Historical Amnesia Research Articles

Memory and discourse on the 1956 Hungarian revolution

This contribution discusses a variety of different factors that have influenced the historical memory of the 1956 revolution in Hungary and the range of different interpretations that have made up the discourse on it. It explores the consequences of the post-1956 repression and the ‘enforced historical amnesia’ that was maintained by the Kádár regime. It then reviews the controversies and disputes between different accounts of the revolution relating to differences in the personal experiences of participants and the different ideologies and outlooks of different political parties as they compete to utilise the legacy of 1956 for their own political programmes. It concludes that there are still rival, irreconcilable images of the 1956 revolution in contemporary Hungary and this seems to offer some support for the post-modern belief in the variability of historical narratives as a consequence of the democratisation of the past, and the variations of memories of the past.

DISPLACING THE COLONIAL EVENT

The essay intends to contribute to the current debate on the failure of Italian public memory to come to terms with its colonial past. Several authors have argued that Italian public memory is under the weight of an oppressive historical amnesia which seals off the country from its colonial past. Yet the present reconfiguring of Italy's colonial memory conceals displacements and dislocations which are no less pervasive or disquieting. Colonial memory in Italy may be described as a sort of ‘pendulum’ oscillating between an all-out desire to forget and the nostalgic recollection of a past which is selectively remembered and re-enacted to suit Italy's new role in the postcolonial age. Given its oscillating nature, colonial memory and its renewed positioning are like back-up files which can be accessed according to convenience or factuality. The recent influx of African migrants trying to break into the fortified European citadel offers an example of this process. As wave after wave of ex-colonial subjects escape difficult situations at home and seek refuge in present-day Italy, an idealized and assertive colonial memory is being revived among the Italian public. Feelings of cultural and racial superiority are thus re-emerging within Italian society and dictate the terms of the new postcolonial encounter between the ex-metropolitan citizens and the disenfranchised ex-colonial subjects who have come to live among them. In many ways, the ‘striking back’ of the empire is no less controversial for Italian society than it is for ex-Italian Africa, where the debate on the colonial past has been revived, particularly during the recent conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea over the old colonial border separating the two countries. The essay discusses a few examples of the ambiguous displacements of colonial memory within both Italian society and Italy's ex-colonies. It discusses in particular forms of whitewashing the colonial past aimed at creating an all-endorsing and sanitized ‘shared memory’ to suit feelings of belonging and national unity in both the Italian metropolis and its ex-colonies.

The Modern Colonial Politics of Citizenship and Whiteness in France

While there is no blatantly racist discourse among the French political class per se, the modern politics of citizenship in France is rooted in France's racialized colonial legacy. Upon critical examination, contemporary French political discourse and policy implementations indeed speak to France's colonial past. The concept of ‘otherness’ is situated at the centre of French political discourse, and is manifested in constructions of whiteness. ‘Otherness’ has created a double standard for legal non-European immigrants compared with French and European citizens. The politics of integration and assimilation are founded on the ideological backdrop of universality, which falsely represents French society in colour-blind terms. This is evident in both moderate and extremist political party rhetoric in regards to new policies of immigration, citizenship and nationality. We contend that the contemporary political discourses in France closely resemble the colonial period in spite of (and precisely because of) France's historical amnesia. In this article, we explore the redefinition of French citizenship as an expansion of whiteness as rooted in the concept of ‘otherness’. In so doing, we contextualize the contemporary discourse of inclusion, exclusion, citizenship, and whiteness on the backdrop of France's colonial legacy.

How to Keep the Bomb from Iran

The ongoing crisis with Tehran is not the first time Washington has had to face a hostile government attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Nor is it likely to be the last. Yet the reasoning of U.S. officials now struggling to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions is clouded by a kind of historical amnesia, which leads to both creeping fatalism about the United States' ability to keep Iran from getting the bomb and excessive optimism about the United States' ability to contain Iran if it does become a nuclear power. Proliferation fatalism and deterrence optimism reinforce each other in a disturbing way. As nuclear proliferation comes to be seen as inevitable, wishful thinking can make its consequences seem less severe, and if faith in deterrence grows, incentives to combat proliferation diminish.

