Narratives Of Persecution Research Articles

Hellhound(s) on My Trail: Reading Cormac McCarthy's Suttree as a Blues

ABSTRACT: This essay rereads Cormac McCarthy's 1979 novel Suttree as a "blues," examining Suttree's deep relationship to the vengeful, hunted black man Ab Jones, whose scarred body and eloquently articulated narrative of persecution leads Suttree to channel his plaintive suffering. Startlingly, the conclusion of the novel, particularly the final image of the huntsman and hounds who the title character fears are chasing him, suggests that McCarthy draws on Delta bluesman Robert Johnson's most famous tune, "Hellhound on My Trail," in his evocation of these hounds and Suttree's fear of them through his channeling the identity of Johnson (behind whom looms Ab Jones). At the same time, the hounds have figuratively embayed a particular Knoxville populace—its black community—with devastating consequences and the hounds' presence through this lyrical intertext at the end of the novel suggest how that community's inhabitants, particularly Ab, continue to be hunted down by the white community's representatives such as the police.

Competing for the Youth: Jewish Scout Identity, Religion, and Gender during the Holocaust in France

Abstract This article examines Jewish youth identity, gender, and ideology during the Holocaust in France in order to understand how young people responded to persecution. The author’s attempts to understand the youth perspective reveals that these adolescents’ experiences were distinct and varied, and each traversed complex and multifaceted paths through the war. Always in perpetual negotiation with other elements of their identities—such as their ideology, religion, and gender—for many, youth movements greatly impacted how they developed and matured into adulthood. Coming of age during the Holocaust meant not only enduring persecution, but also traditional discourses on the place of young people in society. Charting the trajectories of individual young people and Jewish youth groups within the context of the war, the Holocaust, and French Jewish history reveals their radicalized and accelerated wartime development. In researching this phenomenon, it becomes possible to decenter entrenched narratives of persecution and resistance and enhance our understanding of wartime gender roles, the impact of Judaism, and the various ideologies that informed these youths’ lives.

Not by Words Alone: Early Holocaust Graphic Narratives as a “Minor Art”

Abstract Immediately after the Holocaust, scores of Jewish survivors created graphic narratives, in word and image, about their individual and collective wartime experiences under Nazi oppression. This essay will make a case for these early postwar works as a “minor art.” “Minor” captures the material characteristics of this low-capital, low-circulation printed matter: slight in weight, small in size, modest in price, and ephemeral in quality. It also describes their “poor” images that pull, in form and structure, from popular culture (comics, cartoons, illustrated books) on the margins of modernist concerns (composite image-texts relying on narrative storytelling). Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” as a deterritorialized, political, collective utterance, I argue that disciplinary notions of “art” and “testimony” have prevented us from seeing this “minor art” and recognizing how its vernacular, amateur art practices allowed survivors to reconstruct the past, remember communities and identities erased, and reclaim their own narratives of persecution. Created by a minority (a decimated Jewish community) working on the peripheries of the art world, they tell a Jewish story using Jewish frames of reference to create a community outside of majoritarian culture. What is at stake in them is not only a poetics of recollection but a politics of representation: of seeing with Jews as a critical act by dominated persons against the dominant, antifascist master narrative of WWII and the primary media of its dissemination, photography and film. Ultimately, this “minor art” can have major implications for both how we understand the crucial first decade of survivor initiatives and how we write our histories of Jewish art.

Sewing Mothers: Re-envisioning Jewish-Christian Relations in Sholem Asch’s “On a Carnival Night”

Abstract A close examination of early twentieth-century literature written in Hebrew and Yiddish reveals that many of its first representations of Christianity put a central emphasis on Mary. This fact has been overlooked in previous scholarship fixated on the role of Jesus. Our article aims to fill this lacuna by focusing on Mary’s appearance in a short, controversial story published in 1909 by Sholem Asch. Through a close reading of Mary’s encounter with the matriarch Rachel, we define Asch’s ‘maternal model,’ an alternative paradigm for Jewish-Christian relations. We argue that the marginalization of Mary from the scholarly conversation is not a slipup. Rather, it is part of a gendered scheme that prioritized Jesus over his mother and narratives of persecution and victimhood over care and obligation. We show how Asch’s artfully constructed fictional formation offers a political position founded on empathy and interconnectivity.

