National Guard." After all this time, hopefully we can do better than that. There are so many ways we can link the local tragedy of May 4 to the national tragedies war produces. When we learn about one May 4, we inevitably find out about others, much like Ariel Dorfman opened many Americans' eyes with The Other September 11.

When we remember the 4 students killed 40 years ago at Kent State, we should take the time to inquire about other unjust deaths, including those perpetrated by our own country. I agree with and like the "Inquire, Learn, Reflect" statement on the stones that form part of the 1990 May 4 Memorial. But perhaps, 20 years after that memorial was unveiled, Kent State is showing the university is ready to go beyond reflection, toward action.

What will it mean to make May 4 a "historical site"? This summer, I plan a visit to Ohio. I will report back with more detailed observations then. For more, see the Kent State May 4 Center website here and the university's Center for Applied Conflict Mangagement.

*Laurel Krause, the sister of one of the May 4 victims, has set up a "Kent State Truth Tribunal: "We hope the Kent State Truth Tribunal will help to heal those involved, establish cause and effect, and shed light on responsibility for the events that transpired on May 4, 1970. We have not set out in pursuit of punitive justice, but rather the restorative justice that comes from collective sharing and healing. The Truth Tribunal honors those whose lives have been directly affected by the killings and also marks the importance of Kent State as an influential chapter in the history of protest, democracy, civil rights and public security in the United States."

In memory of R.B.

"An Injustice in Spain" - editorial in the New York Times

2010-04-09T06:51:00.001-05:00

From: The New York Times

Bravo, New York Times. Key phrase, the first one, where it states that this case should have been thrown out a long time ago. I will write more about this case shortly.

April 9, 2010
Editorial
An Injustice in Spain

Spain’s best-known investigative magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, is now being prosecuted in a politically driven case that should have been thrown out of court.

Judge Garzón is charged with ignoring a 1977 amnesty law when he decided to investigate the disappearances of more than 100,000 people during Spain’s 1930s civil war and the decade of Francoist repression that followed. The charges were brought by two far-right groups who fear an open investigation of the Franco-era record. Unfortunately, one of Mr. Garzón’s fellow magistrates sustained the complaint and brought formal charges this week.

As a result, he will now be suspended from his duties pending trial. If convicted, he could be barred from the bench for up to 20 years, effectively ending a career dedicated to holding terrorists and dictators accountable for their crimes. That would please his political enemies, but it would be a travesty of justice.

The real crimes in this case are the disappearances, not Mr. Garzón’s investigation. If, as seems likely, these were crimes against humanity under international law, Spain’s 1977 amnesty could not legally absolve them. The suspected perpetrators are all dead, and Mr. Garzón long ago halted his investigation, passing jurisdiction to local Spanish courts in the areas where the victims were exhumed.

Mr. Garzón is a fearless and controversial prosecutor who has made many enemies over the years. He has brought cases against Basque and Al Qaeda terrorists, powerful Spanish politicians, Latin American dictators and Russian mafia thugs.

High-profile cases, like his bid to try the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, appeal to him, and sometimes he overreaches. But his consistent goal has been to deny impunity to the powerful and expand the scope of international human rights law.

Mr. Garzón should be allowed to resume that work at the earliest possible date. Spain needs an honest accounting of its troubled past, not prosecution of those who have the courage to demand it.

New York Times Article on Baltasar Garzón

2010-03-26T00:18:00.003-05:00

Highlighted quote: "He has argued that the amnesty does not cover crimes against humanity."

Published in: The New York Times
Date: March 25, 2010

Spain Allows Case Against Noted Judge

By ANDRÉS CALA

MADRID — Spain’s Supreme Court announced Thursday that an investigating magistrate could proceed with a case against a crusading judge known internationally for indicting Osama bin Laden and the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, according to court papers.

The judge, Baltasar Garzón, is facing possible charges of abuse of power over his decision to investigate crimes committed during the dictatorship of Franco. If Judge Garzón is indicted he will be automatically suspended.