Asbestos and fire: technological trade-offs and the body at risk

For much of the industrial era, asbestos was a widely acclaimed benchmark material. During its heyday, it was manufactured into nearly three thousand different products, most of which protected life and property from heat, flame, and electricity. It was used in virtually every industry from hotel keeping to military technology to chemical manufacturing, and was integral to building construction from shacks to skyscrapers in every community across the United States. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, this once popular mineral began a rapid fall from grace as growing attention to the serious health risks associated with it began to overshadow the protections and benefits it provided. In this thought-provoking and controversial book, Rachel Maines challenges the recent vilification of asbestos by providing a historical perspective on Americans' changing perceptions about risk. She suggests that the very success of asbestos and other fire-prevention technologies in containing deadly blazes has led to a sort of historical amnesia about the very risks they were supposed to reduce. Asbestos and Fire is not only the most thoroughly researched and balanced look at the history of asbestos, it is also an important contribution to a larger debate that considers how the risks of technological solutions should be evaluated. As technology offers us ever-increasing opportunities to protect and prevent, Maines urges that learning to accept and effectively address the unintended consequences of technological innovations is a growing part of our collective responsibility.

"There Won't Be Any Rich People in Heaven": The Black Christ, White Hypocrisy, and the Gospel According to W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois despised white supremacy, economic exploitation, and European and American colonialism. The pillaging and partitioning of Africa angered him no end, especially since they were legitimated by the erasure of Africa and its peoples from the authorized histories of the world. M[T]here has been consistent effort, he wrote in The World and Africa in 1946, to rationalize Negro slavery by omitting Africa from world history. Fundamental this historical amnesia was the neglect of Africa's crucial role in the development of modern religions. White Europeans and Americans, Du Bois insisted, whitened their religious faiths in order justify the oppression and dehumanization of people of color. This was nowhere more apparent than in whites' conceptions of Jesus of Nazareth. Roughly two millennia ago, Du Bois observed, there was born in the Egypto-Syrian area, with its Mongoloid and Negroid elements, a social reformer called Jesus Christ. Hypocritical white Europeans and Americans, however, refused acknowledge that he was anything but white. As Du Bois maintained, Nordics who have never accepted his doctrine of submission evil, repudiation of riches, and love for mankind, have usually limned him as Caucasoid. Of course, the biblical Jesus was not white. He was a Syrian Jew, one whom Du Bois described as perhaps bearing a hooked nose and curled hair. Christ may have even inherited Ethiopian blood. Du Bois, in short, seemed think that if the association of whiteness with godliness provided a rationale for racial oppression, then recognizing the blackness of Christ, or at least his nonwhiteness, might equip African Americans with another set of tools counter exploitation and hatred.1 Du Bois's attack upon the Caucasoid Christ and his consideration of a nonwhite Jesus in The World and Africa and in a host of poems and short stories presaged a theological and religious revolution that occurred in the United States during the late 1960s. As champions of civil rights and Black Power assaulted the citadels of white supremacy during the second half of the

The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898–1936

AbstractA vigorous Protestant left existed throughout the first half of the twentieth-century in the United States. That Protestant left was the left wing of the social gospel movement, which many historians restrict to the pre-1920 period and whose radical content is often underestimated. This article examines the career of one representative figure from this Protestant left, the Reverend Harry F. Ward, as a means of describing the evolving nature and limits of social gospel radicalism during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Ward, the main author of the 1908 Social Creed of the Churches, a longtime professor at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York, and a dogged activist on behalf of labor and political prisoners through his leadership of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, sought a new social order from the early years of the century through the Great Depression of the 1930s. This new order would be the Kingdom of God on earth, and, in Ward's view, it would transcend the competitive and exploitative capitalism that dominated American society in his time. Before World War I, Ward worked to bring together labor activists and church people, and, after the war, he shifted his work toward less expressly religious efforts, while continuing to mentor clerical protégés through his teaching. Ward's leftward trajectory and ever-stronger Communist associations would eventually bring about his political downfall, but, in the mid- 1930s, he remained a respected figure, if one more radical than most, among American Protestant clergy. Organic links tied him and his politics to the broader terrain of social gospel reform, despite the politically driven historical amnesia that later would all but erase Ward from historical memory.

