Orson Welles’ The Stranger as an Unexpected Site of Mediation and Political Engagement

Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian writer and political activist, spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in the US and Germany. Opposing war and totalitarianism, Alexievich wrote about Soviet and post-Soviet individuals who suffered WWII, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.As a writer, she developed a prominent literary genre, “documentary literature,” which offers artistic renderings of real events. Cultivating this new form of literature, Alexievich recorded the recollections of real people and published polyphonic works presenting choruses of voices describing specific historical events. Engaging the voices of people, whose stories have no written records in official documents and are unknown to international societies, Alexievich sought to promote human rights and enable global readers to see the disastrous effects of war and totalitarianism reinforced from Stalin’s time. Recognizing that Alexievich’s polyphonic writings have advantages in advancing human rights, this study tries to solve questions regarding the issue of voice and representation. Why did Alexievich valorize voices exclusively rather than incorporate visual materials, such as photos, into her documentary narratives? How are the voices displayed in her testimonial writings, and what sources influenced her representation of these voices? Illuminating these questions, my presentation articulates the singular qualities of her polyphonic narratives, and unfolds multilayered implications surrounding her composition of the type of novels.

In Memoriam:Stephen Feinstein 1943-2008 Eric D. Weitz "Art From the Concentration Camps: Gallows Humor and Satirical Wit" is a perfect expression of Stephen Feinstein's multiple talents. It demonstrates his extensive knowledge of the Holocaust and his abiding concern with issues of representation. Anyone who knew Steve would not at all be surprised that he devoted part of his scholarly interests to humor and satire, because he was a master comedian and satirist, who could break up the most somber gatherings with his quick wit. Not rarely the comments moved into an inappropriate realm. Only Steve could tell Holocaust jokes and get away with it, because everyone understood that underneath it all he had a deeply humanitarian strain, and this also comes across in the article: a determination to relate the history of the Holocaust, to ensure that survivors' voices are heard, and, for those who did not survive but left traces of their lives in writings or art works, to keep that legacy in public view through his own publications and the many art exhibits he curated. As devoted as Steve was to the history and memory of the Holocaust, his commitments did not stop with the tragedy of Jews. It is noteworthy that "Art From the Concentration Camps" begins with a story from the Rwandan genocide. Steve's understanding of the Holocaust made him highly attentive to other genocides around the globe, and he demonstrated the same commitment to those histories, the same determination to give voice to survivors or to those victims who left some traces, that he did to the Holocaust. Steve Feinstein died very suddenly and unexpectedly on March 4, 2008. True to form, he was giving a lecture at the Jewish Film Festival, held annually in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul) of Minnesota, when he suffered an aortic rupture. The weeks since have been very difficult for his family, his wife Susan, son Jeremy, daughter Rebecca and her husband Avi and their two children, and for all of his colleagues, in Minnesota and beyond, who worked with him and counted him as a friend. Steve brought an outsize energy level to everything he undertook, whether his legendary train set that took up a good part of the basement in the Feinsteins' Minneapolis home, his somewhat manic pace of lectures and museum consultations, or his exuberant teaching. [End Page 49] To all of this Steve brought a fine and multi-disciplinary educational back ground. He studied economics as an undergraduate at Villanova University and went on to receive his Ph.D. in Russian History at New York University, where he also completed a minor field in Art History. For thirty years he taught a wide variety of courses at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and there introduced in the 1980s a Holocaust history course. Steve was already heavily involved in all sorts of human rights activities, notably the anti-apartheid movement and the campaign in support of Soviet Jews. In the Twin Cities, he became a leader in mobilizations around these issues, and was recognized by the regional Jewish Community Relations Council for his efforts on behalf of Soviet Jews. It was not only a public campaign that Steve spearheaded: the Feinstein home became a virtual hostel for new immigrants from Russia, the Feinstein station wagon the local moving service when the new arrivals got settled in their own apartments. It was through Steve's knowledge and love of art that he came to know a most generous donor in the Jewish community of the Twin Cities, who was also an avid art collector. Out of a series of consultations and conversations came, in 1997, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota with Steve as the founding director. (He retired officially from the University of Wisconsin in 1999,) In the ten years he headed CHGS, Steve built it into an internationally renowned center that also had a major presence—both on the university campus; and in the wider community. Always, Steve was committed to education, research, and public outreach on the Holocaust, but also on other genocides around the globe, various other forms of crimes...

This chapter comprises a selection of poetry, prose, and theater by Charlotte Delbo, who was active in the French Resistance prior to her internment at the Auschwitz and Ravensbruck concentration camps. This chapter offers insights into the intellectual and political engagements that Delbo had with prominent people who influenced her before and after the war. It also considers ways in which these engagements reflect her poetic writings, depictions of women’s experiences in relation to the atrocities of the Holocaust, as well as interactions among her protagonists. Delbo “writes resistance” beyond the unidimensional realism of carceral atrocities by bringing the dead as well as the living into a common forum of memories extensively informed by her own traumatic experiences.