In its decision, the five-judge panel ruled against Judge Garzón’s motion for dismissal, saying it saw no legal or procedural reasons to drop the proceedings. The case was filed by several conservative organizations that contend that he abused the powers of his office by investigating Franco-era crimes that were covered by a blanket amnesty issued by Parliament in 1977, two years after the strongman’s death.

In 2008, Judge Garzón started investigating the forced disappearances of a few of the more than 100,000 people who were detained by government forces and remain unaccounted for. He has argued that the amnesty does not cover crimes against humanity.

José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that “Spanish courts have routinely failed to investigate allegations of horrendous crimes of the past, but are being surprisingly active in prosecuting a judge who tried to push for accountability.”

Judge Garzón has long been a polarizing figure in Spain, and this case is no exception. Conservatives see him as a tireless self-promoter, while more liberal voices, like the left-leaning daily newspaper El País, call the legal proceedings against Judge Garzón “harassment” aimed at punishing him for reopening the wounds of the Franco era.

Judge Garzón has spearheaded much of the judicial pressure against the separatist Basque group ETA. He is also a hero among human rights groups that would like to see broader powers to prosecute international crimes against humanity.

Included in several high-profile cases he is currently investigating are the torture claims of former Guantánamo Bay detainees, criminal activity by Colombia’s FARC rebel group and corruption cases in Spain.

Judge Garzón is also facing court proceedings in two separate cases. In one he is suspected of receiving payments from Banco Santander for a series of lectures he gave at New York University while he was involved in a case against the bank’s chairman.

The other case is related to some phone taps Judge Garzón ordered of conversations between lawyers and defendants in prison in a broadly publicized corruption case incriminating top politicians of the opposition Popular Party.

Next on My Reading List: new book on Digital Media and Forgetting

2010-03-17T22:40:00.002-05:00

The memory seminar I was teaching ended last week. First, to be clear, I am a Spanish professor, and I love teaching Spanish language, literature and culture. And, I love doing so in the language! But when the opportunity to teach the honors seminar in English presented itself, I took it on as a challenge. At first, teaching in English was a bit like returning home after a long time abroad. I found it kind of surreal to use my English voice, especially with students I had last semester in Spanish class. I think some of it had to do with the fact that teaching in English (or in one's native language, and to speakers of that language) removes some of the communication "scaffolding" that is always present in introductory and intermediate language courses. That is, because you spend less time working on conveying the message (Am I conjugating my verbs right? How's my pronunciation? Is someone going to make fun of me? Will my interlocutor understand what I'm trying to say?), you spend more time zeroing in on the message itself. In both cases, professor and student brains are just as lit up and engaged, but the focus can be different. In any case, teaching the memory seminar was an invigorating experience, and I learned a lot from my students. I will comment in greater depth on the course at some other time, but for today, I'd like to address forgetting, a topic I feel has really been....well, forgotten, by memory scholars.

Yesterday, while on a vacation-time excursion to my local research library and independent bookstore, I happened upon a book called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton UP, 2009). The title struck me immediately, for a variety of reasons. First, because the memory seminar ended with several readings that addressed forgetting; second, because I am working on a conference paper dealing with amnesia; and last, because as a blogger who posts primarily on historical and political matters, I cannot help but be hyper aware of the need to catalog everything.

Blogging is about stopping time and recording everything, or establishing a record. It is a bit like trying to press pause on the flood of continual information coming at us from all sides. But blogging also seems fearful of the past, because what counts is what is going on now, which will be old as soon as I get to the end of this sentence. What happens to the information being "logged"? As Andrew Sullivan writes in The Atlantic, blogging "is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in." And, I would add, the consequences for our memory as well.
In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger examines a fresh idea -- the need to forget in a time in which the abundance of information threatens to drown us. I think of one of my students, who remarked on the challenges of sifting through data for class research projects; or myself, as I drafted my dissertation -- was more information always better, when more information was "never enough"?

