The politics of omission in translating Palestinian autobiography: a case study of I Saw Ramallah

Reviewed by: Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas ed. by Max Krochmal and J. Todd Moye Steven Rosales Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas. Edited by Max Krochmal and J. Todd Moye. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 469. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4773-2379-3; cloth, $105.00, ISBN 978-1-4773-2378-1.) Coalitional politics is a complicated and sometimes messy undertaking laden with varying degrees of rivalry, defensiveness, and hierarchy. Such complications have arguably assumed a new level of significance in the partisan politics of the modern day and in the efforts to interrogate the nation's past more critically. This anthology steps into this turmoil, and this Chicano historian of Chicanx history is impressed. The state of Texas, with its dual southern and southwestern identities, is a logical place to demonstrate the overlapping nature of "everyday acts of resistance" and institutionalized racism (p. 61). An overarching subdivision does exist in this volume, with African Americans in the spotlight for Part 1, followed by Chicanx struggles in Part 2. Coalitions in metropolitan areas become the focal point in Part 3. A fourth and final installment highlights the statewide Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project (CRBB), from which this work stems. Indeed, the power of oral history and its ability to capture moments often unseen and unheard through documentary evidence are clearly on display. Over five hundred video narrations were collected over two summers, with interviewers and other logistical support provided by multiple institutions throughout the state. The result is a "people's history" of statewide civil rights activism digitized using clever and modern methods on a website accessible to a wider general audience (p. 306). The CRBB and this anthology are a veritable dream for anyone involved in public history, oral history, and the digital humanities. A quick overview of the first two sections offers powerful examples of variance (rural versus urban, "leaders" versus everyday folk, and so on), with individual chapters tackling a variety of topics including segregation, student movements, and racialized violence within both communities. An additional [End Page 806] significant point for me is the willingness to tackle the legacy of Dr. Hector P. García and his off and on leadership of the American GI Forum, a post–World War II civil rights organization largely composed of Mexican American veterans. The literature surrounding both García and the organization is vast and hagiographic, and the determination to confront the long shadow of García and his many complexities is long overdue and refreshing. It is the third section where the theme of coalitional politics and behavior is confronted most vigorously, with the cities of San Antonio and Austin offering the most compelling examples. Young Black and Brown radicals in San Antonio forged ties of solidarity that included biracial support for Angela Davis, César Chávez and the United Farm Workers' grape boycott, as well as electoral cooperation to promote a mixed platform of Black and Brown candidates for city offices. Biracial efforts in Austin also included young radicals as well as formal legal efforts by more mainstream organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to sue for local redistricting to promote better electoral representation. My fear, however, is that the few examples of intersectionality found within the third section are structurally overwhelmed by the first two sections, which clearly illustrate separate trajectories of civil rights activism that seldom overlapped. Moreover, obvious sources of tension, such as the embrace of whiteness by some in the Mexican American community, a powerful point of debate within Chicanx historiography, need a fuller examination than what is offered here. Furthermore, the present-day context of these struggles in the wake of George Floyd's murder, including vocal elements of the Black Lives Matter movement that posit Black emancipation as the source of emancipation for all marginalized communities, could have been addressed. All of this is to say that on a case-by-case basis Black and Brown intersectionality did (and does) exist...

I saw Ramallah, is an autobiography of Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian writer and poet. It is an honest and accurate account of a Palestinian who could not adapt to the changes that have taken place during his absenteeism. It can also be considered a precise manifestation of the national and political identity of the author. It is about the abandonment and loss that Palestinians feel both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. I saw Ramallah is the type of literary genre that won the admiration of Edward Said, who considered it as, “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have.” The aim of this study is to explore translational problems and challenges of this autobiography into English by Ahdaf Soueif, the celebrated Egyptian novelist and critic. This study examines some of the translation strategies adopted by Ahdaf Soueif in handling the complexity posed by cultural-bound expressions since such expressions are bound to pose a real challenge for the translator. This study underlies the role of language in reflecting the realities of an entire community; all encompassed as facts, memories, imagination, and fiction.

I saw Ramallah, is an autobiography of Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian writer and poet. It is an honest and accurate account of a Palestinian who could not adapt to the changes that have taken place during his absenteeism. It can also be considered a precise manifestation of the national and political identity of the author. It is about the abandonment and loss that Palestinians feel both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. I saw Ramallah is the type of literary genre that won the admiration of Edward Said, who considered it as, "one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have." The primary objective of this study is to underlie the semantic and semiotic challenges in the rendition of this autobiography into English by Ahdaf Soueif, the celebrated Egyptian novelist and critic. I chose this autobiography as a case study on account that it embodies some interesting pragmatic and semiotic issues worthy of investigation and study. This study examines some of the translation strategies adopted by Ahdaf Soueif in handling the complexity posed by cultural-bound expressions since such expressions are very likely to pose a real challenge for the translator [1]. This study underlies the role of language in reflecting the realities of an entire community; all encompassed as facts, memories, imagination, and fiction.