Einstein, Race, and the Myth of the Cultural Icon

The most remarkable aspect of Einstein's 1946 address at Lincoln University is that it has vanished from Einstein's recorded history. Its disappearance into a historical black hole symbolizes what seems to happen in the creation of a cultural icon. It is but one of many political statements by Einstein to have met such a fate, though his civil rights activism is most glaringly missing. One explanation for this historical amnesia is that those who shape our official memories felt that Einstein's "controversial" friends like Paul Robeson and activities like co-chairing the anti-lynching crusade might tarnish Einstein as an icon. That icon, sanctified by Time magazine when it dubbed Einstein "Person of the Century" at the end of 1999, is a myth, albeit a marvelous one. Yet it is not so much the motive for the omission but the consequence of it that should concern us. Americans and the millions of Einstein fans around the world are left unaware that he was an outspoken, passionate, committed antiracist.

Payback Time: Neocolonial Discourses in Peter Bacho's "Cebu"

Filipino American writers share similar narrative strategies for critiquing neocolonialism, strategies which may be broadly understood as the dialogizing of otherwise authoritative discourses of Western European and imperialism. They repeat the words used to legitimize Spanish and rule over the Philippines not to mimic and accept their alleged truth, but to expose their function in absorbing Filipino Americans into a white vision of transnational capitalism and racial hierarchy. (1) When colonial discourses reside in the language of the neocolonial subject, dialogization further implicates these discourses in the construction of neocolonial order and exposes them as obstacles to Filipino American representation and agency. In Peter Bacho's Cebu (1991), the first novel about a Filipino American who identifies primarily with localities, (2) colonial discourses of Spanish Catholicism and historical pedagogy pervade the disrupted bildungsroman of a young priest struggling to repress his sexuality and deny his Filipino legacy. The colonial discourses constituting the narrative voice hybridize the Filipino American subjectivity; their dialogizing through tragedy exposes these discourses as cultural tools for assimilating Filipino Americans into imperial culture. In my reading of Cebu, I locate the discourses' plot corollary in the imperial theme of innocence. Ben Luccro, the assimilated Filipino American protagonist, attempts to secure his sexually and historically freighted innocence. He aligns himself with Spanish and colonial discourses represented by, respectively, celibacy and historical amnesia, and he evades what he perceives as a foreign Filipino discourse represented by utang na loob, or reciprocal indebtedness. Tragedy ensues as Ben tries to separate the mutually constitutive discourses of imperialism and gets entangled in the logical and violent consequence of utang na loob: revenge. I conclude with a brief discussion of what Bacho proposes as an alternative discourse of Filipino American representation and agency. Resisting Development: The Bildungsroman as a Genre of Imperialism US Filipinos, observes Oscar V. Campomanes, have not produced enough best-selling or retrievable bildungsroman and narratives of 'becoming American,' with all the troubled quests that such essentially developmentalist emplotments represent (Gonzalez & Campomanes 77). (3) Cebu maintains this pattern of troubled developmental narratives. If the ethnic bildungsroman features a US-born protagonist who attempts to resolve his ethnic identity crisis by visiting his parents' homeland to discover his Old World roots, in Cebu the protagonist goes to his parents' homeland, rejects its culture, experiences an identity crisis which not explicitly ethnic, then flees back to the US. A Bildung, writes Franco Moretti, is truly such only if, a certain point, it can be seen as concluded: only if youth passes into maturity, and comes to stop there (26). But Cebu ends with the protagonist's perceived innocence failing to pass into self-awareness. Bacho himself has noted this Filipino resistance to bildung and contrasts Filipino American literature with Asian American literature, which he claims at the very least holds out hope of resolution: such hope often missing from the fiction of Filipino writers. Given the penchant of many Filipino writers to use in their works Substantial doses of and Filipino American reality, it hardly any wonder that success such an elusive goal. instead, such writers tend to celebrate the protagonist's decision to act as we readers applaud the choice while bracing ourselves for the inevitable disappointment or demise. (Tragic 5) The Philippine and Filipino American reality in which Bacho locates the tendencies of Filipino American plots towards tragedy the Philippines' history of Spanish and colonialism and its present neocolonial dependency on the United States. …

Augustan Measures. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Writings on Prosody and Metre by Richard Bradford