I am thinking more and more about where forgetting comes into all the discourse on memory. I would like to believe we are beyond the stale dichotomy of "memory, good, forgetting, bad," but that seems doubtful. How do we talk about forgetting in the context of historical trauma? How does forgetting enable new memories to develop and transform existing narratives? And, where does new media come into the discussion? I read Marc Augé's Oblivion in January, and recently re-read Paul Connerton's "Seven Types of Forgetting" (along with several of the articles written in response to the latter in Memory Studies, such as "Should We Forget Forgetting?"). I did not buy Delete, but I hope to check it out very soon and report back here after I've had a chance to evaluate it properly. For now, I leave you with this informative lecture by Mayer-Schönberger, and a few other helpful related links on his book:

Interview with the author on NPR

Princeton University Press Technology & Media blog (with links to additional interviews with the author)

Review of the book by Peter Cliff, Software Engineer at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Documenting Ruin

2010-03-10T19:08:00.007-06:00

I saw this in a University of Chicago Press email and thought it related well to this blog. We spend so much time thinking about memorials, but it's true that ruins tend to get overlooked. I can't help but think of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations when pondering the title of Yablon's book. The pertinent info. follows:

Untimely Ruins
An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919
400 pages, © 2009
Cloth $70.00
ISBN: 9780226946634 Published February 2010
Paper $25.00
ISBN: 9780226946641 Published February 2010

American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America.

The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.

Cartoons and a Brief Editorial on the Garzón Case - Spanish Press

2010-03-06T13:11:00.013-06:00

I did not originally intend to use this blog to post about historical memory and Spain, because I have my Spanish blog to do that. However, particularly of late, the Spanish press has been full of news on Judge Baltasar Garzón, and the developing stories (plural, for the web has grown even more complicated) are important enough that that they need to be shared in English.

Pending against the judge is the primary case against him, that he "prevaricated" when he presented a report that dared to investigate the crimes of Francoism as "crimes against humanity." In addition to this initial accusation, made by the ultra-right wing group FE de las JONS (Falange Española, or the Spanish Phalangist Party), a second charge was brought against the judge in relation to funds he received for several colloquia he organized at New York University in 2005 and 2006 (NYU has denied that the judge was sponsored - or bribed - by funds from Banco Santander, and asserted that his visit was paid for through the King Juan Carlos Center, which is part of NYU).

Incredibly, last week, the Tribunal Supremo (TS, or Supreme Court) agreed to hear a third charge -- again, claiming that Garzón overstepped jurisdiction when he investigated a corruption scandal among opposition-party leaders (the case is commonly referred to as "el caso Gürtel" - for information en español, click here - for English, click here). While such ideologically-motivated charges may seem ludicrous to some, the progressive Spanish press seems to be more and more gloomy about Garzón's prospects by the day, as illustrated in the following cartoons, which I have translated for our non Spanish-speaking readers:

1. Title: "Los problemas de Garzón" (Garzón's Problems); Artist: Manel Fontdevila
Source: Público.es

Translation/Explanation:

The title reads: "Loser." In the middle of the drawing, we see Judge Garzón with a shovel on his back. The sign to the left -- probably not coincidental where the signs are planted! - reads "Francoist Graves," while the sign to the right, "Gürtel," refers to the aforementioned case. Garzón states, from left to right, "The cases were different. But the dirt dug up was the same." Fontdevila seems to assert that each issue has dug up painful truths -- one, about the Francoist past, and another, about the corruption scandal in the ranks of the Partido Popular ("Popular Party" -- currently, the opposition). Perhaps I am imagining things, but the artist also seems to be drawing parallels between the PP and the Francoist past, which should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the "historical memory" phenomenon in Spain in recent years. As the blogger Ignacio Escolar writes in a March 5 post, "not only is the topic of Francoism taboo in Spain, so is the PP."