‘Who would dare to make it into an abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah

This article entertains the possibility that new, locally-embedded cosmopolitanisms, critical of the violence inflicted by various forms of colonialism and globalization, are not just a matter of locus, or location, or topos, but also a question of the utopian. I begin with some autobiographically based observations related to a certain barely-documented social formation I witnessed as a young woman in colonial Rhodesia, and develop the scope of analysis by relating the notion of utopian solidarity among pariahs to cultural imaginings of three differently cosmopolitan cities. It will be proposed that what is at stake in defining utopian cosmopolitanism is a certain cultural metaphori city (a term that will be gradually explicated), encapsulated here in the process of tracing submerged similarities in the cultural histories of Harare, Ramallah and Cairo, and engaging with the work of Dambudzo Marechera, Mourid Barghouti, Alaa Al Aswany and Ahdaf Soueif.

This Element develops and showcases a new methodological framework in which to study the connections between early modern travel writing and life- and self-writing. Turning the scholarly focus in the study of travel writing from eye-witnessing and proto-ethnography of foreign lands to the 'fashioned' and portrayed selves and 'inner worlds' of travellers – personal memory, autobiographical practices, and lived yet often heavily mediated travel experiences – it opens up perspectives to travel writing in its many modes, that extend both before and after 'lived' travels into their many pre- and afterlives in textual form. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Reviewed by: Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War by Amy L. Hubbell Mary E. McCullough Hubbell, Amy L. Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War. U of Nebraska P, 2020. Pp. vii- 165. ISBN 978-1-4962-1402-7. $50 (hardcover). This engaging and eminently readable book on historical, literary, artistic, and personal memory examines representations of the complex, ongoing, and multilayered relationship between Algeria, France, and the Algerian War (1954-1962). This six-chapter study (including chapters of introduction and conclusion) begins by explaining psychological approaches to hoarding objects and transfers these theories to the analysis of memories and post-memories, and concludes by the acknowledging the difficulties of honoring the dead, "codify[ing] loss" (132), and how the two are inextricably linked with issues of "excessive trauma or excessive loss" (132). Chapter One, "Too Much Memory and the Algerian War," explains that "French Algeria is a lost colony whose debris is still carted around by the many people displaced at the end of the Algerian War for Independence and during the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s" (25). This chapter frames the study in stating that it "looks across texts and tableaux to show how memory proliferates in both the individual and the collective histories of the Algerian War, and how memory might be obscured and forgotten under the layers of artefacts put on display" (26). In chapters One and Two, Hubbell uses theoretical concepts from Agnès Varda's film The Gleaners and I (2000) as a lens through which to examine literary texts. Through the metaphorical act of gleaning in the fields, the chapter titled "Marie Cardinal, Gleaning, Collecting, and Hoarding the Lost Homeland" investigates how pied-noir author Cardinal's "obsessive recreation of Algeria" (27) in her first two novels Écoutez la Mer (1962) and La Mule de corbillard (1963) contributes to literary memorial remains of Algeria that are heavy, obsessive, and impossible to sort through. Chapter Three, "Leïla Sebbar: Churning Memory Debris," considers Sebbar's "identity [as] one of negotiations that can only be summed up [End Page 180] by exile" (55), focusing on the multiple and almost excessive autobiographical weavings that are central to, and at the same time, surround Sebbar's works. Moving to chapter Four, "Benjamin Stora: Gangrene and the Memory of the Algerian War," Hubbell examines how Stora's massive corpus of works on the Algerian war started out as historic and historiographic yet has recently become more personal. "Despite his wishes, Stora is continually drawn back in to sift through piles of personal memory." In chapter Five, "Hoarding Visual Debris from the War," Hubbell transitions from studying fictional, autobiographical, and historical texts to examining works by three contemporary visual artists: Nicole Guiraud, Patrick Altes, and Zineb Sedira. All three artists retain "personal and collective memory trauma from the Algerian War," which is reflected in their art. Hubbell's meticulous, thoughtful, and mindful analysis of the layers that compose each work of art (whether it be installations, mixed-media paintings, works that use "borrowed and recycled images" (115) such as postcards and/or photographs, or video installations) analyzes the complicated transmission of memory, especially as the artists "explore new ways for France and Algeria to move beyond historical trauma and to understand each other today" (127). In investigating how different genres and media investigate the lasting and intertwined representation of memory, history, and trauma, Hubbell's intimate, careful, scholarly work creates a captivating, convincing, and multifaceted study of the ways in which the texts of individual authors and artists honor and contribute to the ever-evolving complexities of the relationship between Algeria and France, while acknowledging and emphasizing its traumatic past. This engrossing book opens nuanced questions about the haunting relationship between former colonized and colonizer, between personal recollections, memory, history, and collected narratives, and how intertwined they are when writers and artists engage in their production. Hoarding Memory is a must-read for scholars of Algeria; students and specialists of history, memory, literature, art, and postcolonial studies will find it of interest, and will no doubt want to explore further the works analyzed within. Mary E. McCullough Samford University Copyright © 2021 Women in...