Although the 1936 ‘Nazi Olympics’ in Berlin have landmark status both in the history of Nazi Germany and in the history of the modern Olympic Games, it was not until the early 1990s that Berlin begin to reckon with their architectural and historical legacies. The impetus for these discussions was the city’s bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games, for which it planned to reuse the 1936 Olympic Stadium. This article begins by analysing the strategies used by Berlin’s bid coordinators to distance the 2000 bid from the racist aspects of the 1936 Games. Their primary strategy was to honour the victims of Nazism by incorporating the concentration camp Theresienstadt into the proposed route for the Olympic torch. The article then analyses public debates about the best ways to counterbalance the Nazi ideology embedded in the statues and architecture of the Olympic grounds. Simultaneously, it shows the efforts of some Berlin residents to argue that the architectural and cultural legacies of the 1936 Games precluded Berlin from hosting the 2000 Games altogether. The article next examines the grassroots, municipal and federal historical initiatives at the site which emerged in the years after Berlin’s failed bid. These efforts culminated in two permanent historical exhibits at the Olympic grounds, developed to coincide with the 2006 soccer World Cup. Yet, as the article concludes, the Olympic complex remains a living site today, subject to continued discussions and debates about how best to balance recreational, historical and political engagement with the infamous site.

Empathy’s link to cultural memory and the representation of the Holocaust are central to this chapter. Examining alternative designs for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial Competition, the long-standing debate concerning ethical hazards of representation is furthered, as the designs are absent of human suffering, yet trauma can still be visualised through cultural memory. Featured designs include the use of concentration camp iconography and photographs of victims taken before the Holocaust began. Victims’ letters displayed in the Information Centre also provide insights into victims’ distress, prompting the question of what kind of empathy these exhibits encourage. A design employing cattle-trucks for gondolas on a Ferris wheel is also seen as a new, fearful way of representing Germany’s nadir, which is understood through Freud’s concept of the uncanny.

Latinas on television and film: exploring the limits and possibilities of inclusion

This article examines the intertextual connections between Zoe Wicomb’s 2008 short story, “The One That Got Away,” and Helen McCloy’s 1945 novel, The One That Got Away , a piece of detective fiction used by Wicomb’s main character as the basis for a work of contemporary art. Drawing concepts from Wicomb’s 2005 essay on setting and intertextuality, I argue that Wicomb creatively interacts with McCloy’s novel to explore issues of authorial ethics, historical representation, and ideological critique. At the heart of both works is a series of triangular relationships between readers, texts, and their corporeal authors that foreground acts of resistant reading and creative reframing. Familiarity with McCloy’s novel reveals new forms of reference and commentary at work in Wicomb’s story.

In the field of postcolonial Taiwanese literature, a literary tradition that an author follows often consists in contextualising issues of political identity, historical representation or social struggle via the narrative account of a human protagonist. This paper examines Wu Ming-yi’s postcolonial ecological novels, Shuimian de hangxian 睡眠的航線 [Routes in a Dream] (2007) and Danche shiqieji 單車失竊記 [The Stolen Bicycle] (2015), which not only break with this literary norm, but further invite readers to pay attention to the involvement of non-human agents in Taiwan’s colonial history. With an ecocritical reading of Wu’s works, the paper investigates the significant role of these non-human agents—including butterflies, elephants, a bird, fish–men and a bamboo forest—and further demonstrates that a non-anthropocentric narrative offered by these non-humans is also powerful in the shaping of historical representations and political identities of Taiwan.

The Texas Historical Commission, Council of Texas Archeologists, and representatives from local cultural resource management (CRM) firms recently discussed the role of late-19th and early-20th century sites, including their educational value and fairness in representation of diverse social groups. I consider the dialogue regarding these sites as part of a national problem regarding the interpretation of National Register eligibility, especially in the realm of CRM work. The current interpretations are dependent upon site significance and integrity, often failing to consider a site’s historical context by utilizing single-level analytical methods and disregarding regional interpretations. This results in a considerable bias in the sites that are nominated to the NRHP, as the central issues of race and historical representation and variations in site type are ignored in favor of one-sided evaluation methods and a lack of regional interpretations. To address this bias, improved communication and education within and between CRM firms, government agencies, and academic institutions are needed to re-emphasize the importance of multidisciplinary research at historic sites.