2. Title: "Y ahora, Correa" ("And now, Correa" - reference to judge implicated in the corruption scandal -- currently in prison! -- who has made the second charge against Garzón ); Artist: Vergara
Source: Público.es

Translation/Explanation:

In the right-hand side of the cartoon, we see someone in a judicial robe that has just hung a "call to action" poster, calling for the public to file further charges against Judge Garzón. The poster reads: "YOUR TIME HAS COME! Francoist, Corrupt Politician, Terrorist, Drug Trafficker, Tax-Evader, South American Dictator....NOW YOU TOO CAN BRING A CASE AGAINST GARZÓN!! Last days! Great buys (offers) until removal from office! In small print - Reason: You don't even need one!"

3. Title: Untitled; Artist: El Roto
Source: El País.com

Translation/Explanation:

At the top of this cartoon, we have the likeness of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Below, one of his victims. On the "pedestal," the words, "Don't Touch." I'm not quite as sure of this depiction, but the artist is obviously referencing the idea that the Francoist past is not meant to be investigated. Franco is, even in death, still in charge.

Clearly, I am biased toward Judge Garzón. But my feelings regarding this case have far less to do with the person of Baltasar Garzón, and more to do with what this magistrate has stood for in regard to human rights in Spain and beyond. To a certain degree, Garzón has already been put on trial. And when and if he does appear in court, put on trial along with him will be the victims of the Franco regime and their families. What is happening in Spain should be deeply troubling to anyone interested in human rights. A judge that has made his career fighting human rights violations now faces having that same career put in a drawer and locked away. For some in Spain, this is exactly the intent, as the three cartoons illustrate. We are witnessing an "in progress" attempt to promote and install historical and political amnesia. Stay tuned for more on this case.

Report on the Mass Grave of San Rafael Cemetery, Málaga, Spain

2010-03-04T19:10:00.000-06:00

photo by Julián Rojas, in El País.com
San Rafael Cemetery, mass grave

View Larger Map

I have not yet located any information in English on this recent story, but I'm sure the English-speaking press in Spain will cover it sooner or later. Nonetheless, the story is this:

An official report has just been released on results of the three year-long (2006-2009) exhumation of the nine mass graves located at San Rafael Cemetery in Málaga, Spain. There are 4,471 officially registered as buried in this mass grave, from 1937-1957, nearly 20 years after the start of the Spanish Civil War. In what may be seen as an important reconciliatory gesture, the PP (Partido Popular, or "People's Party") and the PSOE (Socialist Party) presented the report together at the Picasso Museum in Málaga. Reportedly, this is the largest mass grave site in western Europe. To date, the remains of 2,840 persons have been exhumed, including those of 349 children who died of hunger, illness or injury. According to the Ministry of Justice, this number refers to children below age 10, the majority of whom died in 1937 and the following years. The exhumed also include 89 women.

To read more about the San Rafael Cemetery and its use as a mass grave site, please see this interview with Sebastián Fernández, a lecturer of History and Archaeology at University of Málaga (from 2008):"There was absolute genocide in Malaga after the Civil War."

Conference in Ireland: "Women's Memory-Work" -- Marjorie Agosín, Others to Speak

2010-02-26T13:24:00.003-06:00

From: U of Penn CFP

“Women's Memory-Work:Gendered Dilemmas of Social Transformation” 24-26 August 2010 University of Limerick, IRELAND

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE “Women's Memory-Work: Gendered Dilemmas of Social Transformation” 24-26 August 2010 University of Limerick, IRELAND

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
• MARJORIE AGOSÍN, Professor of Spanish, Wellesley College, USA
• PUMLA GOBODO-MADIKIZELA, Professor of Psychology, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• MARY L. KELLER, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Wyoming, USA
• MARY NASH, Professor of Contemporary History,University of Barcelona, Spain

The 3-day international conference Women's Memory-Work: Gendered Dilemmas of Social Transformation seeks to explore women-centered expressions of historical experience as fertile ground for cultural agency and social transformation in national and transnational socioeconomic and political arenas. Inspired by the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820, which call for a gender-sensitive implementation of national stability in peacekeeping operations, this conference invites the participation of scholars, activists and artists whose work addresses women’s engagement with the public memory of nations emerging from conflict and belonging to the class of “transitioning democracies.” At the same time, the conference intends to generate a larger dialogue that includes insights associated with women’s production of and participation in public and commemoration rituals in polities that are beyond the “transitioning” phase of democratic development, but which remain entangled in dilemmas of uneven historical and political representation and economic/territorial disparities.