Esta apresentação da renovação atual da filosofia francesa ressalta as contribuições da fenomenologia hermenêutica de Ricoeur para a psicologia social ao enfocar a história pessoal e coletiva como um processo integrado à ação, à narração, à linguagem, à elaboração simbólica e à construção da identidade e alteridade. Sua abordagem histórica e cultural permite ultrapassar os limites do cartesianismo, positivismo e cognitivismo, aprofundando o estudo da subjetividade e de sua formação, inseridos na história pessoal, nas relações sociais, na experiência concreta e na história social mais ampla dos grupos, instituições e comunidades. Corresponde não apenas a um avanço no estudo da linguagem e da interpretação, como também ao surgimento de um novo paradigma da razão, o paradigma hermenêutico, e à criação de um método capaz de explorar novos aspectos da dinâmica psicossocial e de ser uma chave para a interpretação da pluralidade de linguagens e identidades na atual sociedade globalizada.

Audre Lorde’s Zami, Erotic Embodied Memory, and the Affirmation of Difference Anh Hua (bio) introduction In this article I provide a close analysis of Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, examining how Lorde writes individual and collective memories, erotic and traumatic memories, and homeland memories as they relate to self-invention and self-narration.1 Using the theories of the philosopher Edward Casey, I propose that Lorde depicts two forms of embodied memory in this text: erotic embodied memory and traumatic embodied memory. While Lorde does share a few incidents of traumatic memories to break the silence—the painful memories of her family experiencing everyday and systemic racism in her childhood, the loss and death of her friend Genevieve, along with experiences of sexual assault during her girlhood—Lorde is more interested in elaborating on the empowerment of erotic memories for herself and for other women. Erotic embodied memories are found in narratives and rituals of food preparation, in Lorde’s recall of intimate relationships with her multiple female lovers, as well as in her sensual mythical invention of homeland Africa as symbolized by Afrekete. I note that by discovering her sexual awakening and same-sex desire through narrative or storytelling, Lorde is able to arrive at self-authorization and self-affirmation, writing her subjectivity and personal history through the embodied erotic. Lorde’s life narrative shows us that the erotic can be deeply connected to a woman’s writing, creativity, spirituality, and potentiality. In emphasizing the memories of the embodied erotic through life narration, Lorde reminds us of the importance of reclaiming and practicing what I call “the ethics of pleasurable feminism,” that is, the reclamation of female embodiment, female pleasure, and female sensuality as an activist sacred site to counter the patriarchal, racialized, and heteronormative oppressions that so many women experience in our daily lives. Throughout the memoir memory narratives serve as a way to deal with the [End Page 113] tension between Lorde’s wish to cherish the Afro-Caribbean creolized legacy and cultural memories she inherits from her mother and foremothers, and her need to break away from cultural and social traditions and expectations in order to write her own subjectivity and history toward a narrative space of freedom and self-autonomy. Lorde’s text, in working through this tension, is a manifestation of both individual and collective or cultural memories and of self-invention. Writing from a wounded individual and collective history, the black feminist writer Audre Lorde (1934–1992), who died in 1992 after a fourteen-year struggle with breast cancer, recognizes experiential knowledge as a result of what Zora Neale Hurston calls the “infinity of conscious pain.”2 Part autobiography, poetry, narrative, myth, and revisionist history, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name chronicles much of Lorde’s life, from her childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the 1950s as a black diasporic lesbian poet and writer in the United States. Zami is not simply an autobiography but a biomythography, in which myth and fiction function to frame past, present, and future selves. Here I am interested in analyzing how Lorde conceptualizes narratives of memories, whether homeland memories, childhood memories, erotic memories of her female intimate relations, traumatic memories of sexual assault, or mythical memories of spiritual song and symbolic Africa. I argue that the resistant narratives of remembrance, specifically the embodied erotic memories, become an important place for Lorde to narrate self-invention and subjectivity and to rewrite personal and cultural histories. While previous scholarship on Audre Lorde’s writing in general and Zami in particular has focused on issues of identities, queer sexuality, and the importance of communities and difference, my article adds to this body of knowledge by focusing on the relevance of memories, both erotic and traumatic, in Lorde’s creative and activist writing. erotic embodied memories The memoir is structured in three sections. The first deals with Lorde’s ancestry and childhood memories, the second focuses on her school years and her increasing separation from her mother and her family, and the third recalls the lesbian love relationships she has had with various women in her life. In...