The Gory Details: Asylum, Sexual Assault, and Traumatic Memory

For asylum seekers to be granted asylum, they must convince immigration officials that they have been persecuted or that they fear they will be persecuted if returned to their home country. This article discusses the reluctance of asylum seekers to be forthcoming about sexual assault as a form of persecution and the ways in which traumatic memory can affect narratives of persecution for rape survivors. Many asylum seekers, particularly those who have been sexually assaulted, show symptoms consistent with trauma survivors. Consequently, their narratives of persecution are often shaped by partial and incomplete memory recall. The result is that how asylum seekers who have been sexually assaulted tell their stories of persecution is the antithesis of the expectations of credibility. This article is based on qualitative research in Los Angeles, California, and New York City, New York, in the United States. It includes interviews with asylum seekers, immigration attorneys, immigrant service providers, asylum officers, and immigration judges; observations of immigration court hearings; and content analysis of asylum applications. I use these sources to argue that the harm of rape and its long-lasting effects evidenced by symptoms of traumatic memory impacts how asylum seekers articulate stories of persecution. How these stories are told can have devastating effects for asylum seekers that may jeopardize their ability to gain asylum if immigration officials do not view them as credible applicants.

The living memory of persecutions: oral histories of the Roma in Latvia and the question of public commemoration

ABSTRACT This article looks at the life stories and the obscured past of the Latvian Roma with a focus on narratives of persecution during World War II. These narratives, while preserved in family circles and communicative memory, lack wider attention as the commemoration of victims of genocide is not well developed in Latvia. This research attempts to understand what prevents memories from entering the public sphere. For that, the author turns to Romani memory culture and other social factors that can influence the perpetuation of the collective memory of genocide.

Valuing the Urakami Cathedral after the atomic bombing: fundraising and social rupture in Nagasaki

ABSTRACT After the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the ruined Urakami Cathedral, situated prominently on a hilltop close to ground zero, became an iconic site. It represented the rupture experienced by a totally devastated community and landscape in an irradiated environment at the end of World War II. Yet, beginning in 1958, the ruins of the building were razed and the cathedral reconstructed – an act that has remained controversial in the Japanese public sphere, not least due to partial reliance on American funding. This article examines the competing claims of value surrounding these Cathedral ruins and their erasure among the Catholic community and the non-Catholic population of Nagasaki and the politics of patronage that this involved. It draws on interviews to access the voices of atomic bombing survivors in the Catholic community, marginalised in the Japanese public discourse. These give insight into an alternative communal understanding of the cathedral tied into a much older narrative of persecution, poverty, resistance, and renewal. I argue that different perspectives on the value of the Cathedral and its ruins reveal the social rupture foundational to and concomitant with competing value claims, and their interrelated political, economic, and religious dynamics.

Modern Martyrdom and Material Culture


 
 
 Martyrdom has long been associated with the essence of the Coptic identity. The public execution of the 21 Martyrs of Libya in 2015 allowed for a rekindling of the Coptic narrative of persecution both locally and globally through digital and physical material culture. This movement occurred in the aftermath of decades of significant social and political change which redefined the structure of Egyptian society and the place of the Coptic minority within it. Digital material culture in the form of social media campaigns, an animation film and recorded interviews allow for a global audience and an international outcry from Copts around the globe, creating a new sense of unity in suffering that transcends physical boundaries. The physical material culture includes traditional iconography and a church that serves as a local monument to the legacy of sacrifice left by the 21. Together, physical and digital material culture intertwine to preserve the heritage of the Copts in a movement of solidarity never before seen. The martyrdom of the twenty-first occurred during a time filled with social and political change around the world, fueled by activism and resistance to long-established societal norms.
 