The central questions the conference will be exploring are:

• What are the politics and ethics of producing and reproducing gendered memory-work? Who can participate? Who is excluded? What are the critical variables of potential alliances? Where do obstacles/limitations lie?
• In what ways might we be able to re-read traditional performances of womanhood, associated with upholding conservative social values of kinship and nationhood (among others), so as to reassess their potential participation in a radical politics/ethics of remembering, but also of envisioning future paradigms and material practices?
• How do women’s memories of traumatic repression and/or dogged dissidence participate in the historical imaginary and political vision of cultural identities and transitioning democracies?
• What are the challenges we face in building bridges across local gendered activism and international discourses of human rights and law? And how may we insist on the importance of gendered memory-work without re-inscribing the conceptual boundaries we seek to undermine?

This project is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Irish Government. As a transnational and multidisciplinary project, the conference aims to cover a wide range of disciplines—anthropology, geography, political philosophy, law, history, religion, sociology, psychology, literature, fine arts and cultural studies at large. We welcome proposals for papers in topics that include, but are not limited to:

• Gendered memory and political/cultural subjectivity
• Female consciousness and larger social subalternities (racial, ethnic, sexual, etc)
• Women’s cultural/political participation in peace processes
• Gendered politics/ethics of witnessing and testimony (“traumatic” or otherwise)
• Women’s rights and human rights
• Women’s self-referential narratives (autobiography, memoir) and memory performance
• Women’s agency beyond alterity
• Gendered labor and ecocriticism
• Women and the “war-story” (official or sectarian)
• Gendered models of reconciliation/forgiveness/healing
• Gendered dilemmas of redressing the past, seeking justice/peace
• Gender as/and strategic essentialism(s)

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 20-minute presentation by April 16, 2010 to womensmemory@ul.ie.
All proposals will receive acknowledgement of receipt within a week from the closing date, and a final reply as to the acceptance of the proposal by May 7, 2010. If an abstract is accepted for the conference we request that a full draft paper is made available to the conference committee by July 31, 2010. A selection of papers from the conference will be published.
We also welcome thematic panel proposals (maximum 4 speakers).

Please submit the abstract or panel proposal with abstracts in Word or RTF formats along with the following information:
1. Name of author(s)
2. Affiliation
3. Position
4. Contact information
5. 1-page CV
If you have questions about the conference or about submitting a proposal please direct them to Emma Leahy— emma.leahy@ul.ie

Joint organizing chairs:
Cinta Ramblado—Lecturer in Spanish, University of Limerick
Yianna Liatsos—Lecturer in English, University of Limerick

To Download Call For Papers please visit http://www.ul.ie/isks/news.html

More on the Garzón Case

2010-02-17T08:24:00.003-06:00

When it comes to political cartoons, Venezuelan artist Eneko (Caracas, 1963) is one of my absolute favorites. Last semester, we used some of his drawings on immigration, gender roles and other topics as conversation-starters in my advanced Spanish conversation course. Eneko publishes in 20 Minutos, an online Spanish paper. In the past, he has created multiple works on the disappeared of Francoism. He had this to say about the Garzón case (see original here):

Editorial on Garzón in the L.A. Times

2010-02-15T22:38:00.013-06:00

In recent days, while searching for news on Judge Baltasar Garzón's possible trial, I came across a post on the Daily Kos about his pursuit of alleged Bush-era war crimes. That investigation began today in Madrid. Naturally, the American progressive blogosphere has lit up with this news; however, with so many bloggers applauding Garzón's pursuit of Bush, Cheney and Co., a slight detail has been overlooked -- the fact that Garzón himself is under fire in his own country, about to be put on trial like a criminal for daring to investigate the crimes of Francoism.