200 which she so well recognizes and deconstructs in the approaches taken by others, namely the ‘‘ideology of ethics’’inherent in ‘‘the party of humanity.’’ Her arguments about the power of the aesthetic therefore serve only to mystify and legitimate the current ideological status quo. William J. Burling Southwest Missouri State University RICHARD BRADFORD. Augustan Measures . Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Writings on Prosody and Metre. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. viii ⫹ 247. $79.95. Mr. Bradford’s ambition to correct the deficiencies of Paul Fussell’s Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (1954) produces a curiously retro monograph . The deficiencies are ones that Fussell himself points out: a discussion of ‘‘(1) the controversy over the nature of accent and quantity; (2) the eighteenthcentury theory of the nature of rhyme; (3) the theory of line integrity; and (4) the theory of the caesura.’’ Mr. Bradford thinks that these ‘‘four topics’’ should have been Fussell’s interest in the first place. In any case, Mr. Bradford is tempted to imitate the rusted generalities of second-rate literary history: ‘‘Milton, and after him Blake and Wordsworth, deliberately create tensions between the formal component of verse, the line, and the more contingent component, syntax or meaning. In the process both elements are intensified in a way which the poetry and criticism of the intervening hundred years could not comprehend.’’ One person who directly contradicts this is none other than Mr. Bradford himself in his Silence and Sound (reviewed in The Scriblerian , 26, Autumn 1993). Otherwise his present study accepts many things from the earlier one. He still takes no notice of issues of race, class, and gender— but he does recycle. A lot of the recycling involves Paradise Lost. Mr. Bradford continues to assume that the poem itself is a theory of prosody, but he finds it hard to extend this principle to the practice of versification in the eighteenth century. His attention to Pope is perfunctory; Waller, Dryden, and Prior do not rate even that effort, while Swift and Gay disappear—along with all of the women poets, perhaps the most radical retro-ism of the monograph. The canceling out of poets and certain poems also cancels out views and information different from Mr. Bradford’s own. By relying on the trite convenience of ‘‘the ‘graveyard’ school of Blair, Gray, and Young,’’ he shuns the obstreperous Gray and modern comment on his versification , and in another episode of historical amnesia removes Goldsmith as well as Collins and Smart. Johnson says naughty things about Milton’s blank verse—it was ‘‘verse only to the eye’’—for which Mr. Bradford is eager to scold him over and over, while dodging the inconvenient fact that Johnson sometimes wrote in blank verse. Readers who do not know much about eighteenth-century poetry, let alone prosody itself, might comeaway assured that there is not much to know. Of course, there really were experiments in metrical variation, even freeverse.Pastoral and the ode attracted the display of individual talent in metrical art. But no matter; one poem here serves the intolerance of an aesthetic fundamentalism, and Mr. Bradford revisits from Silence and Sound pet examples of Milton’s enjambment with undue veneration. Milton is drafted to humble Thomson, Young, and (most easily of all) Dodsley. Actually Mr. Bradford reorganizes the 201 eighteenth-centurycriticismfromSilence and Sound into the kind of old success story that used to be told about the ‘‘Triumph of Romanticism.’’ Its emphasis is the history of the analysis of Milton’s blank verse; Sheridan’s Art of Reading (1775) is ‘‘the finest work of prosodic criticism in the eighteenth century’’ because of his ‘‘discovery’’ of adding a ‘‘pause of suspension’’or momentaryrest of thevoiceatanenjambedline.Thistime around Mr. Bradford also reads into it the intuition by Sheridan of a ‘‘metrical contract ’’ between Milton and the reader of how to perform the line endings, something Mr. Bradford derives without acknowledgment from John Hollander. Richard Eversole University of Kansas JOAN BEAL. English Pronunciation inthe Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence’s ‘‘Grand Repository of the English Language .’’ Oxford: Oxford, 1999. Pp. 239. $120; $29.95 (paper). Ms. Beal argues in her comprehensive —though often dense—text that sound change during the...