ABSTRACTIn her ‘anti-memoir’ entitled Making It Up (2005), contemporary British novelist Penelope Lively rewrites key episodes of her life story and her personal history by fictionalising them. Taking the voice of different characters who were important in Lively's personal and social development, the author revises each of the eight personal and historical episodes that conform her ‘anti-memoir’. By distancing herself from her real self through fiction, Lively highlights the unfaithful nature of time and memory together with the constructed nature of narrative when recounting personal and collective history. On the other hand, Making It Up points out to the close interrelationship between the personal and the historical in an era, the twentieth century, riddled with traumatic events which escaped the author's immediate understanding but which she successfully recaptures and reorders through fictionalised narrative.

Thinking Photography in Film, or The Suspended Cinema of Agnès Varda and Jean Eustache Ari J. Blatt To my mind cinema and photography are like a brother and sister who are enemies . . . after incest. Agnès Varda1 For years prior to what historians refer to as the "boom" period of the 1970s, photography had yet to come into its own as a bona fide object of theoretical inquiry. Though critical responses to the medium first began to appear shortly after its inception in the 1830s, and continued to develop throughout the early part of the twentieth century with a number of keen reflections on photographic modernism, some of the most sophisticated and insightful writing about the greater implications of photographic meaning only truly began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s.2 A critical moment in the history of our understanding of the medium, this period was characterized not only by the academy's recognition of the history of photography as a legitimate scholarly discipline, but also by an ever more prominent wave of acceptance by museums.3 It was also during the 1980s that artists became once again comfortable exploring photography as an art form in and of itself, and not merely as a model for the painterly process (think Francis Bacon or Andy Warhol) or as a tool used to document more conceptual or site-specific practices (Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci).4 As collectors—with institutional affiliations or otherwise—explored the potential for growth in this nascent sector of the market, a number of critics, sparked by these developments, turned their own attentions to the matter.5 On the heels of the 1977 publication of Susan Sontag's pioneering collection of essays, On [End Page 181] Photography, the editors of the journal October, in a special issue from 1978, responded to the changing status of the photograph both on the market and in the museum by advocating photography's newfound identity as a "theoretical object."6 In their introduction to that issue, the editors proposed that only now could critical thinking about the medium really begin to mature. Given the dramatic rise of the photographic image on the cultural stage, as the editors wrote over thirty years ago, finally could photography be rediscovered and redeemed from "the cultural limbo to which for a century and a half it ha[d] been consigned."7 Looking back on this period, one notes a sudden proliferation of writing that aims to do just that: from Roland Barthes' hauntingly personal reflection on photography and death in La chambre claire (1980) and Hervé Guibert's similarly autobiographical take on photography, memory, and desire in L'image fantôme (1981), to Victor Burgin's seminal compilation on the multiplicity of photographic codes (Thinking Photography, 1982), John Berger and Jay Mohr's self-reflexive photo-essay Another Way of Telling (also from 1982), and Philippe Dubois' consideration of the singularity of photography and the subjectivity of the photographic process in L'acte photographique (1983), just to a name a few.8 If we consider the ever increasing cultural prominence of photography and discourse on photography during those years, it is perhaps not so curious to remark that at around the same time in France—the veritable birthplace of the medium—several of some of the era's most innovative filmmakers were also engaging many of the same issues. Among them, both Agnès Varda and Jean Eustache stand out for having produced two thought-provoking short films that, while remaining true to each director's artistic vision, dialogue with and contribute to the new kind of photographic theory and criticism that was circulating on both sides of the Atlantic at around the same time. As art historian Linda Nochlin has written, "Nothing, perhaps, is harder to write intelligently about than photography."9 In what follows I would like to suggest how Varda's Ulysse (1982) and Eustache's Les photos d'Alix (1980) tap into the motion picture's own privileged potential as a vehicle for thinking—and also, to a certain extent, "writing"—about the medium from which it ultimately evolved.10 As they create a filmic language capable of...