There is a sad irony in this commenter's well-intentioned remark on the Daily Kos post: "The good Judge Baltasar clearly remembers with horror the unpunished crimes of Spain's Franco in and after the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Republicans fought under the banner: 'Spain - the graveyard of European Fascism'. Let us hope that modern Spain will be the graveyard of American Fascism, with the trial, conviction and sentencing of Bush, Cheney and all the other home grown fascists who have literally mutilated our own democratic Republic." The commenter, while citing "American Fascism," is clearly unaware that while busy fighting "fascism" elsewhere, Judge Garzón's investigation of Francoist crimes has led him ever closer to the witness stand in his own country. That is why I am happy to copy the editorial below, which appeared yesterday in the Los Angeles Times. To read about this piece in the Spanish press, click here.

From: The L.A. Times
Editorial

The case against Baltasar Garzon
Spain's famed judge has run afoul of his own countrymen over an inquiry on Spanish Civil War victims. The case could end his career.

February 15, 2010

Spain's world-famous magistrate, Baltasar Garzon, has made many enemies over the years. He has indicted Osama bin Laden. He has gone after Spanish paramilitaries, Basque separatists and members of drug mafias. On this side of the Atlantic, Garzon is best known as the judge who pushed the frontiers of international law, trying to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from London and launching an inquiry into the suspected torture of detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo.

After all that, it is perhaps ironic that the biggest threat to Garzon right now comes not from some hit man but from his own judiciary, which alleges that the judge has overreached at home by trying to probe Spanish Civil War atrocities that were covered by an amnesty the country's parliament passed in 1977. Many of Garzon's adversaries on the right and the left have come together in support of the case against him. It's possible Garzon will be suspended from his duties in the coming days. If convicted, his career as a judge would be over.

Tens of thousands of Spaniards died or disappeared in the civil war, which ushered in the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco in 1939. When Franco died in 1975, the amnesty was widely seen as essential for a transition to democracy. But many of the victims have never been accounted for, and the country has not fully come to terms with its violent past. Garzon opened the case on behalf of relatives who sought to exhume and identify the dead. After right-wing groups filed a complaint, an investigative judge concluded that Garzon "consciously decided to ignore" the will of parliament in pursuing the case, and now a five-judge panel must decide whether to put him on trial for criminal intent. Garzon denies wrongdoing; the disappearances, he says, were crimes against humanity and, therefore, cannot be covered by an amnesty.

We admire Garzon for a lifetime of pursuing criminals without regard to ideology or political bent, often at great personal risk. We also recognize that his outsized ego and appetite for attention have antagonized colleagues and politicians. Though we are in no position to judge the legal challenge against him, we worry about politicization of the Spanish legal system with this divisive case, and the haste with which events are unfolding: An administrative panel is considering Garzon's suspension even before judges decide whether to allow charges to be filed.

We sincerely hope that the Spanish courts will put aside personal animosities and political vendettas, and that Garzon's enemies will not use this case to bring down a judge they dislike. Love him or hate him, he deserves a fair hearing. And a democratic Spain deserves an upstanding judiciary.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

Interdisciplinary Colloquium on War and Memorialization

2010-02-15T18:47:00.004-06:00

From: CFP, U Penn

Interdisciplinary Colloquium: Conflict, Memory and Memorialisation: War and European Culture in the Twentieth Century, 17-19 Jul

full name / name of organization:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK

contact email:
phillim@hope.ac.uk

cfp categories:
cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches
ethnicity_and_national_identity
twentieth_century_and_beyond

contributions to an international colloquium dedicated to examining questions of conflict and memory, focusing on the legacies within Europe of the two global conflicts of the twentieth century and their mythologisation through processes of memorialisation. The principal aim is to explore how music, literature and other arts have mediated the experience of war and shaped historical consciousness in these contexts: this will inform analysis of the way individual and collective memories have changed and developed over time, and their significance for the ongoing formation and articulation of identities in European societies and cultures.