The Crucible of Disease: Trauma, Memory, and National Reconciliation during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878

FEW SOUTHERN WHITES WERE MORE PASSIONATE ABOUT OR MORE DEDICATED to the Confederacy and the Lost Cause than Father Abram J. Ryan, a poet and Catholic priest in New Orleans and other southern cities. During the Civil War he served as a chaplain in the Confederate army exhorting his southern brethren to drive back their northern invaders. After the war he refused to be reconstructed. He championed the Lost Cause and wrote dozens of poems that grieved over the Confederate dead, extolled southern soldiers, and generally lauded southern virtue. Our heroes in Gray, Ryan wrote in one of his most famous poems, C.S.A., would never be forgotten: memories e'er shall remain for us. Moreover, he continued to defend the righteousness of the South. He lionized Robert E. Lee for Shielding the feeble, smiting the strong, / Guarding the right, avenging the wrong.... Ryan's verses brought him enormous fame. One version of his book-length collection of poems was so popular that it went through twelve editions between 1880 and 1892. By the mid-1870s Ryan had received the title poet-priest of the Lost Cause. (1) Ryan's feelings toward northerners and toward the Union changed considerably after a devastating yellow fever outbreak in 1878 ravaged much of the South and was met by a massive relief effort on the part of northern whites. During the summer and fall the pestilence claimed over 20,000 lives and infected roughly 120,000 people. Northerners rushed to help the suffering South by sending funds, goods, doctors, nurses, and letters. In response, Ryan claimed that the nation had been reconciled. In the aftermath of the epidemic, he put these emotions to verse in his aptly titled Reunited: at the touch of Mercy's hand The North and South stood side by side: The Bride of Snow, the Bride of Sun, In Charity's espousals are made one. It was a requital for the bitterness of war: givest back my sons again, The Southland to the Northland cries; For all my dead, on battle plain, Thou biddest my dying now uprise: I still my sobs, I cease my tears, And thou hast recompensed my anguished years.[] (2) In seeking to save the South, rather than annihilate it, the North had brought about a reunification that political Reconstruction had not. The traumatic days of 1878 had both assuaged the anguish that filled Ryan's memories of the Civil War and provided him an opportunity to claim national fidelity. While historians of post-Civil War sectional reconciliation have generally neglected the 1878 epidemic, they have paid a great deal of attention to intersections of memory and reunion. These scholars, especially Nina Silber and David W. Blight, have detailed the ways northern and southern whites reconciled at the expense of justice and equality for African Americans. Blight's award-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory shows how memories of the Civil War served as powerful forces in white reconciliation and black marginalization. Indeed, a contest of memories replaced the contest of armies. Most African Americans, as Blight suggests, maintained an emancipationist vision of the Civil War, constructing it as a battle for racial liberation and civil equality. Most northern and southern whites, however, did not share this view. In the late 1860s and 1870s they increasingly centered their historical memories on the gallantry and heroism of the white combatants--regardless of regional affiliation. Memorial Day services, although initiated by African Americans, quickly became grieving rituals where Yankees and former Confederates celebrated one another's willingness to fight. At the same time northern whites forgot that the war was fought, in part, for racial liberation and equality. Their historical amnesia, coupled with their new view of southern Confederates as noble warriors, facilitated their reconciliation with southern whites while undermining their commitment to protect African American citizenship. …

Multicultural Fashion… Stirrings of Another Sense of Aesthetics and Memory

This paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to ‘know’ the ethnic ‘other’ is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with ‘ethnic’ items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as oriental for South Asian women themselves, although often from a different set of sensibilities and memories, stresses the importance of historical reconstruction.

The Past is Another Country

The author emigrated to the United States from Belgium as a child, and he regards himself as an immigrant still, many years later. While he feels detached from the country in which he lives, his allegiance is not to the country of his birth, either. The cultural and technological distance between Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the United States of the same period was such that it could be measured in decades rather than miles. As a result, the author early on came to think of himself as a citizen of the past. This status does not mean that he is in thrall to nostalgia or luddism, although he is unimpressed by the notion of progress, but it has left him with a peculiar fascination for the highly subjective and impalpable factors that determine the flavour of a particular era. In early adolescence, chance readings gave him entry to the past, its flavours and colours rather than mere data, through the decoding of ephemeral documents. Texts and images not intended for posterity reveal past eras as they felt to those who inhabited them. Knowledge of such things helps to combat historical amnesia and the jingoism of the present.