Memory is a major theme in contemporary life, a key to personal, social, and cultural identity. Philosophers have long regarded continuity of memory as an essential quality of personhood. But personal and collective identity are intimately linked. Classical works such as Maurice Halbwachs's The Collective Memory, and Sir Frederick Bartlett's Remembering highlight the social nature of what we usually take to be individual memory, an insight reinforced by research on the historical consciousness of non-literate peoples.Sir Frederick Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1932); Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, Francis and Vida Ditter, trans. (New York: Harper Collins, 1980). For excellent descriptive and theoretical overviews of the problems that Halbwachs opened up, see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989) and James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). Here I will explore, in comparative perspective, the social processes through which personal memory becomes collectivized and collective memory is instantiated through autobiographical recollection.

This narrative non-fiction essay explores the profound and intricate connections between personal memories and birch trees throughout the author’s life. Set against the backdrop of various significant locations, from the Soviet Union and Ukraine to Finnish Lapland, the narrative intertwines the author’s childhood experiences, family history and adult reflections. Birch trees serve as poignant symbols of continuity and resilience amidst the backdrop of political and personal upheavals. The essay delves into how these trees evoke strong emotions and memories, highlighting their unique role as carriers of individual and collective histories. By examining the interplay between nature and memory, the author offers a deeply personal perspective on the importance of preserving natural environments not just for their ecological value but also for their capacity to hold and evoke human experiences.

In neoliberal global economy, poverty is often theorised as an eradicable economic issue, partly depending on a poor country’s domestic and bilateral policies and partly on poor people’s initiatives (Kiely 2005). An individual’s migration to sell labour in a relatively rich country is considered a powerful personal strategy to make a leap from ‘poverty to prosperity’, affecting the migrant’s both local and national economy (The World Bank Report 2018). Labour migration is intricately linked with a person’s wider context of collective histories of aspirations, struggles and resistance. Using literary materials published in English (translated from Bangla) by Bangladeshi labour migrant poets and writers in Singapore, this paper analyses the centrality of these written texts to recreate migrants’ personal histories within their individual journey of poverty eradication. In such narratives, amigrant often appears as a precarious self being caught in a myriad of uncertainties in a foreign land. Thus, their narratives become a tool to destabilise the binary categories of a migrant’s home country as poor and the host country as rich. Instead, a labour migrant’s perception of poverty and material inequalities is expressed through what I call ‘literature from below’ where creative words become a political tool to resist any a-historical categorisation of labour migrant, poverty and its eradication. The words emerging from labour migrants’ lived experiences represent them both as agencies of eradicating poverty and workers living in an uncertain condition of economic and social precarity.

It is hypothesized that people possess implicit theories regarding the inherent consistency of their attributes, as well as a set of principles concerning the conditions that are likely to promote personal change or stability. The nature of these theories is discussed in the context of a study of beliefs about life-span development. It is then suggested that people use their implicit theories of self to construct their personal histories. This formulation is used to interpret the results of a wide-ranging set of studies of memory of personal attributes. It is concluded that implicit theories of stability and change can lead to biases in recall. The extent and practical implications of these biases are discussed. Personal memories play an important role in people's everyday lives. Individuals dwell on their pasts for a variety of reasons including entertainment (for others' amusement, people fashion stories out of their lives), curiosity (gazing at their teenage children, parents might wonder what they, themselves, were like as teenagers), and the need to achieve self-understanding. People can study the past to learn about their preferences, abilities, and so forth. Personal recollections are also used to control and manipulate public images. Published autobiographies have served this function for hundreds of years (Korda, 1987). In short, people's personal memories are relevant to some of the traditional concerns of social psychologists, including selfunderstanding and self-presentation. Furthermore, much psychological research depends on personal recall. For example, not so long ago, psychologists formulated theories of development on the basis of parents' retrospective descriptions of their child-rearing practices. We now know that such descriptions may be invalid, and seek more direct evidence (Yarrow, Campbell, & Burton, 1970). Nonetheless, researchers and practitioners continue to make considerable use of retrospective self-reports. These include reports of voting, medical care, purchases, and finances. On the basis of such self-reports, social scientists evaluate theories of human behavior and offer advice on public policy. For a number of reasons, then, it is important to know how personal memories are formed and how accurate they maybe. In 1972, Tulving proposed what has become a widely accepted distinction between episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory contains information that is coded both temporally and with reference to the rememberer, semantic memory stores general world knowledge that carries neither temporal nor autobiographical codes. In the present article, I examine a