The keynote speaker will be Professor Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale
Other confirmed participants include:

Tim Cole (University of Bristol, UK)
Rachel Cowgill (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
Nalini Ghuman (Mills College, US)
Elaine Kelly (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Terry Phillips (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
Christopher Scheer (Utah State University, US)
David Taylor (University of Huddersfield, UK)
Guy Tourlamain (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
Laura Watson (National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Eire)

Abstracts of 200 words should be sent by email to Dr Terry Phillips (phillim@hope.ac.uk) by 28 February 2010. Places are limited, and will be allocated to enhance disciplinary, geographical, and chronological coverage. The colloquium website will be available shortly, but travel and location information can be found at http://www.hope.ac.uk/gettingtohope

* By web submission at 02/14/2010 - 17:16

New Photos of 9/11

2010-02-15T08:02:00.005-06:00

From: The New York Times

February 15, 2010

Editorial
9/11 From Above

In the days and weeks immediately after Sept. 11, there was, in many people, a deep hunger to see and see again what happened as the World Trade Center towers burned and then fell, a hunger fed by disbelief and shock. But as the years have passed, 9/11 has resolved itself into a collection of core images — photos, impressions, memories — whether you were in Manhattan that day or not.

This is the condensation that time nearly always accomplishes. So it comes as a surprise — just what kind will vary from person to person — to see the photographs taken that morning by Greg Semendinger, then a New York police detective, from a Police Department helicopter, the only aircraft allowed over Manhattan once the crisis had begun.

The dozen photos — obtained by ABC News from the National Institute of Standards and Technology — were shot from several different angles: over the Hudson, crossing Manhattan north of the towers, looking back toward Brooklyn, and up the island. They capture an aerial glimpse of a burning tower and then the immense plumes of smoke, ash and dust that engulf the sudden vacancy where the trade center stood.

Because they’re shot from on high, they capture with startling clarity both the voluminousness of the pale cloud that swallowed Lower Manhattan and the sharpness of its edges, a reminder of the beauty of the morning out of which so much tragedy so quickly roiled.

It is surprising to see these photographs now in part because we should have seen them sooner. It took a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain them from the national standards institute, which provided the official, technical analysis of why the towers fell. These photos also remind us of how important it is to keep enlarging our sense of what happened on 9/11, to keep opening it to history.

They will be part of what we hope will be an enormous and publicly accessible archive at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

From: The New York Times
February 10, 2010

Aerial Photos of Trade Center on 9/11 Released
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, in the NYT

Newly released aerial photographs of the World Trade Center terror attack capture the towers’ collapse, from just after the first fiery plane strike to the dust clouds that spread over Lower Manhattan and New York harbor.

The images were taken from a police helicopter carrying the only photographer allowed in the air space near the towers on Sept. 11, 2001. They were obtained by ABC News after it filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which investigated the towers’ collapse.

The still images are “a phenomenal body of work” that show a new, wide-angle look at the towers’ collapse and the gray dust clouds that shrouded the city afterward, said Jan Seidler Ramirez, the chief curator of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which is compiling a digital archive of attack coverage. The photos are “absolutely core to understanding the visual phenomena of what was happening,” Ms. Ramirez said.

The images of the dust clouds rising as high as some downtown skyscrapers “are some of the most exceptional images in the world, I think, of this event,” she said.

ABC said the photographs were among 2,779 pictures on 9 CDs the Institute of Standards gave the network. Some of the photographs had not been released before, it said.

The network posted 12 photos this week on its Web site, all taken by Greg Semendinger, a former detective with the New York Police Department’s Aviation Unit, who was first in the air in a search for survivors on the rooftop. He said he and his pilot watched the second plane hit the south tower from the helicopter.

“We didn’t find one single person. It was surreal,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “There was no sound. No sound whatsoever but the noise of the radio and the helicopter. I just kept taking pictures.”