Multiculturalisma and Epistemic Rupture: The Vanishing Acts of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Alfredo Vea Jr

Despite threat it poses to proponents of Western cultural supremacy, English-only movements, and desperate campaigns to whitewash U.S. curricula and culture, often serves to distance, contain, and control very it presumes to promote. If, as Stuart Hall contends, marginality never been such a productive space as it is now (467), dominant multicultural paradigm, operating simultaneously as a curricular structure and consumer ideal, territorializes margins in order to harness and tame productivity of difference. Certain manifestations of recall Disneyland attraction, It's a Small World, filled with colorfully dressed childlike performers who affirm message that we are all so different, yet all same,(1) as viewers, riding safely in their little train through world of get to be entertained by them but remain untouched, unchallenged, emerging into daylight at end of tunnel, safe from them all. Even its resemblance to spooky carnival rides plays upon fear of while singing these fears to rest. This form of essentializes flattening them out into easily consumable icons that contain difference and make it less threatening. Diverse peoples with complex and often brutal histories become packaged like breakfast cereals, with snappy images and, you're lucky, a fun prize inside. Multicultural soundbites do nothing to promote cross-cultural understanding; instead, they offer up easy-to-digest tidbits for consumption. As bell hooks argues, the commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces but denies significance of that Other's history through a process of decontextualization' (Eating Other 31). Decontextualization whitewashes bloody histories and current systemic inequities in order to offer up a banquet of that can be blithely consumed. As an angry white woman in John Sayles's Lonestar retorts during a heated debate about whose version of history should be taught in schools, If you're talking food and music I have no problem with that, but you're talking about who did what to whom forget it. Indeed, a utopian discourse of sameness, Guillermo Gomez-Pena argues, helps us to forget: if we merely hold hands and dance mambo together, we can effectively abolish ideology, sexual and cultural politics, and class differences (The Border 57). The mambo dream induces historical amnesia and diverts our attention from systemic oppression by substituting cultural inclusion for social change. As E. San Juan, Jr. argues, multiculturalism may be conceived as latest reincarnation of assimilationist drive to pacify unruly subaltern groups (60). While there have been many thoughtful and incisive critiques of politics of multiculturalism,(2) little attention has been paid to epistemological framework that undergirds it. Multiculturalism has so readily become a paradigm of mastery and consumption not only because of its obvious ties to global systems of consumer capitalism, but also because as a curricular framework it intermeshes with a dominant epistemological paradigm that seeks to distance, order, and control its of knowledge. Despite its celebration of other cultures, hegemonic form of places an Anglo consciousness at center as knower and marginalizes peoples and as static objects of knowledge. The consciousness of knower remains unmarked and thus transcendentally confident about clarity its perspective affords. This paradigm both insists that Students need to learn more about other cultures and encourages them to feel that they can readily master--if, indeed, they haven't already--what Native Americans believe or what Asians are like. …

The search for the complicit native: Epistemic violence, historical amnesia, and the anthropologist as ideologue of empire

This essay analyzes a number of issues surrounding the Menchu/Stoll dispute. In locating Stoll's criticism of Rigoberta within a larger referential arena that includes an attack on the North American academic left and an unbridled anti-Marxism, the authors attempt to reveal how Stoll's ideological agenda is functionally compatible with the larger political agenda of the New Right. The authors also attempt to reveal Stoll's distortions of Guatemalan guerrilla history as well as problems with his analysis and collection of the data.

German science starts facing up to its historical amnesia.

BERLIN Nazi-era documents from the files of Adolf Butenandt, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry and later head of the Max Planck Society, will be opened for the first time this week.