Global Tangos: Travels in the Transnational Imaginary argues against the hackneyed rose-in-mouth clichés of Argentine tango, demonstrating how the dance may be used as a way to understand transformations around the world that have taken place as a result of two defining features of globalization: transnationalism and the rise of social media. Global Tangos demonstrates the cultural impact of Argentine tango in the world by assembling an unusual array of cultural narratives created in almost thirty countries, all of which show how tango has mixed and mingled in the global imaginary, sometimes in wildly unexpected forms. Topics include Tango Barbie and Ken, advertising for phone sex, the presence of tango in political upheavals in the Middle East and in animated Japanese children’s television programming, gay tango porn, tango orchestras and composers in World War II concentration camps, global tango protests aimed at reclaiming public space, the transformation of Buenos Aires as a result of tango tourism, and the use of tango for palliative care and to treat other ailments. They also include the global development of queer tango theory, activism, and festivals. Global Tangos shows how the rise in social media has heralded a new era of political activism, artistry, solidarity, and engagement in the world, one in which virtual global tango communities have indeed become very “real” social and support networks. The text engages some key concepts from contemporary critics in the fields of tourism studies, geography, dance studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, transnational studies, television studies, feminism, and queer theory. Global Tangos underscores the interconnectedness of cultural identity, economics, politics, and power in the production, marketing, distribution, and circulation of global images related to tango—and, by extension, Latin America—that travel the world.

Global Tangos: Travels in the Transnational Imaginary argues against the hackneyed rose-in-mouth clichés of Argentine tango, demonstrating how the dance may be used as a way to understand transformations around the world that have taken place as a result of two defining features of globalization: transnationalism and the rise of social media. Global Tangos demonstrates the cultural impact of Argentine tango in the world by assembling an unusual array of cultural narratives created in almost thirty countries, all of which show how tango has mixed and mingled in the global imaginary, sometimes in wildly unexpected forms. Topics include Tango Barbie and Ken, advertising for phone sex, the presence of tango in political upheavals in the Middle East and in animated Japanese children’s television programming, gay tango porn, tango orchestras and composers in World War II concentration camps, global tango protests aimed at reclaiming public space, the transformation of Buenos Aires as a result of tango tourism, and the use of tango for palliative care and to treat other ailments. They also include the global development of queer tango theory, activism, and festivals. Global Tangos shows how the rise in social media has heralded a new era of political activism, artistry, solidarity, and engagement in the world, one in which virtual global tango communities have indeed become very “real” social and support networks. The text engages some key concepts from contemporary critics in the fields of tourism studies, geography, dance studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, transnational studies, television studies, feminism, and queer theory. Global Tangos underscores the interconnectedness of cultural identity, economics, politics, and power in the production, marketing, distribution, and circulation of global images related to tango—and, by extension, Latin America—that travel the world.

Telling Ghost Stories: Reflections on History and Hollywood J. David Slocum (bio) History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. By Robert Brent Toplin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. 267 pages. $16.95 (paper). “This story is true.” So begins the trailer advertising Ghosts of Mississippi, the 1996 film directed by Rob Reiner and featuring Alec Baldwin, James Woods, and Whoopi Goldberg. The film portrays the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and, more than three decades later, the trial of his accused murderer, Byron de la Beckwith. Questions of racism and class, of national and local identity, and of justice, especially as they were shaped and manifested in the turbulent 1960s, provide a thematic spine to the production. Even more, the film raises issues of history, memory and, yes, of truth, testing the legacy of the 1960s today and reflecting on the contemporary role of movies and moviemakers in the production of popular history. By presenting itself as a “true story,” Ghosts of Mississippi inserts itself into an active set of debates among filmmakers and historians struggling to represent and give meaning to the past. The issues at play are numerous and knotty, both bound up in the specific historical incidents portrayed in individual films and ineluctably related to larger questions of representation, memory, and myth. In History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past, Robert Brent Toplin takes on this complex of issues through the case study of eight films and the historical and cinematic controversies surrounding them. His division of the book’s introduction into two distinct sections conveys from the outset Toplin’s acknowledgment of the necessary breadth of any discussion of [End Page 175] history and film. “The Power to Embody Ghosts” limns some of the more far-reaching questions posed by contemporary discussants. What is the relation between written history and filmed history? How do historians in different media employ evidence or standards of fact or fiction? How do myth and memory intervene in the productions of these different media and the creation of popular history? The second section, “The Practice of Cinematic History,” is more concrete and outlines four of the “principal methods of cinematic history: mixing fact with fiction, shaping evidence to deliver specific conclusions, suggesting messages for the present in stories about the past, and employing a documentary style to develop the ‘Great Man’ perspective on the past.” 1 The implication is that some of the broader issues of historical representation and media analysis will be clarified by discussions of specific cinematic practices, which in turn will emerge from carefully researched accounts of individual historical films. That is an ambitious undertaking, one requiring thoughtful address of a range of representational and historiographic issues, and Toplin in many ways delivers. A professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and the film review editor of the Journal of American History, Toplin writes regularly on film and history, and most recently edited Ken Burns’ ‘The Civil War’: Historians Respond, a collection of scholarly essays (and meditations) on the documentary series. He has also served in creative and scholarly capacities on the production of PBS and Discovery Channel films. Toplin is thus able to bring both careful scholarship and a sensitivity to the vagaries of the creative process to History by Hollywood. Indeed, his pursuit of abstract or theoretical understanding in each chapter begins with concrete documentary research. Responses to more sweeping questions then develop from the detailed case studies of individual films. Often those responses are oblique, making them sufficiently suggestive to readers familiar with the pertinent issues while perhaps a bit frustrating to others. When Toplin errs it is typically on the side of caution, of relying on close scrutiny of his documentary research rather than opening inquiry to its wider ramifications. His research primarily concerns “a particular category of message movies: dramas that tell the story of real people and actual events from American history” (1). The movies are Mississippi Burning, JFK, Sergeant York, Missing, Bonnie and Clyde, Patton, All the President’s Men, and Norma Rae. To his credit, Toplin explains the category not with rudimentary definitions but...