 

America’s Holy Trinity: How Conspiracism, Apocalypticism, and Persecution Narratives Set Us up for Crisis

Debates over whether QAnon is a “religion” or a “cult” lack theoretical grounding; they depend on unacknowledged definitions and classificatory schemes and ultimately don’t prove useful as an analytical framework for sociological/historical scholarship. Instead, this article suggests we explore the ways one contemporary religious movement helped make widespread acceptance of QAnon possible by weaving their theological commitments to apocalypticism, conspiracies and persecution narratives into the larger American culture.

Being Roman in the Sasanian Empire

Over the past several decades, scholars have challenged longstanding assumptions about Christian narratives of persecution. In light of these revisionist trends, a number of scholars have reconsidered the “Great Persecution” of Christians under the fourth-century Sasanian king Shapur II. Where scholars previously argued that the cause of Sasanian imperial violence against Christians was a perceived connection between them and the increasingly Christian Roman Empire, these new accounts reject this explanation and downplay the scope of violence against Christians. This article reexamines Sasanian violence against Christians in the fourth century, navigating between the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis of positivist and revisionist approaches. It argues that the accusations against Christians must be situated within the broader Roman-Sasanian conflict. In this context, fifth-column accusations were a pervasive anxiety, animated—and deployed—by empires and inhabitants alike. Yet, rather than inexorably leading to indiscriminate violence against all Christians, fifth-column accusations operated in a variety of ways, resulting in targeted violence but also, it is argued, in imperial patronage. Seen in this light, concerns for Christian disloyalty were responsible for the drastic vacillations in Christian experience under Sasanian rule during the fourth and early fifth centuries, unparalleled for other non-Iranian Sasanian communities, such as Jews. It was the particular circumstances of Christians, caught between the Sasanian and Roman Empires, that account for their experience under Sasanian rule.

Religious statecraft: Narratives of persecution and diplomacy in the case of Byzantine, Aksum and Himyar

When reviewed against the background of Byzantine diplomatic correspondence, Aksum’s religious policy on the Arabian Peninsula is perceivable within a Constantinian religio-political matrix. Imperial letters from Byzantine to Aksum and Persia denote the Byzantine role of arbiter of early Christianity. Byzantine Rome’s role in Christianity when reviewed from diplomatic correspondence with allies and antagonists recounts narratives of orthodoxy and persecution. Parallel review of letters from Constantine and Constantius decodes the Christian kingdom of Aksum as a participant of 4th-century CE Constantinian dynamics. This review was enabled through document analysis.

«Против Церкви воздвигнут вал»: актуализация нарратива о гонениях в среде общин Международного союза церквей евангельских христиан-баптистов

«Против Церкви воздвигнут вал»: актуализация нарратива о гонениях в среде общин Международного союза церквей евангельских христиан-баптистов

A Critical Reflexive Account From Participatory Theater With Asylum Seekers: Lessons for Framing Trauma and Resilience in Refugee Status Determination

Critical Health Communication scholars can play a significant role in the asylum seeking process by expanding the legal understanding of migrant trauma. Legal processes like Refugee Status Determination (RSD) define the course of an asylum seeker’s life. Legal determinations hinge on the persuasiveness of narratives of persecution to decide on the legitimacy of asylum claims. Participatory methods, such as participatory theatre, either support or resist legal processes by drawing on narratives of trauma or community engagement, respectively. Methods that rely on trauma narratives validate notions of individual suffering, while methods that use community engagement address the social and communal dimensions of health, including isolation. This essay develops a critical, reflexive account of my situated practices as a theatre practitioner working with asylum seekers, and later, as a character reference for my participants’ legal claim. I show how participatory projects focusing exclusively on promoting migrant resilience through participation can fail to engage with the power that RSD has to determine the course of migrant lives. Importantly, the legal framework of RSD frames an asylum seeker’s every move through the lens of persecution and trauma. As my critical reflections demonstrate, participatory practitioners working with asylum seekers must be aware of how the goals of their engagement may interact with the limitations of the legal process. Such awareness demands strategic forms of engagement aimed at shaping the legal understanding of migrant trauma and persecution.