View photos here

Support for Judge Baltasar Garzón

2010-02-14T13:09:00.002-06:00

The Spanish-language blog and association La Memoria Viva was first to post information on the following "Manifiesto por la Justicia de Garzón," which I have included in the original Spanish below, along with my English translation in italics, following each paragraph. If you are so inclined, please consider signing the document here as a show of support for Judge Garzón. I would think that the more international support offered, the better.

Manifiesto por la Justicia de Garzón

El juez Baltasar Garzón ha ejercido una justicia de forma continuada y valiente durante veinte años en la Audiencia Nacional, comprometida con la defensa de los derechos humanos en España y en el mundo contra dictadores, terroristas, corruptos y enemigos de la democracia. Judge Baltasar Garzón has pursued justice in a brave, consistent manner for twenty years in the Audiencia Nacional, which is committed to the defense of human rights against dictators, terrorists, corrupt persons and enemies of democracy in Spain and the world.

El juez Baltasar Garzón ha sido uno de los principales promotores del desarrollo en España del principio de Justicia Universal. Judge Baltasar Garzón has been one of the primary proponents in Spain of the principle of Universal Jurisdiction.

El juez Baltasar Garzón es víctima de una campaña promovida por sectores de extrema derecha, Falange Española y Manos Limpias, con una sorprendente connivencia de algunos sectores progresistas. Judge Baltasar Garzón is the victim of a campaign put forth by factions of the extreme right, Spanish Phalangist Party and Manos Limpias [an ultra-right "sindicato," whose name translates as "Clean Hands"], with a surprising complicity among some progressive sectors.

El proceso contra el juez Baltasar Garzón es en realidad un juicio sumario contra los defensores de la Democracia, la Justicia y los Derechos Humanos y a favor de la impunidad de crímenes muy graves de carácter internacional. The action taken against Judge Baltasar Garzón is in actuality a summary judgment against the defenders of Democracy, Justice and Human Rights, one that encourages the impunity of serious international crimes.*

El juez Baltasar Garzón está siendo juzgado por una sala del Tribunal Supremo en la que la mayoría de sus miembros juraron lealtad al Movimiento Nacional del franquismo. Judge Baltasar Garzón is being judged by a tribunal of the Supreme Court, the majority of whose members made an oath of loyalty to the National Movement of Francoism.

Una sentencia adversa al juez Baltasar Garzón, tras agotar las instancias judiciales españolas, acabaría probablemente con una superior sentencia condenatoria del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos contra el Estado español. A sentence in opposition to Judge Baltasar Garzón, upon exhausting all appeals of the Spanish courts, would most likely end with Spain being censured by the European Tribunal of Human Rights.

El juez Baltasar Garzón representa el modelo de justicia basado en la defensa de los Derechos Humanos conforme con su Derecho Internacional que millones de ciudadanos y víctimas reclaman en todo el mundo. Judge Baltasar Garzón represents a justice model based on the defense of Human Rights in accordance with International Law that millions of citizens and victims demand the world over.

Ya en 2008 el Comité de Derechos Humanos de las Naciones Unidas recomendó al Estado español la derogación de la preconstitucional Ley de Amnistía de 1977. In 2008, the United Nations Committee on Human Rights recommended that Spain repeal its preconstitutional Amnesty Law of 1977.

Este caso vuelve a demostrar la necesidad de la Justicia Internacional. Incluso España, el país que intentó procesar al dictador Pinochet, es incapaz de juzgar su propia dictadura. Y quien lo intenta, es juzgado por ello. This case again demonstrates the need for Universal Jurisdiction. Even Spain, the country that sought to prosecute dictator Pinochet, is incapable of judging its own dictatorship. He who attempts to do so, is in turn judged for it.

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*the phrase "juicio sumario" brings with it for me the notion of a "kangaroo court"

For more on this story in English, please see the following:

"Spain's Super-Judge Closer to Being Charged" (NYT, via AP)