Prima Materia, 1999

A s a visual artist, I create testimonial objects and immersive environments as a means of personally recalling events and phenomena that are subject to collective cultural, historical, and spiritual amnesia. My desire is to induce viewers into remembering (and forgetting) their perceptions regarding how we got where we are, what we may have lost along the way, and potentially where we need to go. Prima Materia is an on-line work whose content is technically accessed through an animated interface to a collection of navigable VR poetry passages. The visual and textual content of these passages is rooted in the alchemical concept of the prima materia—the common chaotic “prime matter” from which all elements are elevated. The alchemists described the prima materia as “our chaos” that resulted from the fall of Lucifer and Adam. The alchemists’ chosen task of elevating this raw essence to the state of a divine material was equivalent to returning the fallen back to paradise. Although the material was said to be omnipresent for those with the eye to recognize it, the alchemical myth also said it resided deep in the core of sacred mountains. Despite the transmutation of alchemy into contemporary science, this chaotic resource remains a necessary point of departure for creativity. The white noise of disorder that frequently envelops our lives needs to be looked upon as a malleable entity that must be folded back on itself for regeneration. The possibilities of bringing the prima materia together as a positive collaborative element are only limited by our willingness to experiment with our creative imaginations beyond the partitions of esthetic and technical isolation. Six visual and textual VR poetry passages make up the Prima Materia site through a Shockwave Flash 3 animated interface. The content of each of the individual passages— oriente, catalyst, curandero, asphalt, brownian motion, and oxidation—are interactively navigable using Quick Time VR and Quick Time 3 or 4.

Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women

Reviewed by: Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women Eileen Cherry Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. Edited by Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998; pp. x + 448. $39.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. This carefully assembled collection of fifteen American plays by black and white women writers about the brutal legacy of lynching takes its title from the famous protest song recorded in 1939 by jazz vocalist Billie Holiday. In the foreword, critic and scholar, Sandra L. Richards writes: The Billie Holiday song . . . speaks of the blood at the roots of a tree that is metonymically characteristic of the American landscape, blood that has seeped into the soil that nourishes us all—black and white especially, but finally all who claim the United States as home . . . . This anthology is a challenge to a collective, historical amnesia that would forget the late nineteenth and twentieth century social ritual wherein white men brutally maintained their power by terrorizing black communities . . . . We would will to forget, we would collectively struggle to remove from our consciousness the knowledge that this peculiarly American tree continues to bear strange fruit. [ix] Richards argues that even as we face the end of the twentieth century, Americans cannot deny the legacy of this barbaric cultural practice, which can be found in its contemporary forms in church burnings, internet postings, hate crimes, and a flourishing paramilitary that often serves as a macabre rite of passage for white American males. The lynching dramas presented in this anthology give us an opportunity to examine the phenomenon through the eyes of its victims as well as through the collective voices of American women who were witnesses and, in many instances, complicitous to the horror. But this collection is not merely a litany of gruesome injustices. As an eighty-year retrospective of a dramatic genre, it is significant for its exposure and illumination of the catalytic work of African American women artists who have always been working in the American theatre, albeit from a marginalized space. Concomitantly, it recognizes the cooperating voices of white women playwrights who have challenged the monologism of the dominant discourse that was always prepared to shut them out and shut them up about this particular topic. In fact, one underlying theme that links these women’s performance texts and lives is the threat of silencing and erasure. Some significant voices, like Corrie Crandall Howell’s in her powerful one-act [End Page 224] The Forfeit (1925), are rescued from obscurity by this anthology. In this respect, the collection challenges the borders of race and gender by providing a comprehensive “Table of Lynching Dramas,” as well as rich bibliographic resources that invite further investigation by scholars interested in how ideology can create a common aesthetic ground for diverse artists. Judith L. Stephens writes, “These plays are complementary and reciprocal, both womanist and feminist, in that they reflect commonalities and differences between and among black and white women” (11). In her introductory essay, “The Impact of Lynching on the Art of African American Women,” Kathy A. Perkins reflects on the murder and mutilation of a pregnant black woman, Mary Turner, by a white mob in Brooks County, Georgia in 1918 and the “silence” it evoked in American society, except for the protest of African American artists and activists. In the early decades of this century, to speak publicly and truthfully of such lynching atrocities was indecorous in the eyes of the whites. Additionally, black artists and activists learned that speaking out could prevent their success, subject them to punishment, and have terrifying repercussions. This is why Billie Holiday’s performance and public success with “Strange Fruit” was extraordinary: “Holiday introduced the controversial song, written by white poet Lewis Allan, which she performed at Café Society, New York City’s first interracial club. Never before had a vocal artist been so direct with the issue of lynching” (17). Each play in this anthology speaks unabashedly, using the theatrical devices of social realism that bring this brutality back to its roots—the homes, schools, kitchens and workplaces of everyday America. There are diverse offerings, from Angelina Weld Grimke’s Rachel (1916), which...