Sounding Roman traces the role of music performance in maintaining, shaping, and challenging ascribed social identities of Roman (“Gypsy”) groups, who constitute one of the most socially reviled and yet culturally romanticized minorities in Turkey. Roman communities have been a ubiquitous presence, contributing to social, cultural, and economic life since the Byzantine period in Anatolia up to the present. Alternately exoticized and reviled, Roman communities were valued for their occupational skills and entertainment services. Based on detailed historiographic study and twenty years of ethnographic work, this book examines the issue of cultural and musical representations for creating, maintaining, and contesting social identity practices through philosophical reflections on meaningful symbolic configurations in metaphoricity, iconicity, and mimesis paired with a sociological interrogation of unequal power relationships. Through these lenses, the book investigates the potential of musical performance to configure new social identities and open pathways for political action, while exploring the limits of cultural representation to effect meaningful social change. The book begins with historical representations of çingene as a marked ethnic and social group during the Byzantine to late Ottoman Empire. It then traces how such constructions were revised during the period of the modern Turkish Republic through the creation of a commercial musical genre, the Roman dance tune (Roman oyun havası). The book includes a companion website with illustrative texts, images, and audio examples.

Historical feature films transport their audiences to experience another world and time, albeit temporarily. They are time machines that have become major artefacts of popular and youth culture and for a brief interlude they bestow global-scale historical significance on their filmic narratives of the past. This fleeting significance is intensified by media hype, social networking clamour, gaming versions and product merchandising. However, historical filmic narratives are often a single representation of the past with no obligation to adhere to evidentiary records. Added to this, feature films serve a commercial imperative, and coupled with the limitations of the art form, this often leads to manipulation of the narrative and the inclusion of fictionalized elements. Despite these flaws, international scholarship suggests that these frequently historically inaccurate and distorted filmic resources are being widely and regularly used as teaching resources in history classrooms. These history teachers have experienced the power of film to motivate today’s visually-orientated students, to engage them both emotionally and intellectually and to provide narrative frameworks which offer single representations of the past that may vary from more conventional sources. As well as considerations of significance and engagement, feature films can be effective primary and secondary sources for historical inquiry and providing the history teacher with unique and rich opportunities to explore issues of historical representation and understanding. These apparent tensions between student engagement and issue of historical authenticity prompted this research project. Designed in three phases, the research project explores the relationship between the use of feature films in the history classroom and its link to the creation and development of historical understanding. The first phase establishes the usage, rationales and filmic pedagogies in Australia with a focus on New South Wales. The project then adds the student voice to the discourse and an Australian perspective to international research in the field. The second and third phases of the research take a grounded theory approach to explore the mechanisms by which historical feature film captivates the viewer and the utilization of this in the quest for historical understandings in the classroom. The project reports on filmic pedagogical methodologies and the link between these and teacher disciplinary conceptual frameworks and develops guiding principles for optimizing historical understanding when using feature films in the history classroom. Graphic representations and models have been developed to conceptualize the research findings and reflections. The scholarship from this research will contribute to the fields of education, history and media studies

The article addresses the issues of cultural and archival historical representations as they are presented in Danish journalism about historical events taking place in the former colonies of Denmark, the current United States' Virgin Islands (USVI). The (post)colonial relationship between Denmark and USVI has been overlooked by Danish and 'western'-based scholars for quite some time. The article presents the case of a journalistically represented reenactment in the USVI commemorating the emancipation of the Danish slaves on the three colonial islands St. John, St. Croix, and St. Thomas in 1848. The case shows that journalists often depend on documented historical accounts rather than cultural knowledge, myths and legends, that may tell a different (his)story. Engaging journalism with feminist theory and postcolonial theory, the article discusses how this bias determines who gets to speak and who is silenced, that is, journalistic objectivity. Finally the article seeks to develop another way of thinking about postcolonial memory constructions in journalistic representations.