Religious statecraft: Narratives of persecution and diplomacy in the case of Byzantine, Aksum and Himyar

When reviewed against the background of Byzantine diplomatic correspondence, Aksum’s religious policy on the Arabian Peninsula is perceivable within a Constantinian religio-political matrix. Imperial letters from Byzantine to Aksum and Persia denote the Byzantine role of arbiter of early Christianity. Byzantine Rome’s role in Christianity when reviewed from diplomatic correspondence with allies and antagonists recounts narratives of orthodoxy and persecution. Parallel review of letters from Constantine and Constantius decodes the Christian kingdom of Aksum as a participant of 4th-century CE Constantinian dynamics. This review was enabled through document analysis.

Textual and reader factors in narrative empathy: An empirical reader response study using focus groups

This article contributes new insights into the interplay between textual and reader factors in experiences of narrative empathy, or empathy with characters in narrative. It adds to the rather scarce empirical evidence on the relationships between textual devices and readers’ (non-)empathetic responses to characters. This empirical study involved stylistic-narratological analysis of short stories by Eduardo Galeano and thematic analysis of focus group discussions. The study considers empathy in relation to victims and perpetrators in narratives of persecution and torture. Methodologically, the article emphasises the value of a qualitative approach to collecting and analysing readers’ responses that is half way between naturalistic and experimental orientations. The main findings, which revolve around the interaction between certain narrative techniques and readers’ moral evaluation of characters, challenge some theoretical claims from the scholarly literature about textual effects on readers’ empathy. In so doing, the article considers empathy as a highly flexible and context-dependent phenomenon, and suggests the need for a nuanced approach that accommodates the complex interaction between textual and reader factors in the reading context. The discussion spells out the broader implications of the study for stylistic research on the role of language in bringing about effects in readers and also for narrative empathy research. These implications will be of interest to scholars conducting reception studies or reader response research in the neighbouring fields of empirical stylistics, empirical narratology, and empirical literary studies.

Data Privacy and Displacement: A Cultural Approach

Abstract Recent research has pointed to the increasing impact of digitally derived data on forced migration processes, including legal mechanisms for accessing social media profiles of asylum seekers. These developments raise the issue of data privacy, specifically how asylum seekers understand data privacy and protect their data. This article pays particular attention to cultural variants of data privacy. Culture, here, refers to a communication culture linked to displacement, with safety as a key code and variant of data privacy. For the asylum seekers and refugees from South(east) Asia, the Middle East and African nations, safety was a concern in daily digital practice. Safety was a relational way of being, exercised through selective contacts and playful presentations of the self. Those presentations were deeply embedded in the logics of social media and stood in contrast to narratives of persecution, potentially posing problems for asylum claim determination in the future. Based on the lack of awareness of asylum seekers about data privacy and safety, a data safety workshop was designed, available on GitHub.

Irish soldiers in Loreto and Rome: a pilgrimage, and an employment request c.1609

Scholarly attention to the Irish Catholic experience on the Continent in the early Stuart era is increasing.1 Interest in Irish pilgrimage to continental sanctuaries in the early modern period is one facet of that broader historiographical trend. However the surviving evidence tends to favour the travels of those of higher social standing, and it is their experience which has received attention.2 The present text, by contrast, arose from the journey to Rome of two brothers, soldiers who had been serving in the Irish regiment in Flanders. Having visited the Marian shrine of Loreto (north-east of Rome) on the way, while in Rome they made a petition to be employed in the papal military service. Their request is at several levels. Irish participation in Spanish military forces both in Flanders and Spain in the early seventeenth century has been of interest to scholars in recent decades; Irish involvement with the papal military forces in the same period is less well noted.3 Early modern soldiers regularly faced unemployment arising from a cessation of hostilities; in the case of two soldiers in the Spanish Netherlands, this document throws light on the need to find a new employer, and on strategies adopted to that end. Further, in presenting themselves to the Pope as a prospective employer, the petition illustrates how Irish soldier exiles fashioned an assertive Catholic identity for themselves, in which the family’s experience of religious persecution in their homeland was linked with subsequent military service against heretics on the Continent. Hence the significance of the text presented here. The brothers’ army career was outlined, with referees indicated, and some possible openings in the papal forces were suggested. These professional elements were integrated into a family narrative of persecution for the Catholic faith, and personal religious devotion, with a view to making an informed request for employment in papal service.