Remembering California

C a l i f o r n i a D r e a m i n g 1 5 5 works include Other Destinies, Mixedblood Messages, and the novels The Sharpest Sight, Bone Game, and Wolfsong. R e m e m b e r i n g C a l i f o r n i a A n n e E . G o l d m a n In spite of the unimaginable crimes that occurred, little punishment followed. The City of Los Angeles fell into a state of historical amnesia. —Alejandro Morales, The Brick People (1988) In pointed contrast to florid myths of “Arcadian” California (“Pacific Arcadia,” in fact, is the organizing principle of paintings currently on show at Stanford University’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts), or the chirpy optimism of turn-of-the-century real estate boosters, The Brick People charts California’s growth through the lives of the Mexicanos who work as bricklayers and literally lay the state’s foundations. A far cry from the Ramona pageant, Morales’s Southland is framed from the start by raced tensions, imperial aggran­ dizement (the Rough Riders on San Juan Hill, the collusion of the Porfiriato with American capital), and too rapid an industrialization that blights the living conditions of the people who make it possible in the first place. Historical amnesia as the keyword of the state? I try resuscitating images from the past, but focusing on what materializes from the depths of historical memory is like looking for answers from the black eight ball we played with as children: the same conventional pictures swim into vision over and over. Instead of substantive answers to my questions, a standard set of images surfaces like the plastic ball’s ready­ made oracles: crumbling missions glazed by the setting sun, pony express riders driving their horses into white-foamed exhaustion, rail­ road spikes waiting to be struck into track ties, prospecting pans and picks spangled with gold. This collective, richly misguided fantasy life makes remembering the past, and looking critically at its links with the present, difficult. As Gerald and Janice Haslam note, Los Angeles and San Francisco occupy only a fraction of the state’s geography, but they monopolize its image in the media. As Texas is to the South, so California is to the West, except that for every rerun of Dallas, there are probably 100 episodes of LA Doctors; Baywatch; Melrose Place; and Beverly Hills, 90210. To recycle some discarded phrases from the 1 5 6 W A L 3 4 ( 2 ) S u m m e r 1 9 9 9 dumping grounds of literary theory, the Golden State is “always already” “overdetermined.” The Haslams’ essay, for all the care with which it dismantles the puffed-up images of California as so many overblown Rose Bowl floats, provides a case in point. The authors close by invoking “this western edge of the West— with its seething com­ bination of the traditional (abundant rodeos) and the nontraditional (intimate links to Asia and Latin America).” However, to identify rodeos as closer to “home,” I would ar­ gue, is to mistake Turnerian visions of “the frontier” with a land mass that has “tradi­ tionally” had as many “links” with both Asia and Latin America as it has with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. 1will return in a moment to Turner, but let me point out the obvious here: the (literary) ground continuously shifts under our feet. To reconsider the boun­ daries of the state, regardless of which parameters we use (geographical? legal? José Montoya and the Royal Chicano Air Force. CHJCANO PARK FREE­ WAY PYLON. 1975. Acrylic on concrete. 30' x 35'. Courtesy the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), Venice, Calif. • In 1968, Cal State Sacramento art professors José Montoya and Esteban Villa established the Royal Chicano Airforce (RCAF)—made up of “pilots,” “co-pilots,” and “impudent young pilots” who fly “adobe airplanes” for “Aztlân Airlines”—to promote community activism by uniting political action and artistic expres­ sion. In the mid-1970s the RCAF, with many other Chicano art collectives, painted murals on freeway pylons to turn a junkyard area in the middle...

Colonial era livestock development policy: Introduction of improved dairy cattle in high-potential farming areas of Kenya

Contemporary development planners often suffer from historical amnesia — a lack of awareness about earlier, often strikingly similar, development programs. This is especially true for development initiatives from the colonial era, which are often completely unknown to planners or are dismissed as irrelevant and inappropriate for modern circumstances. This paper focuses on colonial era livestock policy in Kenya, especially the introduction of improved dairy cattle in high-potential African farming areas. This early attempt to improve livestock production encountered many of the same frustrating obstacles to successful change that we see today and it illustrates that planners can learn much from both the successes and the failures of colonial era development programs.