Satan’s Empire: Ancient Rome’s anti-Christian appeal in extreme metal

This article discusses the previously unexplored intersection of the reception of classical antiquity in extreme metal with Satanic and anti-Christian themes. It is demonstrable that the phenomenon has roots in the genesis of extreme metal itself, especially in its inheritance from biblical and literary history of the associations between Satan and Roman emperors. As extreme metal evolved over the past three decades, that theme combined with the perception that imperial Rome had undertaken widespread and sustained persecutions of Christians, including spectacular executions for the sake of popular entertainment, throughout the three-century history of the early Church. This is despite the consensus of many modern historians that the Romans were largely tolerant of Christians and persecutions were brief, isolated, more humane, and cost much fewer lives than early Christian sources suggest. It is evident that metal artists inherit, and thereby perpetuate, a tradition manufactured by Christian sources that have largely been debunked; yet these artists depart from those Christian sources by denying the appeal of martyrdom and shifting sympathies to imperial Rome and its ‘Satanic’ emperors. Like Satan himself, these emperors function as symbols of masculine aggression and liberation of the passions from contemporary political and moral systems. Such anti-establishment sentiments, especially among Italian artists, can manifest in fantasies of a Roman Empire reborn. By their artistic license, extreme metal artists continue to reshape a literary and artistic legacy of the imperial Rome and constructions of persecution narratives developed over the course of the late antique, medieval and modern periods.

The Securitization of Refugee Movements in Contemporary Politics


 
 
 Securitization implies moving a situation up the security agenda of a state, so as to perceive it as a potential existential threat to national security. This article attempts to analyze the post-cold war refugee situations in context of the securitization concerns they raised for states hosting them. Here both the traditional and non-traditional contours of security are highlighted, including incidents of direct armed conflict between sending and receiving dyad, external intervention, infiltration or facilitation of trans-national movements across international borders and compromise of territorial integrity in the wake of these movements. The current narrative of persecution and accusation around refugee movements has led to unnecessary bias, directed towards those fleeing conflict zones. There is a need for a delicate balance between concerns of state and human security in the wake of these movements. This can help to understand why these seemingly humanitarian disasters have lately been identified as a securitization concern for host states in international politics. The analysis also uses social constructivism to establish the host state‟s challenges; which may account for as an incremental threat to the integrity of host state‟s ethnic, demographic and social constructs. The primary question that the paper seeks to address is to why and how these movements were able to raise security concerns, though they are usually associated with destitution and marginalization, yet lately have been associated with diffusing negative externalities of violent conflict zones across international borders.
 
 

‘Timeless places’ – Narratives about flight, exile and belonging

In this paper, I present some results of an interdisciplinary (psychological, historical, discourse-analytical) research project on narratives of persecution, flight and survival. These stories told by the children (and grandchildren) of Austrian victims of Nazi persecution, all of them left-wing political dissidents and some of them also Jewish, relate to World War II and the Holocaust. In their narratives, the interviewees try to come to terms with the experiences of their parents (and grandparents) and bridge the obvious cognitive dissonance of living in Austria and holding a citizenship which was denied to their elders at a traumatic point of their parents' lives. Firstly, I focus on the narratives as they relate to flight and the loss of citizenship and homes. Secondly, I investigate what it meant - from the children's perspective - to later return to and grow up in the country that had excluded their parents. And thirdly, I reflect on what such stories imply for the present and future and what we can learn from them. In the analysis, I integrate quantitative methods (narrative network analysis and corpus linguistics) with qualitative discourse analysis. Although each story and the related context are of course unique, it is nevertheless worth discussing if specific characteristics of the narratives could be generalised to other contexts in order to illustrate the plights of fleeing refugees and their struggles for survival.